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  • Games about the GameA History of Tabletop Baseball
  • Adam Criblez (bio)

And so, finally, he'd found his way back to baseball. Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much—to tell the truth, real baseball bored him—but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery.

—Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, 45

On August 9, 1981, Cleveland set the Major League Baseball All-Star Game attendance record when more than seventy-two thousand fans packed into cavernous Municipal Stadium, kicking off the second half of MLB's only split season. But nearly a month earlier, during the work stoppage causing the divided schedule, the stadium hosted another All-Star game. A few dozen curious onlookers and a handful of reporters turned up to watch Cleveland Indians legend Bob Feller throw out the ceremonial first pitch … umm, dice … for a baseball game between two producers from WKYC- TV. An announcer provided play-by-play of the rolled results, determined using the Strat-O-Matic Baseball tabletop board game, and the scoreboard in centerfielder updated the score. Fans outside the stadium could even dial in to a hotline, dubbed the Sportsphone, for up-to-the-minute results. That July day, a pair of virtual homeruns by Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Manny Trillo powered the National League to a 15–2 victory; in August, the real Trillo went hitless, but his NL team still pulled out a 5–4 win.1

Without real baseball occurring during the strike, the summer of 1981 lacked the usual options for sports fans. In April, Larry Bird won his first NBA [End Page 125] title with the Boston Celtics; a month later, Mike Bossy's New York Islanders took home the Stanley Cup. But the start of NFL training camps remained a month away, as did college football. Still, why Strat-O-Matic? Why "fake" baseball?

Studying baseball-themed board game simulations like Strat-O-Matic presents a unique opportunity to explore the changing nature of baseball fandom and interactivity, while also providing insight into the developing importance of statistics for baseball fans. As video game scholar Christopher Hansen notes, "games permit us a separation from work, other obligations, and our everyday lives by creating experiences in which we have power over time such as calling a 'time-out' in a sports match or taking back a move in an analog board game." Nowhere is Hansen's statement more accurate than in baseball simulations, which allow fans the opportunity to relive nostalgic moments from MLB history, create elaborate what-if scenarios, or measure their board-game managing ability against what real-life managers accomplished on the field. In fact, two of the most significant developments in baseball over the last forty years, fantasy baseball and advanced statistical player evaluation, are both deeply rooted in tabletop gaming.2

Tabletop games simulating baseball are nearly as old as the sport itself. As early as the late 1860s, Francis Sebring's Parlor Base-Ball attempted to recreate the experience of the sport by using a spring-activated bat to strike a mechanically rolled penny. At $5 per game, Sebring's model was expensive and not widely purchased. In fact, no copies remain in existence. Subsequent games followed a similar pattern; most provided a variation on pinball or darts where striking or throwing an object into a particular hole or zone rewarded the player with a hit or punished them with an out. Even when baseball stars like Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, or Napoleon Lajoie endorsed a new game, the product itself lacked the nuance of individual player performance. For example, in the many variations of "dice baseball," which debuted in the mid-1880s, gamers rolled one or two six-sided dice and counted the pips. Regardless of the identity of the virtual batter or pitcher, two 1s might be a homerun while two 6s ended the inning. Game...

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