By the summer of ’78, I recall asking my dad to write out the check. While I had read the “Cutthroat Baseball” article in Sport magazine which described the APBA Baseball game in use, each of the game brochures I now had in my hand, had sold me on the fact that I needed to purchase A game. Both game brochures captured my imagination. I had mailed away for 2 different game brochures: APBA Baseball and Strat-o-Matic Baseball. When the baseball publications came out later in winter/early spring of 1978, I was now determined to look at a few different table top baseball games, and with some lawn mowing money, make a purchase. Reading the Sport magazine article, made me realize, there were games out there which would statistically represent each player with probability, etc. Who the player was at-bat did not matter, they all had the same probability to hit a homer, to get a hit, etc. I had an “ABC Monday Night Talking Football” game,Īs well as one of the old Coleco table-top hockey games where you control the individual players, and puck and goalie, using the rods which run up-and-down the ice rink.Īnd I played my own 2-dice baseball game, where you added the 2 dice and the result was (if my memory serves me right): 2-triple, 3-walk, 4-K, 5-out, 6-single, 7-out, 8-out, 9-out. In 1977, I still had not purchased a stat based table top sports game. I could say this article shaped my fascination with sports simulation games, as I was just 11 years old when I first read this article. Written by one of the four league members (and an editor for Sport magazine at the time), Roger Director, you can read the actual Sport magazine article here: ( Part 1 and Part 2 ).

The article I am referring to, “Cutthroat Baseball”, appeared in the October, 1977 issue of Sport magazine, featuring Rod Carew on the cover. If you are old enough, and you followed sports and baseball, and maybe you played table-top baseball games in your youth, you may have come across a magazine article in a popular (for the time) sports magazine, about a 4-team, draft APBA Baseball league played between 4 friends in their 30’s, now well into their careers, lives, marriages, and the general ups and downs of life.

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