Baseball

When the Mets began play the following year, I went to a game at the Polo Grounds, and followed them a little, but the Yankees continued to be my favorite team.   They won the pennant each of the next three years, but lost the World Series to the Dodgers in 1963 and the Cardinals in 1964.  In 1964 I went to the All Star Game at Shea Stadium, but was disappointed when the National League won the game.

The Yankees collapsed in the mid 60's, falling to 10th place in 1966.  Mickey Mantle retired in the spring of 1969.  I continued to follow the team, although I did get distracted by the "Miracle Mets" that season.  The Yankees improved in the early 70's and made it back to the World Series in 1976 after an exciting ALCS vs. Kansas City.  I continued to go to Yankee Stadium two or three times a year through the early 70's, but after moving to Poughkeepsie, NY in 1974 there wasn't as much time for attending games.  Shortly after our wedding in September of 1976 my wife and I did get to a doubleheader at the newly-renovated Stadium.  We also went to a game in 1979 two days after Thurman Munson had been killed in a plane crash.  That was probably the last time I was at the Stadium -- by then we had children to take up most of our time.

The Yankees in the mid-80's weren't very interesting.  I still followed them on TV, but when we moved to Cary, NC in 1987 the games were no longer available on TV so I lost touch with them.  Since I still missed baseball, and the Atlanta Braves were available on TBS, I tried to get interested in their games, but we ended up spending a lot of time during baseball season at our sons' games.  When the Braves started appearing regularly in the postseason, we got to know the players a bit better.  The Durham Bulls were a class A affiliate of Atlanta, so we saw some of the players before they reached the major leagues.  By 1995 we started watching the Braves games during the regular season, and have been fans ever since.  The 1996 season presented us with a problem, as the Braves and Yankees faced each other in the World Series.  I still had some loyalty to the Yankees, but my wife was a Braves fan.  Since she was also a big Mark Wohlers fan, that Series did not please her at all.  We went to a game at Turner Field in Atlanta in 1997, the year it opened.  We saw the Braves play the Devil Rays at St. Petersburg while we were in Orlando for a Microsoft conference in 2000 (actually I was there for the conference and my wife was there for the vacation).  We also saw another game in Atlanta in 2001 (another Microsoft conference), but haven't been back since, although we still follow them on TV.

Over the years I have also been to games at RFK Stadium in Washington DC (sometime in the late 60's) and Fenway Park (1996).  We have also been to several Durham Bulls games, which are more interesting now that they're a AAA team.

Playing Baseball

I enjoyed playing baseball with friends in the neighborhood when I was growing up, but was not very good at it.  I joined a Little League team when I was 11, but there were no rules about playing time in those days.  There were 15 players on the team, and nine played every game while the other six sat on the bench.  I never got to play at all that year.  The next year I did get to play some, but didn't do well and was put back on the bench, so I decided there was no reason to continue to go to the games.  That experience was enough to keep me from trying out for my high school team.  While the school had a freshman football team, there was no freshman baseball team, so I would have had to try out for junior varsity, and didn't have the confidence to do it.

Many years later (1985), while I was working at IBM, they organized an adult baseball (not softball) league at the IBM club, so I decided to give that a try.  We had some trouble finding a place to play, and the league almost was cancelled, but eventually we were able to play at the Town of Wappinger fields.  Our first game was played on a Little League field -- there were a lot of home runs.  About half of the players in the league had played high school or college ball and were a lot better than the other half.  The first season saw a few teams drop out, and some games were forfeited.  I enjoyed playing but still wasn't very good.  The next year I volunteered to be team captain, so that was more interesting.  We lost 11 of our 12 games (the team we beat also went 1-11), but still enjoyed ourselves.  We played at the Vassar College field (which was about 300 feet or so down the right field line and about 1000 feet or more in left) and a field in the Town of Fishkill.  In 1987 I had to reluctantly quit the team when we moved to Cary, NC.  After that I did get to play some with my two sons, but not in a team situation.

Baseball Simulation Games

Sometime in 1961 I received a copy of the All Star Baseball Game, which allowed you to play baseball games using real major league players, who would perform according to the historical abilities.  The players were all stars from throughout baseball history, including Hall of Fame players such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, etc.  I remember making my own disks for the 1962 season, using index cards, so I could play games with the current players.  Later that year I bought the Negamco baseball game, which featured rosters of all teams from the previous season.  A year or so later, I started playing the APBA game, which was an improvement in that each batter was rated individually.  I would start a season, playing every game on the schedule, but the games would take so long to play, and the stats were very time consuming, so I would only get to mid-May or so before the next season's cards came out and I lost interest in the season I was playing.

Sometime in the mid 70s I joined an APBA play-by-mail league.  We drafted teams and then specified lineups, and sent instructions to our opponents for our road games.  They would play the games, managing our team according to the instructions, and send back the results.  After a couple of seasons, I started my own league, the Off-Season Baseball League, in 1978.  I served as league commissioner, and maintained all of the statistics from reports for each series that the managers would send me.  In 1985 the APBA computer game became available, so we started using that (optionally at first).  Some time around 1992 I decided to resign from the league, since it took up so much of my time and I had other things I needed to do.  Several years later I discovered a web site the league had set up, and re-joined.  Now that I'm no longer commissioner, I have more time to devote to building a good team.  The league is now in its 29th year (it operates during the off-season, from September through March).

While I enjoyed the APBA game, I had some problems with its realism, so I've tried a number of other games over the years.  There was one I enjoyed in the late 70's.  It was called "The World's Greatest Baseball Game" and was published by JWW Corp.  (not the world's most humble corporation).  One of the features I liked about it was that it rated minor leaguers for each team, so you weren't forced to use the players that the real major league team used.  You could bring up a rookie from the minors and try them.  I was in a league using this game for a short time, but sometime in the 80s the company stopped issuing new seasons.

I also tried the Pursue the Pennant game in the mid 80's.  That was very well done, and took a lot of subtleties into account, but the games took a long time to play.  In 1988 I purchased the computer version of the game, which allowed you to play a complete season for one team while the computer simulated the other games.  For the first time I was able to get through a full season.  This game eventually became known as Diamond Mind Baseball, and it is still one of my favorites.  It is probably the best for replaying a full season, and for in-game realism.

Another game I tried is Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP).  It has a different focus.  Instead of rating players based on their performances from a particular season, it rates them in various areas (power, speed, contact, etc.) based on a projection of their abilities.  And it provides enough players for a major league team and a team at each minor league level (AAA, AA, A), so you can manage an entire organization.  This means that you have much more freedom to decide who plays for your team.  You can even make trades with the other (computer-controlled) teams.  But the best feature is that it the players abilities evolve as time goes by.  When you complete one season, you can start the next season.  Some players will have retired, and there will be new rookies available.  As you play a number of seasons, players careers will begin, peak, and then fade out.  It provides a real feeling of controlling a major league organization.

The 1997 season saw the Atlanta Braves and the Baltimore Orioles dominate their respective leagues all season.  The two teams were obviously the best in baseball, and I was really looking forward to the World Series to see which one would triumph.  But, thanks to the division set up and the wild card rule, the World Series that year was between the second place Florida Marlins and the 86-75 Cleveland Indians.  This was such a disappointment that I decided to use Diamond Mind Baseball to play what should have been the Series.  That inspired me to set up a web site (www.revisionistbaseball.com)  where I published what the league standings would have been each year if there were no divisions.  For seasons where the team with the best record in each league didn't make it to the World Series, I used Diamond Mind Baseball to simulate a revisionist Series.  I also looked at what the pennant races would have been like.  While working on this site it occurred to me that the current major league baseball post-season setup was simply an eight team elimination tournament, with the so-called World Series merely the final round of the tournament.  So I started a series of tournaments, again using Diamond Mind Baseball, with the premise that ALL of the teams made the playoffs.  Since 1961 was my first year as a baseball fan, I started the tournaments with the 1961 season.  The intent was to show that the more playoff rounds a team has to go through, the more likely it is that the best team will not make it to the final round.  An additional benefit has been the enjoyment of playing games with all of the players from each year.

Currently I am still maintaining the Revisionist Baseball site.  I have completed nine tournaments, and I'm currently doing the 1970 tournament.  My plans are to update the site and change its focus a bit, toward baseball simulation gaming in general.  I'm also still managing a team in the Off-Season Baseball League, and I'm in the second season managing the Atlanta Braves using the OOTP game.