The Astros ended up winning the Series in seven games in a match that was far more alive, interesting, and satisfying to us Houston fans than the reality contest was back then. In a recent replay I did of the 2005 World Series, I started with a rested Roy Oswalt pitching for the Astros in the cool night opener in Chicago. I prefer to play the straight real-team match-ups. WIth APBA’s draft and wizard features, it’s pretty easy to put together whole seasons, make up your own players, and even pit your homeboy Pecan Park Eagles club into a desperate World Series contest against the 1927 New York Yankees.

(APBA stopped making this disk once they woke up to the fact that it was hurting sales of the season disks. Today I have ballpark settings for every park in the big leagues that APBA manufactures, a number of season disks for some of the greatest seasons in baseball history, and one player disk that contains the data for every major league player from 1876 through 1996.

I never played the board and dice version again. Sometime in the late 1980s, APBA made the quantum leap into computerizing their game. As one of the game’s earliest, most consistently realistic baseball results games, I was able to play the old dice and board deciphering codes to replay whole major league seasons and arrive at outcomes in the standings and individual hitting, pitching, and fielding accomplishments that were statistically in line with whatever happened to the same teams and players in reality.ĪPBA developed football, hockey, and golf versions of their game over the years, but these held no interest for me – nor did the simpler game of Strat-o-Matic Baseball. Whenever I settled down to life domestically and professionally, I always came back to baseball – and in whatever forms it may have been available to me as a player, fan, reader, researcher, and writer.ĪPBA Baseball was always a part of the flow. Hey! I’m still that way! I never got over it, I suppose, except for the enjoyable, but testosterone-driven dating experience of my middle to later adolescent and young adult years – and all the time and energy I spent working my way through three college degrees and getting started in private practice.

I was 15 years old and still quite involved in anything that pulled me closer to baseball on a 24/7 basis.

I know that to be true because APBA still has a record of my purchase by mail from our home in Pecan Park. I bought my first game set from the company in June 1953. The APBA Baseball View of Minute Maid Park.ĪPBA Baseball has been around as a board game since 1951.

Apba baseball game