Things You Miss In Sports

That was the one that had the Wrigley Field outfield and scoreboard as its game board, rigbt?

 

Yeah, that's the one. I had one myself when I was a kid; me and my buddies played the heck out of that.

Another one I had was SI's Statis-Pro Baseball, which used a flip-card system instead of dice. Couldn't recreate a whole season, but I would mix up the player cards and distribute them to fictional teams and play a tournament with those teams. So you had scenarios where Steve Garvey played for Pittsburgh, and Mike Schmidt played for Atlanta, and Dwight Evans won my MVP award leading St. Louis to the 'World Series' title.

 

Me and my dad used to play APBA baseball, which combined player cards, dice and these giant cards that covered pretty much every game situation imaginable. You rolled the dice, one red and one white, and whatever number came up you looked it up on the player card to get a number and then took that to the giant card to find out what happened. Rolling doubles was always a hit, and a 1-3 was always a strikeout.
Dad got the 1980 card set when it came out. We dug up a board and pieces from another baseball board game and used it to keep track of runners and such. We had a draft where we each picked 25-man teams and played a season against each other. At some point we added a 10-man "minor league" team to make roster moves.
Hell of a lot of fun. To this day I can still remember some of the random, obscure stars of that 1980 season, like Ben Oglivie and Mike Norris.
Norris was the ace of my pitching staff. I threw a 17-inning no-hitter with him once. Dad might have been drunk that night, but on the bright side at least he wasn't out shooting craps.

 

Statis-Pro was great. Why couldn't you recreate a whole season? They had cards for every player. One summer five of us each had a team and played a 60-game schedule.
It was late 80s and my buddy had the Expos with Dawson, Carter and Raines. But the best player on the team, and maybe in the league, was Fred Manrique. Had to look it up
it was the 1985 season. That year, Manrique had 13 at-bats with a single, a double, a triple and a homer.

Statis Pro Baseball - Wikipedia

Never knew they stopped making cards after 92. Late 90s a few buddies had a Stratomatic league, but they were playing on computer.

 

One of the best sports games ever.

Along with:

 

Mainly, I was staging games by myself on the dining room table and my 14-year-old self realized that a 60-game or even 30-game season for every team was too big an undertaking and with working that in with homework and other activities, I would probably lose interest halfway. It was just a lot easier doing single elimination for a couple rounds and then I would go best of 5 for the semifinals and best of 7 for my tabletop World Series. I had fun with it though.

 

Gotcha, wasn't sure what you meant by couldn't do a full season. My buddy who had Statis Pro liked it better than Stratomatic, but think most prefer Strato.

 

Turning on a game and 95 percent of the time knowing who's playing by the uniform they wear. In every sport, there are too many alternate jerseys.

 

I have mentioned this before but I know a guy who played the entire 1981 season on StratoMatic. Every game, took him 11 years and the Expos won the World Series

 

Playing this game was fun, but it drove me nuts because nobody would go in the right position.

I cracked up during the scene in "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey," when the Grim Reaper got angry at a spinning player and swatted the pieces off the board. I knew how often that happened to me.

 

Good call. And not just too many "alternate" jerseys, but also teams changing their base uniforms, and colors, way too frequently nowadays.

Like you said, used to be you could instantly identify the teams just by a glance at the uniforms. Now the unis often leave me clueless.

 

Dizzy Dean and his "podner" on Saturday baseball broadcasts, Pee Wee Reese. Yes, I'm old enough to remember.

Speaking of Pee Wee, the 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers had five black starters on opening day, unheard of for that era. Who were they?