Confessions of a Baseball Board Game Lover

Baseball at Memorial Stadium

When I was a kid, my favorite place to spend time was Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, home of the Orioles (and, until 1984, the Colts). I would go to games with my father and brothers and, when I got a little older, I would scrape together whatever money I could by doing odd jobs to go with my equally baseball-crazy friends. Bleacher seats in the old ballpark on 33rd Street were pretty cheap.

I would always make sure we went as soon as the gates opened, because that’s when the visiting teams began batting practice, and I wanted to park myself right behind the first-base dugout and take it all in.

I remember talking to the Twins’ Kent Hrbek, Mike Stenhouse, Randy Bush, and Frank Viola (congratulating him on the birth of his first child), Robin Ventura of the White Sox, Oddibe McDowell of the Rangers, and George Brett of the Royals. I absolutely loved every minute of it. I even got to enjoy being shooed out of the box seats every time by the ushers, who demanded we return to the bleachers right before the National Anthem.

Discovering Statis-Pro Baseball

When I wasn’t playing baseball myself or watching the Orioles, I enjoyed another aspect of my baseball-fueled childhood: Statis-Pro Baseball.

Statis-Pro was a board game sponsored by Sports Illustrated and sold by the Avalon Hill Game Company, which was located on Harford Road in Baltimore.

Every year beginning in 1979 and continuing through the 1992 season, Avalon Hill manufactured cards for every—or nearly every—player who had been on a major league roster the previous season. The cards were created according to formulas that reflected the actual statistics of the players. The premise of the game was that you could replay an entire season and find out if the right team had won the World Series.

The Birthday Present That Hooked Me

For my birthday in 1981, my mother bought me the Statis-Pro game with the 1980 season’s player cards. My mom didn’t have a lot of money, so I really appreciated that she had splurged to get me something she was sure I would enjoy.

I was hooked the minute I got the box opened.

The game board resembled a stadium in its own way. The player cards came in perforated sheets that you had to punch out and organize according to team. At first, I didn’t really even know what I was looking at. Once I read the directions, I knew I would be spending a lot of time with this game.

It was designed to be played against another person, or you could play solitaire. I played both versions.

Playing Manager—and Statistician

I enjoyed making the lineups out for each game. I had a lot of fun pretending to be Earl Weaver or Sparky Anderson. The best part, however, was keeping score of the games and compiling the stats after every contest was played.

I used to record the stats on graph paper. I went through a lot of graph paper erasing the previous stats to update them.

As we all tend to do, I got busy with life and grew up, and while I stopped playing Statis-Pro, I never really lost the itch.

Back to 1979

One day three years ago, I got the idea to look on eBay to see if anyone was selling a Statis-Pro baseball game. To my delight, someone was trying to sell the game with the 1979 player cards inside.

I was in luck.

The 1979 season is really the first season I remember with any kind of clarity. Plus, the Orioles went to the World Series that year—and choked away a 3–1 Series lead to the Willie Stargell-led “Family” that was the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I purchased the game. When I received it, I organized the player cards. It was a used game, so I didn’t have the fun of punching out the cards. I found the 1979 major league schedule. And I created an Excel spreadsheet for every team so that I could bypass the graph paper and use a 21st-century way to keep the stats.

This Time, I’m the Manager

It has taken me three years to get to the end of May 1979 in the schedule.

At this rate, it will take me about a decade to complete the season and see if the Orioles can make it to the World Series. With me as the manager instead of Earl Weaver, I like our chances!

The hobby has taken me back to a particularly pleasant part of my childhood, and it allows me an escape from the “real world” for a while. I am constantly reminded how much baseball meant to me as a kid.

As I mentioned in another post, I still have my baseball cards.

And now, yet again, I have Statis-Pro.