Sporting News/OBR

[Tim C]

APBA is a table top baseball game played with cards that have columns of dice rolls and a number after that that represents a play.

What made both Strat-O-matic and APBA different from other games is that they both used offensive, defensive and pitching statistics from the previous season to establish perfomance that was statistically accurate to real time games.

You had envelopes with 20 man rosters (you get get extra players @ extra cost) that you built starting lineups of your own. The included batting orders based on the "most used" line-up from the actual season.

Every player had a defensive rating (for positions played during the season) and there was a default value if a player was used out of position.

Pitching was based on a "Class" basis. An "A" pitcher was a top performer and the rest went dow to a "Class" D pitcher that was basically a spot starter or mop-up man.

Each pitcher also could have other highlights noted (strikeout pitchers had an x and/or a y rating, great control pitchers would have a z and wild guys would have a w).

Offensively there were three columns of dice roles:

11 or a 1 and a 1 was the start. We then progress through all possible dice combinations. Each of the combinations had a number to the right that indicated an action on a play board.

Double numbers were almost always good offensive perfomance and certain other outcomes wre consistantly bad.

The critical part of the game were play boards. Each board carried a possible opportunity of each individual runners on base possibility.

Now this is a real basic description of the game. All of us that played the game for years still have the play boards memorized so there were no long term searchs for play outcome.

If you consider that these games and statistics were (orginally) basically defined during a time without computers it is really amaziong the accuracy of both games.

Regards,