Sporting News/OBR
 

I was proven wrong on a rule. It turns out to be one of the rules that changed in 2007. So I finally bought a new rule book to replace my 1999 copy. It came in only 3 days from ABUA but it's not published by the Sporting News. Do they no longer publish it? I was so used to the old font and italicized comments.

When I got my 2009 OBR that was replacing my 2005 Sporting News Edition, which replaced my 2000 edition, which replaced ... I noticed that it was now a MLB publication and not a TSN publication. I went to the vast Finnerty archives and pulled out my very first Sporting News OBR from 1965 and started getting all weepy.

Mine first was from 1984. I was 13. I asked my mom to get it because I wanted to make sure I was scoring correctly on my APBA board game. It had Leon Durham on the cover. I loved Bill Buckner and I hated it that Durham replaced him at first but I still thought it was cool that a Cub was on the cover. I still have it too.

As owner of the OBR, MLB has always been the publisher. In the past they have had printing contracts with multiple companies. They decided to go with a single printer and, unfortunately, it isn't The Sporting News.

Yes, it's Triumph Books and they really suck. The glue gives out and the pages fall out.

24:13 StrikeOut
 

My first set of APBA cards covered the 1957 season.

We played the game hours on end.

There has NEVER been a more accurate baseball board game.

Regards,

Actually, that's not correct. The Sporting News was the publisher. That's why it said "Published by The Sporting News" on each book. Major League Baseball authorized the publication, making it an official publication when The Sporting News published it.

You might have to enlighten this youngster on what that game is. haha. I have no idea

45:14 Walk
 

Whenever 24:13 came up, I'd say, "He struck him out!" in my best Harry Caray impersonation.

Actually for accuracy Strat-O-Matic blows APBA out of the water.

Jasper

PS: This is just to start a holy war on table top baseball simulations, no malice intended ;)

Lol
 

As with most everything these days there are ALWAYS two camps.

We played complete seasons and the stats came out (if you played fairly) within .001 of the actual numbers.

We, of course, morphed the game, by combining teams or buying All-Time Great sets and such.

I still use the board game (have not been drawn to the computer game) and love the sound of the dice been shaken.

65:35 " . . . and he fouls out to Berra near the screen." (in my best Mel Allen)

Regards,

Agreed.

The short version . . .
 

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,

Sorry, I was just repeating from an email from MLB offices. I'll notify them of their error.

66:1
 

There it goes...it might be...it could be...

Sorry, Mr. Umpire, sir, and I am certainly very sorry also to your special friends at MLB.

[The Sporting News published the OBR for decades, including the early part of this one]

I have no special friends at MLB. I don't know why you'd assume that. MLB stated in a release that TSN had printed the book and MLB was the publisher. Obviously, they were mistaken.

I don't know why you seem to think this is such a big deal. I doubt anyone else cares.

I feel deprived, as I had no knowledge of such a game as a youth in the 60s and 70s :mad: Can this game still be obtained at a reasonable cost?

$20 to $40 on ebay depending on vintage and condition.

APBA Website
 

See, that's how little I know about it. ;)

I had ( and loved Statis Pro)

We had a league during college. Many a class was missed due to a game available on the schedule.

I also remember bringing our player cards to class and working on trades in the back of the class room.

Ahhhhh the memories....

I'm not sure if you are suggesting that The Sporting News was the only publisher of the OBR. They were not. Triumph Books has published the OBR for years-- and the pages have fallen out for years.

MLB can also claim to be a publisher, because the word "publisher" doesn't have a crisply defined meaning. "Copyright" does, though, and MLB holds the copyright on the rules themselves, while TSN and Triumph have copyrights to, for example, their cover art.

Ahhh yes! I played the Strat-O-Matic in my youth. Everyone in the neighborhood was involved (even some of the girls). I never heard of the APBA game here on the East Coast. It may have been available, but when I bought in (literally, no one could afford to buy one themselves), the neighborhood was all Strat-O-Matic.

So did NBC. And, perhaps surprisingly, there were one or two (relatively small) differences. Personally, I preferred the format of the NBC book (it was smaller).

One of the differences: The NBC book said that when a pitcher was visited for the second time, he had to be removed "from the game." TSN just said he "had to be removed." The former is, of course, the MLB ruling (I think the rules on MLB.com at the time also omitted the "from the game" phrase.")

I did not. I simply insisted that TSN was a publisher of the OBR until recently and that they were authorized by MLB to be so.

Slow day.

Don't confuse a generic "publish" with the meaning of "publish" in a legal sense.

In legalese, one of the definitions of publish includes:

b: to distribute or offer for distribution to the public copies of (a copyrightable work) by some transfer of ownership, rental, lease, or loan

Note the "transfer of ownership" part. As MLB did not transfer ownership to either SN or Triumph, those companies did not, in the legal sense, "publish" the book. MLB is just protecting their rights when they state that SN did not "publish" the book.

Good luck with this. I had written a similar post and then decided to delete it.

That was a NL/AL difference in interpretation for a time in the instructions to umpires. NL said "removed from the game," AL said "removed from the mound." Boy, did it annoy the managers in the summer leagues, who played "National League rules" and thought it just meant "no DH," when I enforced that.