I'm curious to know what makes Ballpark such an enjoyable game for you.  I've seen it over the years, and as I long time baseball board game player it looks pretty detailed.  I don't know that I've ever heard you go into what you love about the game and would love to know what makes it so enjoyable for you.  

So what does make it so enjoyable for you?  

Thanks Large,  

Matt

            I have been thinking about how to answer your question since you posted it about a week ago, so let me get to work on that.

            Ballpark was invented by a KU professor, Dr. Charles Sidman, in the late 1950s.  It is mathematically a very clever game, although it does have significant flaws or miscalculations in it, some false assumptions underlying it.  Anyway, Ballpark is based on

1)      Random numbers, 1 to 50,

2)     Player Cards, Batter Cards covering the numbers 1-25 and Pitcher Cards covering 26-50,

3)     Park Charts, representing each major league park, and

4)     A "book", a 48-page book in which you have to look things up a few times a game, or more. 

It’s pretty intuitive; it sounds a little complicated but experienced players typically play a game n 30-40 minutes, a three-game series in less than two hours.

            Dr. Sidman organized a group of friends, who started the first Ballpark league about 1960 or 1961; don’t know the exact date.  Could have been 1965.   You have to remember; baseball was more popular then than it is now, especially among mature men.   It might be difficult to do that now, although board games are actually much more popular now than they were then, I believe, and there are many "board game groups" in the generation behind me.

            Anyway, the group of professors at some point began talking about pooling their resources, and converting this wonderful game, as they saw it, into a commercial product.  I wasn’t there, but in that era Strat-o-Matic and APBA were developed into commercial products, I think one of them was marketed before then.  I think as they saw it, there are these commercial games like this, but our game is obviously better than their games, so why don’t we make put our game on the market and seeing what we can do with it?   In 1971, they opened a restaurant in town called The Ballpark.  The idea was that you would go in, order a sandwich and a beer or something—they were supposed to be terrific sandwiches, but you know how that goes—you would order a sandwich and a beer, and play a game or a series of Ballpark games.   You could use any team that had won a pennant from 1920 to 1970, so you would play the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies against the 1931 Cardinals, if you wanted to.  This was 1971; the 1931 Cardinals then were like the 1982 St. Louis Cardinals are now, not all that far in the past.  All of the "old" Ballpark stuff was copyrighted in 1971. 

            The restaurant was fairly successful for a period of five years or so.  Anytime you went in their would be people there, some of them playing the game and some not, some just drinking beer or eating a sandwich. Groups of young men developed who played the game regularly, would drop in a couple of times a week for a series.  They all got to know one another, and they formed leagues.  The restaurant encouraged the formation of leagues, for obvious reasons, and when you have a league, the league has to recruit members in order to sustain itself.  People like me, who were known to be obsessive baseball fans, were recruited to join leagues—even if people didn’t LIKE you, they would still recruit you to join the league because the league needed you. 

            The key point is that by the mid-1970s there was a culture in Lawrence of organized baseball fanatics—not just baseball fanatics, but baseball fanatics who knew other baseball fanatics and interacted with them on a daily basis.  Those people knew the history of baseball at a very deep level.  You play the 1924 Washington Senators in Ballpark a few times, you start wondering who Nemo Leibold was, and who Muddy Ruel was, and who George Mogridge was.  Many of these people collected and read baseball books, and shared stories from them relating to the players.  The players from baseball history became like the people in your home town, people that you knew and talked about.  Jim Carothers, I think, became the first college professor to offer a course in the History of Baseball.  This became a common thing, and then those courses faded away as baseball slipped in popularity among college-age students. 

            That culture is the key point of this essay. You understand, I am not in any way, shape or form comparing myself to Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Isaac Newton, but things develop out of local cultures exactly like this.  Most of the artists, writers, musicians and scientists that you have ever heard of came from intense local cultures of art, literature, music or science. 

            I came from a culture exactly like that, and this is critical to my accomplishments, absolutely central to it.  When I started the Baseball Abstract, it was universally believed that there was no significant audience for a book like that.  I could not believe that that was true, because I actually knew dozens or hundreds of people who were interested in the same type of issues that I was.  That fact gave me the confidence that all of the people who told me I would never make a living by doing this didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.  The concept of "replacement level" comes directly from Ballpark.  I was always (and still am always) trying to figure out how to value players from Ballpark.  I started out by just counting accomplishments, expressing these as Approximate Value (a concept you can still find on Football Reference, although it never really worked ALL that well).. . but anyway, I started out trying to evaluate people for Ballpark by Approximate Value.  All Ballpark Leagues have some sort of protection limit at the end of the year and draft for the next year. . . in other words, you are playing the American League in 1937 and you have 27 players on your roster and you can protect 10 of them for next year, then you re-draft before you start the 1938 season.  At some point it occurred to me that players of a certain quality, you can replace in the draft; what mattered was value ABOVE replacement level—meaning replacement level in the Ballpark draft, but then a couple of years later I realized that the concept of replacement level had real-world implications. 

            Well, Dr. Sidman went off to teach at some other University, the Ballpark closed in the late 1970s, most of the original Ballpark managers went off to another school or died.  Dr. Sidman spotted some of the mistakes he had made in designing the game, and re-designed it, but the Lawrence Ballpark culture clicked on, rejecting the modifications to the game that Dr. Sidman made after he left town.  It still clicks on today; I play today in that same league that Dr. Sidman started 60 years ago.   I’ve been in several other leagues over the years. 

            None of this is intended to say that Ballpark is a better or worse game than APBA or Strat-o-Matic or Diamond Mind; I don’t know.  It’s time and place; I wandered into a time and place where there was a robust baseball culture, founded on Ballpark baseball, and this fact is central to my career.  But to talk now about Ballpark itself, the design of the game worked for me, and still does.  Ballpark is randomized on several different levels.   Let us say that it is triple-randomized by the interaction of the cards, the park charts, and the dozens of different charts which are in "the Book". 

            You draw the number for the player; let us say that it is 23.  Well, it could be 23 Right or 23 Left.  For different hitters, it would be a Home Run for one, a Ground Ball for another, a T5 (tap to the third baseman) for another.  It is a randomized outcome.   Let’s say it is a T5; the third baseman could be a 1 (an outstanding fielder), a 2, a 3, a 4, a 5, a 6, a 7 or an 8 (a bad fielder.)   Each gets a different array of outcomes, and that array is randomized by the Park Chart.

            Each Park chart has sets of outcomes; a T5 to a 6 third baseman gets one outcome with the bases empty, a different one for each base-occupied situation, a different outcome in a different park.  It’s randomized outcomes.  A T5 might be a Z; that sends you to the Z chart, at the back of the book.  A Z might be an infield hit, an error, a ground-out advance, a ground-out no advance, a double play.  A fielder might be ejected from the game for arguing.  It’s randomized. 

            The triple-randomized design of the game—and in reality there are several more identifiable layers of randomization, beyond these three, but I’m trying to keep it comprehensible.  The triple-randomized nature of the game prevents you from breaking the codes.  That’s a terribly important feature of any game, the extent to which the codes are transparent.  You tend to lose interest in any game once you fully understand its codes. 

            But the design of Ballpark is such that you can never fully understand the codes.  I have been playing the game for 50 years, and I’m REALLY good at this kind of thing, pardon my saying so, and I’ve done hundreds of organized studies of how it is put together, representing thousands of hours of work, but I still don’t fully and absolutely understand how everything fits together.   I know most of it, and I understand why the game doesn’t work sometimes the way it is supposed to work. 

            I first heard of APBA and Strat-o-Matic probably in 1962 or 1963—I was born in 1949—and I immediately began developing similar games for my own amusement.  I never owned one of those games; we couldn’t afford anything like that, but I invented my own games on the same concept, several or many different variations of it.  In college I made and distributed one game to friends, and a few hundred games were played; a friend of mine from college with whom I have re-connected claims that he still has that game in a box somewhere, although I certainly do not, and haven’t seen anything of it for 50 years.  It’s not really that odd; I have known several other people who did the same thing as kids, including John Henry, owner of the Red Sox. 

            But if I saw that game now, from college, I could break the codes for that in ten minutes, I think.  On encountering Ballpark, I was aware that I was dealing with a vastly more nuanced, more sophisticated mathematical model of baseball than what I had created.  I immediately became fascinated with that model, with understanding that model, understanding real baseball through that model, and understanding how real-world baseball is different from that model.   I still am.  I still work on all three prongs of that obsession quite literally on a daily basis.   Sometimes I win my Ballpark League; usually I don’t.  But the process of it has served me tremendously well over the course of my career, and I felt that I owed it to Ballpark to explain that to you as well as I could.