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Sunday, Jun. 09, 2002 - 11:00 a.m.

On Baseball

A sunny Sunday morning, Dad out in the yard mowing the lawn, the newspaper spread out in front of me, open to the baseball page with a dozen box scores staring back at me, a hundred stories hidden in their numbers.

I'm reminded of summer days in high school, when I'd spend my first hour of the day at the computer, punching in numbers as I determined the results in the fantasy baseball league I'd organized with my friends. It began with four of us in eighth grade owning two teams each to stretch out the talent pool. In high school, it expanded with the expansion of our friends, and we even ventured into football. I�d write weekly updates, complete with stats and standings, and distribute them in newsletters to everybody. I even tried to set up a subscription -- for the cost of the necessary stamps -- so that I could mail them out each week over the summer. I still have many of them, I think.

The leagues dissolved after graduation, but I got back into it toward the end of college when a group of teachers at Mom's school started one up and invited me in. That was 1997, and I'm in my fifth year, participating in two leagues, down from the five I foolishly threw myself into last summer.

Baseball has fascinated me since 1986. Something about that magical autumn when the Mets won the World Series uncovered a hidden love within me, and I've been a fan, a student, an afficionado of the sport since. I collected baseball cards, kept score at games, played through high school, pitched to friends and hit off them in the backyard or at the field by the school, bought video games. Ahh -- the video games. I remember countless hours spent in front of the TV with the old-school Nintendo and various forms of games.

I'd get up early on school mornings just to play, when there was no homework or sunny afternoons to demand my attention or give Mom a reason to tell me to "get off the Nintendo." It started with the no-frills, non-descript "Baseball," the very first game I bought -- or had Mom buy -- after I got the system, which came, of course, with Super Mario Bros. That Baseball game was simple in its graphics and its play -- the pitchers were either right-handed or left-handed, the batters alternated, and the uniforms had a few different color combinations, determined when you chose your team from the list of "teams" -- A, C, D, P, R, Y to represent the Athletics, Cubs, Dodgers, Pirates, Royals and Yankees based on their colors. Then you just played. It was pretty lame (check it out; it's got pictures), but I spiced it up for myself by making it a league. I'd take a major-league team's schedule and use it to form a schedule for one of the Nintendo teams. I'd play the games, keeping track of what each batter did on a makeshift scorecard I made on one of the millions of sheets of blank or scrap paper my dad would bring home from work. I'd write out the lineup, matching it to the current teams' lineups, and play the game, using simple tick marks -- | -- to indicate each at bat, run, hit, etc. On the computer -- our simple, monochrome Radio Shack Tandy -- I'd input the numbers and keep track of each players' and team's progress.

I found one thing by my experiment, and that was for all its faults, at least the Nintendo Baseball game could write out a lineup. Generally, the No. 3 hitters on each team had averages among the highest; the No. 4 hitters had the most home runs; the leadoff guys were the fastest.

Luckily, with time, came better baseball games. "RBI" was the first, I think, but I never had it. I never had "Major League Baseball," either. "MLB" and "RBI" were the first, I believe, to get the licensing rights from the MLB Players Association and could therefore use real players' names. I'd play them at friends' houses, but usually would lose miserably, as often happened when someone who didn't own a particular game played someone who did.

My next purchase was "Bases Loaded," which had no licensing rights but did have different teams in different cities and fictional players with names and stats. It was the first game I owned that had a season structure, and I think in the season I played, I won all but 20 of those games.

I did the same thing with �Bases Loaded� that I did with �Baseball� -- I kept the stats and followed the season closely. The game was sensitive to my home state�s history of being shunned in the shadow of New York and had a team in �Jersey,� which was the one I controlled. It had two legitimate superstars, �Paste� batting third and �Bay� hitting fourth. I took the liberty of giving Paste the first name of Danny and he became my power-hitting alter ego in the game. He was also the one player on Jersey -- and each team had one -- who if you hit him with a pitch, he�d charge the mound, beat the crap out of the pitcher, and get ejected from the game.

Then they came out with �Baseball Stars.� This one, which was my last Nintendo baseball purchase, was the best of all, for me. It had fictional teams -- including one of all women -- and fictional players, but it had a season setup and organizational features no game before it did. You could create a team and build a league with other teams of your choice. Each player had varying levels of skill in categories like power, contact, speed, defense, arm and even prestige. The more players on your team with more prestige, the more �people� came to your games, and the more money your games brought in. With the money, you could increase your players� skill levels until the total points reach their maximum. You could also buy free agents, which usually necessitated the release of another player, who would be shown walking off into the sunset, head down, his belongings wrapped in a blanket and tied to the end of a stick in that stereotypical view of a bum, and a dog walking beside him.

But the best part was, you could name the players. Everyone who owned the game filled a team with his friends, making himself the team�s superstar. In one season, for instance, I hit 106 home runs. I ruled.

I also had one game that could be played without a television or computer. �All-Star Baseball� was made by Cadaco and featured a 3-D game board of a stadium -- I think it�s the Metrodome -- with a panel rising in the outfield with the fans on it. Licensed by the MLBPA, it features discs of players -- past and present (in the early 90s or whenever it was) -- with the circle divided into numbered sections. 1 was a home run, 3 a strikeout and so on. A weak hitter like Ozzie Smith would have a small section of the pie devoted to 1, but as a contact hitter, he also had a small 3. Babe Ruth had a space for 1 and 3 as big as his reputation. You�d put the disc in the spinner and spin the arrow, reading the instructions for each number as the arrow pointed to it. I�d play it with friends, and I�d do it on my own as well, keeping score of each game in an official scorebook I purchased just for that purpose. I think the scorebook is even still around.

I bought one baseball computer game -- �Tony LaRussa Baseball 3� -- and played it religiously for a summer in college, and at home on breaks. I felt just a little old when I visited the �Baseball As America� exhibit at New York�s Museum of Natural History and saw a copy of the game in one of the displays. I still throw it in on occassion and pick up where I left off. As a computer game, it has the most storage capability of any baseball game I own, and it�s retained the records of the five or six �seasons� I�ve played. Back in 1997, I was already up to 2001 I think, and now time has caught up with fantasy.

All these memories came back to me when I visited the New York Public Library on Thursday to see their exhibit of new artifacts, Victorians, Moderns and Beats. It contains many manuscripts and notebooks from Jack Kerouac, and even a display of his own fantasy baseball game, a pastime he invented as a child and played throughout his life. He made up teams and players, drew a game board and threw an eraser onto it. Where it landed there was a symbol, and then he�d consult a card for the player at bat to see what the symbol meant in terms of what the player did (a hit, fly out, ground out, home run, etc.). It was ingenious; in fact, it was very similar to a game developed later, Strat-O-Matic, which was wildly popular in the 50s and 60s (I think). Kerouac mentioned his baseball game in Desolation Angels and wrote a story, �Ronnie on the Mound,� based on one of his fictional pitchers.

When Mom saw the exhibit, she marveled over Kerouac�s game, awed at the similarities between the Beat writer and myself, though glad they stopped with the love of baseball and of writing.

I�m still in love with the game of baseball and all the ways it can be enjoyed -- from watching a game on TV (I�m one of the few who can do it), attending one from the majors down through high school, playing in the back yard or running virtual seasons on a gaming system or the computer.

I think, for old-times� sake, I�ll slip �Tony LaRussa Baseball 3� into the CD-ROM drive right now ...

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