If I Had An SP78 DeLorean

Throughout the nearly four decades that I’ve been playing my Statis Pro 1978 Replay season, I’ve often wondered what I would do differently if I could go back in time and start my season over again…to somehow return to 1980 and implement ideas, and correct mistakes, and make changes to aspects of the board game that have plagued me for years. And by doing so, make my replay season a bit more realistic, and in the long run, easier to deal with stat-wise.

So with that in mind, I think I’ll pull a Marty McFly, hop into a 1982 stainless steel DeLorean, and travel back to the dawn of the 1980s, when I was a junior in high school, living in Rancho Bernardo, California, and ready to start my replay season. Listed below are the ten changes, modifications, and general wish-list items I would have incorporated from the start, if given this opportunity.

Prep Time

When I sat down on the floor of my bedroom to play the very first SP78 Replay game, I just wrote out the lineups and started playing, with zero preparation made for the coming months of the season: I had no blank stat sheets printed, I had no lineups set, I did no double-checking of 1978 rosters, and I had no process in place of how I was going to keep track of information throughout the season. In other words, I was ill-prepared, and looking back, I wish I’d taken more time to get these things in place, so I wouldn’t create so many headaches for myself later on.

I also wish that, from the start, I would’ve kept track of game sites and times, and taken more photos of games and the locations where they were played, and overall been a tad more organized with my stat-keeping.

Opening Day

I have no idea why I chose August 22nd to begin my season, except for maybe I had nothing going on that late-summer Friday afternoon, and figured it was as good a time as any. Not that it makes a difference to my season, but now I wish I’d picked a more memorable date to start with: perhaps a day when I’d gone to see a Padres game, or the final day of the real 1980 season, or while watching the 1980 World Series, or even on the one-year anniversary of when I’d purchased the game, on November 15, 1979.

But in hindsight, I’d probably go with August 3rd, the birthdate of my friend Bob, who’d introduced me to the game, and would’ve joined me in replaying the season if he hadn’t passed away earlier that year. However, there is one aspect of August 22, 1980 that might make it a more notable opening date to my season: if written out numerically (08-22-80), it becomes a palindrome.

Don’t Trust Avalon Hill!

Yes, I trusted—or maybe assumed—that the makers of Statis Pro Baseball would print every 1978 card with its player’s Opening Day team…nooooope! As I found out years later, dozens of players were assigned to teams they’d been traded to during the season, with some even assigned to teams they’d been sent to as late as September, for chrissake! Also, players who’d started the season in the minors were given ‘real’ player cards, as if they’d started the year on the parent club, while A’s pitcher Rick Langford, who appeared in 37 games and spent no time in AAA, wasn’t even given a card or a spot on the minor league ‘fringe player’ sheet! And in a now-infamous move, Avalon Hill printed two cards apiece for Tommy Hutton and Dan Spillner, with Hutton playing for the Expos and Blue Jays, and Spillner playing for the Indians and Padres!

What I should’ve done, and is my biggest regret from this list, was buy myself an issue of Street & Smith’s Official 1978 Yearbook (it was only $1.50!) and double-checked every team’s roster, and made sure every player was on their Opening Day team, since it was my intent from the very start to see how each team would’ve done if there had been no trades or free agent signings during the ’78 season.

TWISP Notes #70

a
TWISP Notes
March 25, 2019

• The August 18th game between the Astros and Pirates, which was called due to thunderstorms at Three Rivers Stadium with the Bucs leading 15-1, was just the third time in SP78 history that a game had been first delayed by rain, then later called. The last time this occurred was in 1988, during a May 7th match-up between the White Sox and Red Sox at Fenway Park.

• Two new sites were added to the SP78 host locations list, when I ventured to New Mexico with my friend Steve P in February and played a trio of games there, all in Las Cruces. The first was played solo at the Thomas Branigan Memorial Library, which was labeled NM3, between the Red Sox and A’s; that night Steve joined me as we played the second game of the trip at site NM4, the Comfort Suites on Telshor Boulevard, between the Steve-led Royals and the Rangers. One more game was played the next morning, at the already-established site NM2, his former home in Las Cruces that was now empty and waiting to be sold.

• The two games played at NM3 and NM4 that Friday equaled the SP78 mark for number of sites hosting games in one day, a feat which had also been accomplished in 1983, 1985, and twice in 1994.

• In the Minnesota-Toronto contest at Metropolitan Stadium on August 18th, first baseman Rod Carew went 5-for-5 with four singles and a double, boosting his season average to .313, as the Twins topped the Jays 8-4. It was Carew’s first 5-hit game of the season, and lifted his current hits total to 161.

• The August 16th game between the Yankees and A’s played at site AZ18—my current apartment in Peoria, Arizona—was the 78th game hosted by the site, bumping it into 4th place on the all-time games-hosted list, past site SNB in San Bernardino and behind AZ8 (218), ESC11 (183), and ESC7 (145). The site is currently four games shy of the coveted 100 games-hosted mark.

The Grease Game

For those of you visiting this post because you happened to see the heading above, thinking this was an article about a charity softball game with teams managed by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, I apologize…this is definitely not that article. Instead, this is a story about a Statis Pro baseball game played nearly forty years ago, outside of the confines of my SP78 Replay season, between two teams managed by my brother and his friend, and played while they snacked on a decidedly non SP78-sanctioned snack item.

The date was July 8, 1981. My brother Scott was at our house on Palacio Place in Rancho Bernardo, California, hanging out with his friend Matt, while I was at a screening of Superman II at our local multiplex with my friend Brent. At some point during the evening, the two decided to play my Statis Pro Baseball board game, with Scott taking the reins of his favorite team, the Dodgers, against Matt and the hometown Padres.

Interesting SP78 Ejection Factoids

In an e-mail I’d sent to my friend Steve P a few weeks back, I told him about a recent Statis Pro game I’d played, between the Pirates and Astros, where Bucs slugger Willie Stargell had been hit by a pitch thrown by Houston starter Vern Ruhle, after Stargell had homered two innings earlier. I was ready to have Stargell rush the mound in response, and prepared to eject both batter and pitcher from the game, but then I wondered: had Stargell ever been tossed in his career? I looked it up and found out that no, he hadn’t. So I sent him to first, and I ejected Ruhle instead, and that was that.

I’d also discovered that Robin Yount, another SP78er, had never been ejected, and he ranked #4 on the list—behind Stan Musial, Willie Mays, and Brooks Robinson—of non-expelled players who’d played more than 1,500 games in their careers. Steve responded to my e-mail a short while later, and he included a list that he’d compiled while researching my site, titled Interesting SP78 Ejection Factoids. I thought it would make for a fun and informative post, so here it is (all numbers are current through August 18th).