Nostalgia Beat: Old School Fantasy Baseball

As recently as two years ago, I was considered an overzealous sports geek for organizing the NCAA basketball office pool each year. Nowadays, legions of even more zealous sports geeks play "fantasy sports," which put my little basketball pool to shame. Everywhere you look online, there are websites with fantasy sports "updates." The ESPNews ticker at the bottom of your television screen even occasionally provides them.

I don't claim to be an expert on fantasy sports, but my understanding is that these folks create their own "teams" by selecting real players and then following their stats. In other words, if your fantasy baseball team includes David Ortiz, you'd add Big Papi's stats to those of the other players you've selected to determine how your team performs. If you're yawning by now, don't worry, I am too.

I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon. I have nothing against fantasy sports, although I admit to being an old-fashioned team loyalist: if my team wins, I’m happy; if they lose, I’m pissed, and no imaginary team made up of players from far flung corners of the league is going to cheer me up.

But one aspect of the fantasy sports phenomenon does make me indignant: the impression of some devotees that it is a recent invention. In fact, fantasy baseball – and I would argue the best-ever fantasy baseball game – has been around for sixty five years. It’s nowhere on your computer screen, but it may well be in a musty old box hidden in the back of your closet.

I’m talking about All-Star Baseball, a board game manufactured by a company called Cadaco and first sold in 1941. Each player was represented by a small cardboard disk that fit onto a spinner; the disk was divided into pieces, like slices of pie, with each slice being one possible outcome of the player’s at bat. For example, one slice of the disk would be a strikeout, and another would be a home run. The size of each slice related to the likelihood that the player would hit into that play: Reggie Jackson, I remember, had a very large homerun slice, but an ever bigger strikeout slice, representing his actual performance on the field. You'd flick the spinner and wherever the arrow stopped, that's what the hitter did: homerun, strikeout, or any pie slice in between.

The game is simple, and brilliant, and totally satisfying in a way that online fantasy sports can’t be – in All-Star Baseball, you make the action happen yourself, in real time. Back in the 1970s, my brother and I never tired of flicking the spinner and seeing what Reggie, or Babe Ruth, or Dave Parker might do at the plate. We'd play full nine-inning games, our fingernails scuffed and bleeding by the end. We weren’t just tracking these superstars, we were channeling them.

And now I’ll sound even older: like so many wonderful, simple things from our past, you can’t find All-Star Baseball in stores any more. Ebay is your best bet, and then once you have the game board you can buy sets of cards of your favorite players or teams, or even a set of all 30 teams for a particular season.

So if you're going to play fantasy baseball, consider doing it the old-school way. Eat some jello to strengthen your fingernails, slip a David Ortiz or A-Rod disk onto the spinner, and start flicking. You'll feel like a kid again, I promise.