We may be about the same age (in my case 48), I can't for the life of me remember that board game.
I'm 51 -- and apparently losing my memory!
The game was not All American Baseball. It was All Star Baseball -- as I learned via an unnecessarily circuitous eBay search.
I'd guess this one has Richie Ashburn; it's about the vintage of the one I had as a kid -- though I'd guess mine was '61 or '62 (by which point, I think, it had the Wrigley Field backdrop ... though maybe that came later; I did buy the game, again, as an adult, about 20 years ago):
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=19106&item=5938447376&rd=1.
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Googling, I found this (including a Richie Ashburn reference!) -- from the Bucks County Courier Times (12/234/2003):
'All-Star Baseball' creates a real blast from the past
By RICH KENNEDY
Bucks County Courier Times
News item: Cadaco, a Chicago-based toy company, reintroduced the board game "All-Star Baseball" last month. Cadaco first sold the game 52 years ago, but until November, it had not produced "All-Star Baseball" since 1993.
Before Sega, before the Xbox, before a corpulent former football coach made a cottage industry out of lending his name and voice to a series of video games, Ethan Allen walked into the office of Cadaco president Don Mazer with a unique idea and a famous name.
"I'm not the Ethan Allen who hawks Early American furniture," he told Sports Illustrated in 1991, "and I'm still too young to have led the Green Mountain Boys."
An outfielder with six MLB teams from 1926 to 1938, Allen invented "All-Star Baseball" after retiring from the majors and sold the idea to Cadaco in 1941. His creation became the precursor to every Strat-O-Matic product, every John Madden video cartridge, every "fantasy league" in the stat-based sports game genre.
The beauty of "All-Star Baseball" was its simplicity and, in truth, its realism. Players from the 1930s through the 1980s were represented by "performance discs," on which various numbered categories of hits and outs reflected each player's career statistics and offensive tendencies. The discs looked like pie charts. Reggie Jackson, for instance, had much larger home-run category (No. 1) than Pete Rose, but Rose had a better chance of hitting a single (Nos. 7 and 13).
To play, you slid a player disc into one of two spinners on a cardboard stadium, flicked the metal arrow, and let chance and probability determine the outcome of the "at-bat." Your opponent whirled the other spinner to field the ball. Me, I played game after game with my friends until our index fingers started to bleed.
My father, too, had played the game as a child, and so on many summer nights during my adolescence, he and I would clear off the kitchen table and drive my mother upstairs with our noisy arguing and exaggerated home-run calls. These were tense affairs, the winner entitled to flaunt his victory until our next game. Jean Shepherd could have used these board-game battles as grist for his short stories.
Jack Sanford threw a one-hitter against me in one game, which is to say that my spinner kept stopping on Nos. 2, 6 and 12 (ground ball out), on Nos. 3, 4, 8 and 14 (fly ball outs), and on No. 10 (strikeout). Once, during a 1985 family vacation in Sea Isle City, I danced around our rented shore house after the spinner landed on the eyelash-thick No. 1 of Richie Ashburn's disc, my dad incredulous to believe Whitey actually had gone yard in the bottom of the ninth to beat him.
Of course, there was more to those games than "All-Star" supremacy in our house. They were an opportunity for my dad to teach me about baseball, about players I had heard of but never seen. They were a chance for a father and son to spend time together.
After learning Cadaco had reissued "All-Star Baseball," I stopped by my parents' house yesterday and peeked into the first-floor storage closet. The game was still there, buried between "Clue" and "Battleship" on a shelf, covered with a film of dust.
Inside the box were the yellowing pages of loose-leaf paper on which I scribbled my team stats and boxscores, and Allen must have known what he was doing because there was justice in those numbers. At the time of my last "All-Star" game, Babe Ruth was hitting .500 and leading the American League in RBIs, Lance Parrish was hitting .200., and Steve Blass was throwing strikes, walking one in eight innings, his infamous mental block no match for Allen's statistical acumen.
"The reality it was based on was part of its popularity," Paul Reidy, Cadaco's marketing manager, said yesterday. "You really did play the role of a big-league manager."
Allen, who as Yale University's head baseball coach from 1947-68 tutored a first baseman named George H.W. Bush, died in 1993, the same year that Cadaco executives decided to stop selling "All-Star Baseball." Video games had surpassed board games in popularity by then, Reidy said, but "in the last couple of years, with all that's going on in the country and the world, there's been a resurgence of retro forms of play because of people's renewed nostalgia."
So to the pleasure of those who played the game years ago and still do - there are "bootleg" discs of current players available on Ebay - Cadaco has pulled it out of the past. It cost $1.25 when the company first sold it. It's now $29.99, and Reidy said, "In every specialty store it's been placed, I just flies off the shelves.
"We get calls every week, and we have for 10 years," Reidy continued. "Out of all the products I get to work on, this one is the most fulfilling, just based on the feedback from people who are happy the game is back."
Call me silly, call me nostalgic, and complain all you want in those tired cliches about the commercialization of Christmastime. But understand: When you are a child, there are certain toys that are special, certain gifts that will always have a hold of you. For me and many other boys, Allen's simple, brilliant invention was one.
I've already promised my dad a game on Christmas Day. Don't laugh. Pitchers and catchers report for spring training in only one month, three weeks and four days.