APBA Lets Stat Lovers Be Managers

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Trevor James, 7, playing at the APBA tournament

in Lancaster, Pa. Brian Wells, 16, got the first of his two titles when he was 9.

From the NY Times

By CHRIS HINE; Published: August 8, 2009

LANCASTER, Pa. — Amid the rolling hills of Amish country sits a small brick building obscured by shrubbery. It is the headquarters of APBA, a company founded in 1951 and known most for making a dice baseball game that has nurtured a persistent following through the years.

Not far from this building, 76 people recently converged on a hotel ballroom for the annual APBA tournament. Many of the players were middle-age men hoping to apply their math and managerial skills to something other than work. One player was 7, and perhaps the most feared competitor was a teenager with spiky hair.

Video games have become increasingly sophisticated, and fantasy sports leagues have surged in popularity, but APBA, like its rival Strat-O-Matic, has stuck to the basic format that made it successful. Players compete using a system built on the actual performance of professional players and teams from baseball’s distant or not-so-distant past.

“Baseball has always been a game for statistics freaks,” said John Cochrane, a veteran APBA player from Virginia. “And this was the ultimate game for statistic freaks.”

Each player chooses a team, which comes with a set of cards for the entire roster. Ratings and numbers have been assigned based on how pitchers and batters performed that season. Winning or losing is mostly determined by rolls of the dice — one red, one white. The numbers of dots on the dice — first red, then white — correspond to numbers on the cards. Those numbers, in turn, match up with a situation booklet that determines walks, hits and outs.

Along the way, the human players act like managers, deciding when to hit-and-run, when to pull the infield in, when to pinch-hit and when to bunt. Those decisions are announced before a play, and the outcomes are found in the booklet. Nine-inning games last about 20 minutes.

The annual tournament takes place in Lancaster or in Las Vegas, and it has garnered a devoted following. At this year’s version, in late July, some players wore T-shirts bearing their own personalized APBA cards. Others brought custom dice shakers. Many have memorized the results book, which contains hundreds of possible outcomes for each dice roll.

APBA (pronounced APP-bah) even has a Hall of Fame (which Cochrane joined this year). Several participants are in statistics-related careers like accounting, teaching math, tax law and financial advising.

“This is a really nerdy place,” said Brian Wells, the spiky-haired teenager whom nobody in the tournament wants to face. “It’s fun, but it’s nerdy.”

The 16-year-old-Wells, a fast-talking native of Wyomissing, Pa., who has a summer job as a busboy, became the first person to win the tournament twice. His first title came in 2002, when he was 9, his second in 2008. The older players have accepted him, some begrudgingly, as a member of their fraternity.

“It used to be when I was 9, when I was younger, they didn’t seem like they wanted me there, you know, little kids,” Wells said. “And then, like winning, they didn’t really like that at all.”
Wells has a knack for rolling doubles, which are the best for a hitter. Combinations like 66, 11 and 33 usually result in extra-base hits or home runs.

Wells has made the playoffs in six of his seven trips to these tournaments. He uses the same dice shaker that helped him win his first tournament, and in this year’s playoffs, he wore the same shirt that brought him luck in 2008. APBA also helps him stay motivated in school; his parents made him skip the tournament one year because his grades were not to their liking.

“I also play the baseball video games, but after a while, that just gets boring,” he said. “And APBA, it will get dull after a while. Like, honestly, if you’re my age, you can’t play it every day.”
Lancaster has been APBA’s home base since 1951, when Richard Seitz established the company. Seitz and his friends called their group the American Professional Baseball Association and later shortened the name.

The peak years were the 1970s and early 1980s, according to Marc Rinaldi, the company’s president. Today, APBA has four employees, and it creates card sets after every major league season. The company has developed football and hockey games and has plans to release a golf game.

“We’re a niche market for people who prefer a more cerebral approach to playing and want to control the action through being a coach or manager,” he said.

To sell itself to a younger generation, APBA is developing an interactive version of its electronic game. Company officials had hoped to have it on the market already, but development complications have delayed the release. At the same time, Rinaldi said, there is not much APBA can do to restructure its basic game, which he said had sold more than 600,000 units.

“As long as there’s fans, there’s always going to be the guy that likes to track stuff, the guy that likes to do replays, the guy that wants to be able to say, ‘How would this guy perform against this guy?’ ” Rinaldi said. “I want those guys to come to us.”

Wells cruised into this year’s semifinals by playing with the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals. With two outs in the ninth inning of the deciding semifinal game, he needed a home run to tie the game with Jim Edmonds at the plate. For some batters, like Edmonds, a 66 means a home run.
Wells stood up to roll and shook the dice. The other players gathered around, anticipating that 66. Everyone watched and listened intently to that familiar rattle. Then it stopped.

Out came the red die — a six.

Then the white one — a five.

A third title was not to be for Wells. The game ended with a pop-up to the catcher.

Wells lost to John Duke, a 62-year-old retired computer systems analyst who went on to capture the tournament title with the 1909 Pirates. It was his second championship in three years. Duke also defeated Wells in 2007 on his way to winning it all with the 1927 Yankees.

In previous tournaments, Wells won with the 2001 Seattle Mariners and the 2000 Arizona Diamondbacks. He left this year’s event vowing to end the “curse of John Duke.”

He has tried, with little success, to recruit friends to APBA. Next year, he said, he expects to attend the tournament with his father, Greg, while his friends stay home with video games.
“They don’t make fun of me,” Wells said. “But they don’t want to get into it. Because some of my friends just don’t have the attention span for all of this.”

So You Think You Know Baseball?

From retrosheet.org

What is a courtesy runner?
What is a mid-play runner?
What is a courtesy fielder?
When was the last time each one occurred in a major league game?

Courtesy Runners
Until 1950, a courtesy runner was allowed for a player if that player had been injured and at the moment couldn’t continue. The original player then stayed in the game defensively in the next inning. Most often the courtesy runner was already in the lineup.

Last time it occurred
7/2/1949 (Browns at Indians) - In the bottom of the ninth inning, Ray Boone was hit on the arm by a pitch from Karl Drews. Jim Hegan, already in the lineup catching, ran for Boone and scored. Since this inning was the end of the game, the players do not return to their defensive positions.

Mid-Play Runners
When a player who was entitled to advance was physically unable to do so. A pinch runner is allowed to enter the game and complete the play. These are not courtesy runners because the replaced player did not later come back into the game. The relevant rule is 5.10(c)(1) which allows for the replacement of an injured runner in a dead ball situation before play resumes.

Last time it occurred
9/14/2005 (Red Sox at Blue Jays) - In the top of the 5th, Gabe Kapler was on first when Tony Graffanino hit a deep fly ball near the line in left that Kapler thought might be in play, so he started running hard. As he rounded second base, he ruptured his left Achilles tendon and sprawled on to ground. The ball went over the fence for a homer, but Graffanino wisely stopped at second base while Kapler was attended to. After many minutes, Kapler was loaded onto a cart and taken off the field. Alejandro Machado, appearing in his 4th Major League game, entered as a pinch-runner and scored his first Major League run in front of Graffanino.

Courtesy Fielder
Due to an injury, a fielder cannot continue and there is not a replacement available

Last time it occurred
8/10/1952 (Cubs at Pirates, game 2) - In the top of the ninth of the second game of a twin bill, Pirates catcher Clyde McCullough was injured and could not continue. The Pirates two other catchers, Eddie Fitzgerald and Joe Garagiola, had already been used in the game as pinch hitters. With the approval of Cubs manager Phil Cavarretta, Fitzgerald was allowed to replace McCullough. The Cubs won the game 4-3. Under the playing rules in effect since the 1950 season, that was an illegal substitution that the umpires should not have allowed.

From retrosheet.org

Baseball Veers Into Left Field

Stephen Webster/ Wonderful Machine (Associated Press: Reese)

Voluminous Data Yield Some Arcane Research; ‘Pee Wee’ and Life Expectancy

FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By AUSTIN KELLEY

When baseball dubbed shortstop Harold Reese “Pee Wee” and first basemen Fred Merkle “Bonehead,” they probably weren’t trying to lengthen the players’ lives. But according to researchers at Wayne State University, major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them.

The nickname findings are part of the wide-ranging and often arcane academic research that deals with the national pastime. In another study, we learn that players whose first or last name begins with “K” strike out more than those without “K” initials. And in case you were wondering, research finds Democrats support the designated-hitter rule more than Republicans.

As any numbers geek knows, baseball has always been the wonkiest of sports, rife with statistics and theories. Whether baseball purists like it or not, scores of analysts and number crunchers have knocked down the gates of the hallowed game and are now climbing over the furniture with their protractors and measuring tapes.

Scores of armchair statisticians and Retrosheet, an organization dedicated to digitizing baseball history, have compiled hundreds of thousands of bytes of errors and sacrifices—all easily downloadable to the public. The ballclubs themselves have taken notice and most, if not all, have statisticians on the payroll.

“You have such a large, detailed database to start with,” says Phil Birnbaum, editor of the statistical-analysis newsletter for the Society for Baseball Research (SABR). “A lot of things that are just interesting things about life, you might first hear about them in baseball just because the data is there.”

Indeed, 90 years of plate appearances helped marketing professionals Leif Nelson of the University of California-Berkeley and Joseph Simmons of Yale University show that players with K’s in their initials strike out more than those without K initials. (“K” is the scorekeepers’ mark for a strikeout). The findings were part of a larger study published in 2007 in the journal Psychological Science that people unconsciously seek out outcomes corresponding to their names despite their conscious desires.

“Even Karl ‘Koley’ Kolseth would find a strikeout aversive,” they wrote, referring to the 1910s-era player. “But on the whole, he might find it a little less aversive than players who do not share his initials, and avoid it less enthusiastically.” (Mr. Kolseth actually never struck out in his 24 plate appearances for the Baltimore Terrapins, but Kevin Kouzmanoff of the Padres struck out 139 times last year).

In the May 2007 Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Christopher Zorn, a Penn State professor, and Jeff Gill, of Washington University, demonstrated that Democrats tend to support the designated-hitter rule more than Republicans or independents do. Using data from a 1997 CBS News poll, they suggested that the DH, introduced in the American League in 1973, not only represented radical change from tradition, but also struck some conservatives as anticompetitive. “Liberals all like the designated hitter,” Prof. Zorn contends, “because it’s sort of a welfare program. It lets hitters hit longer into their careers and takes responsibility away from the pitchers.”

Perhaps the most prolific of the baseball quirkologists are Ernest Abel, a professor of medicine, and Michael Kruger, a statistician at Wayne State.

In the past four years, Messrs. Abel and Kruger have also argued in academic journals that professional baseball players live a little longer than average folks; that players who debut at a young age have a shorter life expectancy than their slower-developing teammates; that players with “positive” initials have a longer lifespan than those with initials like “P.I.G.”; that southpaws are a little shorter than right-handers; and that major-leaguers are more likely to die on their birthdays than chance would predict. Hall of Famers are likelier still.

Prof. Abel, who has written books on a wide range of topics, including graffiti, genetic disorders and “Marihuana: the First Twelve Thousand Years,” says names, initials and death just intrigue him.

“I do a lot of reading,” he says, “and like to speculate on a lot of different aspects of behavior.” Baseball, Prof. Abel points out, is not only a good place for data, it’s also more interesting than doing a study on, say, academics. “What kind of kid grows up and wants to be an economist?” he says.

It’s not to suggest that baseball research isn’t worthwhile, since findings can have real-world applications.

W. Christopher Winter, medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center, led a soon-to-be-published study, funded by Major League Baseball, showing that teams that are adjusted to their time zone have a “circadian advantage” over teams that have just traveled across the country. “Baseball is a great way to raise awareness,” says Dr. Winter, who notes that findings can apply to shift-workers. “It’s a sexy topic and it gets a lot of attention.”

Much of the latest academic work owes a debt to the expanding field of sabermetrics, the science of baseball analysis. For sabermetricians, no topic is too small or hypothesis too unlikely. SABR’s journals publish articles like “Was Roy Cullenbine a better hitter than Joe DiMaggio?” (In short, no). At the organization’s upcoming conference, David Smith, president of Retrosheet, will answer the question: If a pitcher reaches base and has to do a little running, does it affect his performance on the mound?

Bill James, considered the father of sabermetrics, argues that occasionally statisticians are like sentries looking into a fog. “We’re trying to see if there’s an army out there,” he once wrote, “and we have confident reports that the coast is clear—but we may have underestimated the density of the fog.”

Some of the statistical analyses in the academic papers may be foggy as well.

“Whenever we try to prove something by statistical analysis we are at risk of going wrong in 6,000 different ways,” Mr. James says in an email.

The nickname study depends on the assertion that certain players did not have a nickname, which is difficult to establish with certainty. Prof. Abel says, though, that his nickname books and histories are fairly reliable. “People who do statistics on baseball,” he says, “are very meticulous.” (Despite this, Prof. Abel does not publish in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal. “It’s too esoteric,” he says.)

Prof. Zorn, the political scientist, notes that his study on Democrats and the DH rule was limited by the data set. Dr. Winter, the sleep scientist, says his study about circadian rhythms made assumptions about the causes of performance even though other variables can affect a person’s internal clock.

“Being on a plane, the restricted dietary choices, dehydration, lack of comfort, disruptions in sleep,” he says, “all those things certainly affect an individual’s performance.”

As for the K-name strikeout study, Mr. Birnbaum of SABR notes on his blog that if the data are recalculated using plate appearances instead of players’ career strikeout rate (thus placing more weight on players with longer careers), the results don’t hold up.

Meanwhile the study’s co-author, Prof. Nelson, says he welcomes critical review. “It remains entirely possible,” he says, “that [we] are incorrect.”

FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

East or West - Fine Baseball Exhibits

From Sabr.org

July 2009 Baseball Exhibits
By Susan Petrone

Two baseball-related exhibits on opposite ends of the country. This information is posted as a courtesy.

One of the most ubiquitous and instantly recognizable American pop culture artifacts, the baseball trading card, is the subject of a new exhibition sponsored by the Baseball Reliquary. Cardboard Fetish will on exhibit at the Pasadena Central Library, 285 E. Walnut Street, Pasadena, California, from July 6-July 31, 2009. Admission is free.

Mixing nostalgia, affection, irreverence, and social commentary, Cardboard Fetish explores the history of baseball cards from their origins in the 19th century as advertising mechanisms for tobacco products through their more recent status as a locus of intense baby-boomer nostalgia and object of currency, with some cards fetching astronomical prices.

The exhibition also features a special display, “The History of Baseball Card Defacing,” by Pennsylvania-based artist Paul Kuhrman, in addition to artist-designed baseball cards, related artworks, and/or commentaries by Cynthia Paige Aaron, Brendan Boyd, Chester Crill, Joe Dossen, Ted Duarte, Michael Guccione, Fred Harris, Greg Jezewski, Albert Kilchesty, Melissa Ann Lambert, Bob Lemke, Jon Leonoudakis, Bruce Markusen, Richard Newton, T.S. O’Connell, Christy Patrick, Jacqueline Ruyak, Ben Sakoguchi, William Scaff, Judy Spak, Keith Ullrich, and Mel Weiner.

Pasadena Central Library hours for the exhibition are: Monday-Thursday, 9:00 am-9:00 pm; Friday-Saturday, 9:00 am-6:00 pm; and Sunday, 1:00-5:00 pm. For additional information, phone the Baseball Reliquary at (626) 791-7647; for directions, phone the Pasadena Central Library at (626) 744-4066.

The Baseball Reliquary is a Pasadena-based nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history and to exploring the national pastime’s unparalleled creative possibilities. Cardboard Fetish is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. http://www.baseballreliquary.org/

Going Going Gone Sports and Scherer Gallery present "BASEBALL AT STEUBEN." This unique show merges the art and sports world into a celebration of America's greatest game. Among the artists included are Norman Rockwell, Gary Erbe, Ben Ganz, and Palmer Hayden. These monumental tributes pay homage to the greatest teams in basball history including the 1927 Yankees, 1961 Yankees, 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers and the 1969 NY Mets.

Individual achievements by Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Hank Aaron are captured in stunning displays. Historical moments involving Bobby Thomson and Mickey Owens are given special attention. Whether you are a NY Yankees, NY Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers, or NY Mets die hard, you will appreciate this special collection. The dates of the exhibition are July 9th through August 8th, 10am - 6pm mon-sat. Furthermore, Going Going Gone Sports will donate a portion of all sales to the fight against ALS disease, paying respect to Lou Gehrig on the 70th anniversary of his famous speech.

To get a glimpse of this event, please visit our website goinggoinggonesports.com. The location of the show is 667 Madison Avenue, New York, New York. For further information please call 212-593-9716 or 646-285-1497.

From Sabr.org

Today, I Consider Myself....

70th Anniversary of Lou Gehrig's Famous Speech

Play this video to hear the original speech.

In his final days, as he battled ALS,
Lou Gehrig penned his most personal thoughts
in a series of revealing letters.
See that and more at this website in honor of Lou Gehrig.