Board gaming pt 1

When I was growing up, there were no video games so I was playing sports related board games. They involved individually or combinations of dice, magnets, levers, ping pong balls, charts, spinners, and football players that vibrate on a football field when electricity is turned on.

Most of those games involved generic players who occasionally had different abilities but the games were basically simple.

There were two baseball games that actually used real players that I played as a kid. One was called All Star baseball. Every all star player was represented by a disc which fit into a spinner. One player from each position was selected, a lineup was made, and every at bat was a spin. Numbers ranged from 1-14 and the space for each number represented how often each possibility could occur.

The numbers were:
* 1 Home Run
* 2 Ground out, double play with runner on first base
* 3 Runner reaches base on error
* 4 Fly out, all runners advance
* 5 Triple
* 6 Ground out, all runners advance
* 7 Single, runners advance one base
* 8 Fly out, runner on third base scores, others hold
* 9 Walk (Base on balls)
* 10 Strikeout
* 11 Double
* 12 Ground out, runners advance if forced
* 13 Single, runners advance two bases
* 14 Fly out, runners hold their bases

Since my daughter's softball season ended last Monday, I decided to create a disc to represent her season: (Note: Not all possibilities are on the disc since those situations did not occur in her 22 plate appearances)



I added number 15 to represent hit by pitch.

Steroids

I was working on this post anyway when the Sammy Sosa situation was made public. With how much pain my knees were in and with a con last weekend, I was unable to finish this until today.

Since my first game in June 1972, I have seen 13 of the 25 people who hit at least 500 home runs live in the fifty or so games I have attended over the years



For some reason, when posting color charts, I lose some of the image quality. I did see Frank Thomas at Comiskey Park and U.S Cellular Field.

Except for Hank Arron who I saw as a member of the Brewers but decided to use the Braves color, the colors of the players I saw reflect the team or teams they were on when I saw them. For those I did not see, I used the color of the team or teams they were most associated with.

Of the 12 I saw play in a game, (Mike Schmidt was a member of the 1983 all star team and I saw him at the workout day before the game) none hit a home run in a game. The player with the most home runs that I remember seeing hitting one was Harold Baines who hit 384.

Busted

While at my mom's last month, we heard a couple of police sirens and rushed outside to see what happened. We noticed two different cars pulled over by police and after they were done, they went back to the corner and pulled over two more cars.

Shortly after between my sister, parents and brother-in-law, we decided to put up a dollar guessing the color of the next car pulled over. From what we could tell, a third officer was a few blocks north of where we were relaying the info upon spotting the situation. Considering how fast traffic can go on Western Avenue, it was possibly a speed trap.



It got to the point where upon a car getting pulled over, one of us would cheer along with the kids as the other four pulled out a single. As the police car returned to the spot, we were cheering it and shouting out what color of car to pull over next. Not wanting to miss out on any action or add to the tally, we decided to order pizza and once it arrived, we stopped betting though more cars kept getting pulled over.