Musial, Moon, Repulski. Holy Cow!

Sporting News, The, August 16, 1999 by Dave Kindred

We walk down one flight of stairs, two flights, three. We're descending into the basement of the APBA Game Company building in Lancaster, Pa. We're underground and surrounded by concrete-block walls. It's dark and cool. We reach to the top shelf of a filing cabinet and slide out a drawer of 3-by-5 index cards.

The cards are the company's customer list from the 1950s. They carry information printed by a machine called a typewriter, not a computer. They're typed by the company's president, not by a temp hired for the day.

In the file drawer marked "K," we find a yellowed card reading: Kindred, Dave. Atlanta, Illinois. 9/18/58. p.pd. 63.

My guide is Scott Lehotsky. He's an APBA historian who knows the card's code. "It means the company paid 63 cents postage to mail you the game."

I loved that game with a child's passion. I knew the meaning of every roll of the dice for every player in every situation. Even as the radio delivered Harry Caray's nightly shoutings from St. Louis, I sat on my bed and rolled dice for the 1956 Cardinals of Stan Musial and Wally Moon, Ken Boyer and Rip Repulski.

So this is the happy news: I am again a child.

This latest childhood started with a column identifying Joe Torte as a fan of the "late, lamented" APBA board game. Within a day, e-mail arrived full of kindly objections. Late? Lamented? Hardly. APBA is alive and well.

"And we invite you to play in our national tournament in July," Lehotsky wrote. "Just pick any team under .550." That tournament standard was serendipitous. The '56 Cardinals finished at .494.

Forty-two APBA players came to Lancaster from eight states, including Oregon's Ed Zack, the author of "The Ultimate Handbook for APBA Baseball Cards," a 687-page bible. APBA cards have been made for teams of all decades, even for Negro League teams. These little cards with their rows of magic numbers so truly replicate actual performance that, to quote Zack's mighty tome, "You'd swear there is an immortality for all ballplayers through the dice-driven seance of APBA baseball."

Fathers and sons showed up. A man in a Giants cap, shaking the dice, shouted at an immortal's card, "OK, Buck Mays, give us something." Zack drove 4,500 miles in a wending route to Lancaster and lost his first eight games.

Did the man say a "seance"? There is that feeling of time doing tricks. I know one thing. For a summer day in 1999, it was again the summer of '56. I wrote in the lineup: Blasingame 4, Dark 6, Musial 3, Boyer 5, Moon 9, Repulski 7, Sauer DH (under tournament rules), Katt 2, Del Greco 8. Our opening game pitcher was veteran righthander Murray Dickson. We lost to the 1980 Reds, 8-2, and then lost again on a Mario Soto two-hitter, 4-0.

Sitting across from my next opponent, George Fahey, I said, "George, take it easy on me, I haven't won a game in 43 years."

"That's interesting," said George, who wore a Phillies cap and managed the 1953 Phils, "because I've been playing 43 years."

But my Cardinals ignored the experience difference. Vinegar Bend Mizell and Lindy McDaniel combined to shut out the Phils the last seven innings. And we ended our Eisenhower-to-Clinton dry spell with a 4-3 victory.

Because tournament rules limited games to 10 innings, we tied the 1978 Rangers, 1-1, on Herm Wehmeier's one-hitter. The Rangers' manager, Karl Hasselbarth, grumbled throughout about his cleanup hitter, Bobby Bonds, who hadn't had a hit in 33 at-bats.

"Maybe," I said, in my wiseguy sportswriter way, "he'll have a son who can really play."

Hasselbarth is a computer analyst, 36 years old, who fell into the APBA habit as a youngster while playing junior varsity baseball at Baltimore's Poly High. He'd skip school the day new APBA cards came out and drive two hours to wait outside the company's doors to be first in line.

Marriage, work, career--all that grownup stuff got in the way for a while. But three years ago, he came back to APBA. He liked it better than real baseball, at least the kind of major league baseball that waged the calamitous 1994 labor-management war.

"The greed now is sickening," he said. "The players live in such a spoiled world. And the owners are no better. They'll try anything to make an extra buck, like World Series games so late that kids fall asleep by the third inning."

In Lancaster, with my '56 Cardinals, we had no World Series worries. We went 5-4-1 and were eliminated in the first round. Our nearest brush with greatness was the tie with Hasselbarth's '78 Rangers, who went on to win the tournament in a three-game championship series against the 1978 Pirates.

The key hit for the Rangers was a seventh-inning home run that broke a 3-3 tie and started a six-run rally. The hero? Barry Bonds' daddy. TSN

Dave Kindred is a contributing writer for THE SPORTING NEWS. Look for additional commentary from Dave weekdays at sportingnews.com and on AOL (keyword: TSN).