In 1992 Richard Seitz passed away at age 77, a year after Marc Rinaldi joined the company. It’s changed somewhat, as Veryl Lincoln, one of APBA’s product managers, notes below, but if I bought the latest baseball player card set I could still play with them on my 1970s game boards. In the 1990s the game evolved from a board game to a computer-based one, called Baseball for Windows however, the board game was - and still is - available for sale. However, even when you played it at a higher level of complexity, it was still easy to play. It includes pitching grades, the ability to hit-and-run and sacrifice runners, and more. The game’s more sophisticated than my description. Under all three fielding columns the number 13 happens to give the same result: The batter struck out. If the bases were empty, he’d look up the 13 on the Bases Empty board under one of three fielding columns, which reflect the fielding ability of the players on the field.

Runners on Second and Third Bases/Bases Full.

Runners on First and Second Bases/Runners on First and Third Bases.

Runner on Second Base/Runner on Third Base.

The on-base boards’ contents represent these eight on-base possibilities: He would then (in most cases) look up the 13 on an on-base board, of which there are eight. When the player looks up the 64 on the batter’s card, the matching red number is 13. Each black number is followed by one, or in some cases two, red numbers. The player would then refer to the batter’s card.Įach card contains three columns of black numbers, starting at 11 and ending at 66, that covers all 36 possible dice combinatons. For example, if the red die showed a six and the white die a four, the result would be 64. To play the board game a player would roll two dice, a large red one and a small white one and then combine, not add, the numbers on the dice.

That game contained 320 player cards, which amounted to 20 players for each of the 16 teams in the major leagues in 1950.

Among those influenced by Seitz’s efforts were Hal Richman, developer of the Strat-O-Matic baseball game. His game emphasized realism based upon a statistical foundation and influenced the genre’s development. Seitz created a baseball board game that inaugurated the era of sports board games. For most baseball fans, Dick Seitz isn’t a household name however, he embarked on a journey that changed the lives of many baseball fans.

Apba baseball boards