(08-01-2012, 01:14 AM)tlangston28 Wrote: (07-31-2012, 09:42 PM)Matt W Wrote: Not so, this is before fantasy baseball came into its own (40 years ago I'm afraid to mention) and before my budget could handle going to more than 20 Pirate games (this is when they were especially good, in the 70s) a year, even in the cheap seats. At that time, we were lucky if one game a week was televised and heaven help you if it was a night game on the coast. I went to bed with a transistor radio turned on its lowest volume so my Mom wouldn't hear (If Dad heard he would come into my room and listen to an inning).
What's a kid to do when he lives and breathes baseball and can only see a game at most once a week? Get the dice and paper. Heck we even had a league. One of my best friends took the Reds and I had the Pirates and we played a short season of 50 some games.
I suppose that we were also candidates for the Future Actuaries of America, given our interest in statistics but we just thought we liked baseball... a lot.
This is funny... When I was a kid, I had gone to several Cub games at Wrigley Field but the biggest problem there was that the games were all day games so school and no one to drive us there prevented us from going to a lot of games. (Always watched them on WGN). In any event there was a book called "Stuck on the Cubs" that described the life of a kid growing up on the South Side (White Sox country) that loved the Cubs. In one of the chapters, he describes a game they made up called Dice-de-dice baseball that laid out the rules to roll two dice and the results would tell you the at-bat outcome. I think I played out about a 40 game season that year and it was especially fun for me because it was the only way the Cubs would have a winning season and play in the world series. 
I played a season of APBA in high school ('81 Season deck) with a group from school. Eat lunch and play a game. Was a blast, except that I had the Braves - who stunk.
But growing up, before we knew about APBA and SOM (which I have never played), my brothers and I played a playing card driven baseball game that we got from a box of Pop-tarts. Two complete seasons, where we kept books and played a "World Series". Was a ton of fun, and taught me how to keep score.
Do a search on "kellog card baseball game" and several of the games show up. There was also a football, hockey, soccer and basketball game, but the baseball was the only one we played.
