Dice baseball: a tabletop tradition | Hacker News Reader

Dice baseball: a tabletop tradition

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For anyone interested in a modern version of this, I strongly recommend Deadball[0] (specifically 2nd edition). It uses RPG dice and a few stats to build a fairly realistic but still breezy game. You can use real player stats to build teams, or roll up your own. I know some fans who run entire leagues for fun.

0: http://wmakers.net/deadball

Echoing this, it's a fantastic game for what it is. The author also just finished funding a Kickstarter for a "Junior" version of the game as well.

Came here to make the same recommendation! Deadball is great.

Deadball looks exactly like the 'modern reboot' I was imagining while reading the main article... Differing tables of results per player, with RPG elements for evolving the results tables over time.

I can also imagine a (probably computer-aided) variant, where true player stats are known only to the person who 'owns' the player, approximate stats are based on results in actual games, and there's a system for trading players between seasons.

Dice baseball is an inside joke in my family. We always make fun of my dad for playing "way too much when he was a kid, instead of going outside" -- this is at least according to my Grammy.

He stopped playing dice baseball when his older brother got his first computer. It allowed you to make super basic spreadsheets (or something that felt like spreadsheets, I don't trust his memory a ton) -- and the first spreadsheets he made were about dice baseball. From there he made spreadsheets about his highschool baseball team, and from there he decided he loved computers and went back to school to study them.

30 years later, here I am on HN :)

Possibly Visicalc? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

I had not encountered dice baseball before reading the article, probably because I was brought up in the UK, where the equivalent dice game was Owzthat [1] - for cricket. All of my contemporaries, when we were aged seven to 12, played - and most of us carried a tin in a pocket.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owzthat

I visited the article only to make sure it mentioned the novel "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." by Robert Coover.

I was thinking about that book just yesterday. I find something about the way it goes "all in" on a tabletop gaming system deeply appealing. Probably for the same reasons I find pencil and paper RPGs and programming computers appealing.

Will definitely read that book next!

The system in UBAInc is pretty well fleshed out in the book and at one time in the rings-era WWW there were people creating their own versions of the game -- some very good.

Universal Baseball Association, J Henry Waugh, Prop -- Dice Game

http://sagarin.com/sports/dice.htm

That book was a childhood favorite of mine.

Loved reading this. I was unaware these boxed editions existed but I do recall using my AD&D dice as a kid to make a "baseball" game. I was obsessed with the probability of singles vs doubles vs triples vs home runs at the time and how to balance that with the poly dice. Anyways, it was probably the late 1970s and I had neither real stats nor the internet and I have no idea what my rationale was but I recall the game design process was far more enjoyable than the game. (Personal note ... boy, was that foreshadowing!)

Anyways, in the article, my eyes were drawn to the roll outcome tables and they all seem to be making triples as likely or more likely than home runs. Yikes. In reality, it's the exact opposite by a large degree. Example ... in the 2018 MLB season (pre-pandemic, full season), 853 triples occurred while 5,656 home runs occurred. And triples are becoming less common over the decades for a variety of reasons. But even in the 1950s, home runs were two to three times more likely than triples per at-bat.

Anyways, none of this matters, just sharing something nerdy. I enjoyed the article, thank you!

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?key=&i=triples+in+mlb+201...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?key=&i=home+runs+in+mlb+2...

What changes would you suggest to the tables to make the triples more inline with a realistic game?

Do a reroll maybe?

Sure, but in the spirit of these games I guess there needs to be a balance between simplicity and realism. A single roll and table lookup is simple and fun but not finely grained so not realistic if limited to 1D6 or 2D6. So maybe a re-roll, like you suggest, but then maybe that doesn't have the same easy flow.

Nowadays, dice with more sides are common so that allows a simple 2D10 roll and a percentage lookup table. Maybe that's the balance.

Thanks for the d10 idea!

Dice baseball, for any visitors here who may not be aware, was played by untold thousands upon thousands of kids -- and a few adults too -- over the course of more than a century, and seems to have faded as a popular pastime only since around the early 1980s.

I may have missed it, but does the article really neglect to mention that probably a lot of the reason is that people now can play sports video games? Tabletop is great, but video games let you do so much more.

Never played this game but spent hours as a kid playing strat-o-matic baseball with my friends and solitaire style.

https://www.strat-o-matic.com/product-category/baseball/boar...

The group I was in switched to Pursue The Pennant when that came out.

Seems like there’s still an active community around it!

I even played Strat-o-Matic baseball by mail when I was a kid! We'd fill out our rosters and managerial instructions then mail them off to our opposing team's manager. A week later I'd get the results back in the mail. Hard to believe such a relaxed pace.

I absolutely was obsessed with MLB Showdown as a kid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLB_Showdown

Card collection + dice game simulation. Was so much fun.

I'm barely old enough to have played this and can strongly recommend Bottom of the 9th as a modern take that captures much of the same feel:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/166286/bottom-9th

No affiliation, just played it at a game convention some years back and was very impressed—and got a strong nostalgia buzz for dice baseball, which I'd almost forgotten having played at the time. Very solid game design.

Bottom of the 9th and

Baseball Highlights 2045

are great, specially like playing on the app, since it does all the scoring and bookkeeping.

This is a heavily augmented version as compared to the games covered here, but some of my strongest memories of gaming as child with my dad were playing Sports Illustrated's 1971 baseball game*.

It was a lineup-based game with actual players, the dice mechanics were a single die of one color (black, IIRC) with numbers [1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3], a white die of [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5], and a white die of [0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4]. The dice were read as "black die in 10s, plus the sum of white dice in 1s".

The pitcher rolled first, capturing the walks, HBP, strikeouts, etc. If the pitcher result was NULL, then the batter rolled for the result (with different results vs right and left handed pitchers). Each player had a running speed, which was used in tables when the manager decided to steal a base or try to stretch a hit into an extra base or tag up on a marginal fly ball. It did a fairly good job of capturing the actual results to match the statistics from the season.

We each picked four teams and ran a league, did an All Star game, playoffs, and World Series. Along the way, I had to keep track of all the stats, calculate the averages (damn fine way of making me do math exercises), etc. From over 40 years ago, I can still remember the game, the mechanics, the worn out spots on the stats sheets as I updated them.

* - https://spookyshobbyshop.com/SPORTS%20ILLUSTRATED%20BASEBALL...

I had a College Football game with the same dice (Bowl Bound), and a similar experience with my dad! Had a regular season, kept stats, make rankings. Was an absolute blast and something I remember fondly

Thanks for sharing it!

I grew up playing APBA with my friends and tried to write some automation tools in BASIC on my TRS-80 in Jr. High. A few years ago I wrote a simple Node app to scrape Baseball Reference data and create plausible, reverse engineered Strat-O-Matic cards as PDFs. Sometimes I feel like I enjoy just playing with baseball stats more than actually simulating a baseball game.

I played a dice baseball game that I learned from my father when I was growing up. I had little interest in baseball itself, but for whatever reason this game where I tracked all the players' stats for a league on paper, set up home and away games, and then rolled four dice to see if there were strikes, doubles, triples, etc., was super appealing to 10 year old me. There was no real complexity, no decisions to make, just roll dice and record, and then calculate the stats for the players after each game and at the end of the season.

Long but appreciate why it is long. Thanks for taking the time.

>We strongly recommend, for you adults who'd like to teach kids how to play any tabletop baseball game, you first take them to see an actual ballgame...or at least watch a game on TV with them.

Would add listening (radio) and playing (including stickball variants) to that list. These games are great if you have that context, and much more difficult to get into without that context.

Very true. I find that watching a sport that I've played AT ALL is much more entertaining than, say, curling (pls no sarcasm about curling here, folks).

Even golf, which I haven't played since high school, is more relatable to watch because at least I've done it.

I love watching curling during the Winter Olympics...my favorite version of the Olympics, and curling is just really high on my watch list.

Couple of years ago we had a power outage during the world series.

So it was my wife, the cats, and I curled up on the couch with a pocket radio listening to the game by the light of an electric lantern.

It's hard to express what a wonderful experience that was. The national broadcast call (ESPN I think) was very good. I'm just not a great fan of my teams current radio team, but this was a really good call. Sitting in the dark was just icing on the cake that helped us focus on the game.

I feel like the radio experience is a 'you'll only know it when you see (hear) it' type thing. A great radio team makes a huge difference. Was lucky enough to grow up with the Mets announcers of the 80s (Bob Murphy, Gary Cohen, Gary Thorne). Spent many nights (long after my official bedtime) with my clock radio (smuggled under my covers) delivering magic.

That article was not what I was expecting. I played APBA baseball as a kid and loved it. You were forced to learn strategy. Lineup, sacrifices, hit and run, stealing, advancing on throws (or throwing behind the runner), hold runner on 1st or not, L/R splits, the list goes on. It gave me a much deeper appreciation of the game. I was also able to “experience” teams and players of the past by managing them. The first game I bought from APBA also included the 51 Dodgers and Giants so I could replay that famous LCS. I also bought some notable Cubs teams from the past, the 08 and 35 teams were great.

The completely random dice games in the article aren’t really baseball games as much as they are dice games with baseball framing.

APBA is still going strong. They have complete card sets for seasons ranging from the late 1800s till today. I bought the newest version of the game along with the 1935 season. I wanted to get to know the 35 Cubs better and had grand plans of replaying their season. Didn’t quite get to that but did have fun playing some of great teams of the past against each other.

I’d still rather play tabletop baseball games than the computer based ones. I don’t know about Strat-o-Matic but the quality of the dice rolls stays constant but the results vary by the player and pitcher. It uses 2d6, classically one white and one red and you read the numbers sequentially. So it would be 66 instead of 12 and 11 instead of 2. 66 is always the best roll you can have but all double number rolls are good. What’s nice is that it is similar to a real game in that you can tell when a player squares up a ball but you have to consult the chart to see what actually happens. I find it a similar rhythm to seeing/hearing a batted ball and then waiting to see the result. You can also do some role playing. Roll a 65 instead of a 66 and you can say he “just got under” the ball because an 65 inevitably ends up fouling out instead of hitting a homer.

I found the color, font, and spacing of the text very hard to read so I might have missed it but... what is the appeal of playing "baseball" where everything is just random chance based on dice rolls. Real sports isn't random chance. There may be some element of that but it's mostly about skill and strategy.

> ...everything is just random chance based on dice rolls.

Not everybody for sure, but some people enjoy just rolling the dice and watching the scenario play out. Along the same line, there was a very popular game based on a WW2 bombing run over Germany called B-17: Queen of the Skies. (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1032/b-17-queen-skies)

Loved pen & paper baseball as a kid, used to invent vast worlds. Now I use Out of the Park Baseball as my simulator of choice, but there have been precedessors since the late 90s.

my baseball nerd friends really seem to really enjoy https://pocketpennantrun.weebly.com/

In the late 80s/early 90s I came across a version that had a twist - you'd create a starting lineup using baseball cards, and the stats (minimally) affected the odds.

I think that’s the APBA one which uses cards.

Can’t find the source, but I remember reading that Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam used to play dice baseball with one of the Ramones while on tour.

Picked one of these up last winter. Fun save for the fact that it’s pure chance. I Shay’s prefer at least a little strategy or skill.

I read a story about some Marines in some kind of disciplinary situation who took up “stopwatch baseball.” You start a stopwatch and then try to stop it exactly on the minute. If you do, that’s a home run. If you are a tenth of a second early, that’s a triple, two-tenths a double, etc.

Needless to say, they were very, very, very bored.

man this article really drags it out

TLDR

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