I ordered 1936 and got it in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I printed up the White Sox games from that year. My head was swimming with the possibilities. First off, I would play the games in exact order of the retrosheet list. However, I would introduce interleague play-just to break up the monotony-and also to utilize every team in the set. I will play every team in the NL at least three times except for the Cubs. Why? Because the 1930's was the era of the "City Series" between the White...

I have, in my 40th year, discovered the wonders of "APBA" baseball, the kind played with playing cards and rolls of the dice. I had a similar game made by Sports Illustrated from 1970, but never got into APBA. Don't know why, guess I never botherd to look for it.

I had been on whatifsports.com for a while, but grew bored with computer simulations. Not only did it not account for the "human" element of the game, but it was over in two seconds. So I quit going there...

As I got a little older and my imagination started to flourish, I got hooked on the 1949 Washington Senators. I decided to create a whole fictional team, the one that came thisclose to the pennant and lost. I had a whole lineup and background for the players. I decided that I would no longer be the home run hero, that fell to Joe DiMaggio.

Anyway, I remember two players that I created for that team-slugging 1st baeman Buddy Lewis and pitcher Albert Kramer, who would go on to the Hall...

I played baseball with a bat, helmet, glove, invisible ball and invisible teammates of the Cubs, Sox and Yankees. Oh, sure I did try to play baseball with some kids from the neighborhood when I was about 9 years old or so. I discovered my first time playing that, if there was one thing the neighborhood kids enjoyed more than playing baseball, it was shouting every single four-letter, foul-mouthed epithet in their parents' worldly vocabularies. At one point, I made a mistake and a kid my age called...

Posting my baseball fan fiction (the stuff I managed to write) has got me to thinking about my childhood. Like many, I fantasized when I was a kid about being a major league baseball player. I wanted to be so many guys at once that I clearly recall coming up with a few different versions of myself.

One was an outfielder for the Cubs from 1947-67 and the White Sox from 1968-75. Yes, nearly 30 years. I was very young then, and had no idea of course about how long a major league career...