On the agenda for a recent two-week pilgrimage I made to Las Vegas was a totally wholesome event in which I participated along with a buddy who also committed journalism here at The Sun and now works at USA Today.
The two of us were entered in a tournament featuring a decades-old baseball board game. Seventy devotees of something called the APBA baseball game gathered at the Palace Station in Vegas - site of O.J. Simpson's gimme-the-memoribilia event several months ago - to vie for the board-game championship playing with great teams of the past.
Sound geeky in a Star Trek convention kind of way? Yeah, probably it is. But the people were extremely pleasant and total baseball fans, and, I confess, the whole thing was pure, unadulterated fun.
APBA is a pre-video game version of EA Sports, meaning a game that allows participants to oversee players and teams whose make-believe performances are supposed to replicate their real-life counterparts. But instead of madly manipulating joysticks, these low-tech game players roll dice and keep track of runs, hits and errors on paper score sheets. The emphasis is on strategy (with a healthy dose of luck) rather than quick-twitch motor skills.
Having nearly the entire universe of baseball teams from which to chose, we decided on the 1919 Chicago White Sox - the team that scandalized baseball by throwing the World Series. Defying history's verdict on that star-crossed collection of baseball ghosts, my friend and I had hoped to redeem "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Ed Cicotte and the rest.
In a weird twist, the day before the 52-team tournament started, we were strolling through the Forum Shops mall attached to Caesars Palace when we happened on a sports collectibles store where Pete Rose, of all people, was signing autographs for anyone buying selected items. The buddy, a Boston Red Sox fan, couldn't resist. He made the required purchase and had his picture taken with the most famous living baseball player exiled from the game for gambling.
I'm not sure what kind of karma that set in motion, but our White Sox - playing in a field of 52 great teams, from the dead-ball era to the 21st century - finished 4-6 in our eight-team division. Five of our six losses were by one run. We had just two home runs over the course of 10 games, one by Shoeless Joe.
If there ever was evidence of the soundness of Earl Weaver's philosophy about three-run homers, that was it. We would sometimes get 16 and 17 guys on base and score just three or four runs. That doesn't work against Ruth and Gehrig.
