66 Priority in National Pastime

The origins of an iconic card making technique

66 Priority in National Pastime

Anybody who has ever played APBA knows that dice roll 66 is treated as the “ultimate” roll. Dice roll 66 usually provides the best hit number possible on any given card. Interestingly, this extends beyond APBA’s baseball offerings and into other sports.

The number 66 was so iconic that it featured in APBA t-shirts that were once sold in the 1970s:

I’m not sure that they chose the best possible model.

Anyway, the priority of dice roll 66 goes back to National Pastime. In fact, on every single National Pastime card (as far as I’m aware), 66 gets the “best” play result number, followed by 11 and then 33:

66 was prioritized from the beginning.

This seems to go back to older dice baseball games, actually. For example, in Steele’s Inside Baseball, dice roll 666 is the only way a player can hit a home run:

It seems that 111 was slightly better than 333, since 333 occasionally resulted in the batter being thrown out trying to stretch the hit into an inside the park home run.

By the way — that tradition predates Steele’s game as well. According to this excellent site, an 1886 game called Our National Ball Game, which used two dice, also gave priority to a 6-6 roll:

Note that the two dice were of the same size and color, and were always read with the lower roll first. This is the classic form of “combining” dice rolls you see in old dice baseball games, and clearly served as inspiration for National Pastime.

While this isn’t proof that National Pastime was inspired by Steele’s Inside Baseball, it certainly hints strongly at a connection.

The other interesting thing about the above National Pastime chart is that all players receive at least a 7 on 33, with the exception of Mellilo, who received a 10, and Cissel and O’Rourke, who received 11s. Oscar Mellilo received a 7 on 44; Chalmer Cissell received a 7 on 22; and Frank O’Rourke also received a 7 on 22. Van Beek preferred to stick 10s and 11s on dice rolls 22 and 44; these 3 exceptions to that general rule might be an example of Van Beek moving the play result numbers around for whatever reason, which is a trend we’ll talk about in a future post.

The real key here, however, is that every single player has at least one 7 on his card. In fact, all pitchers have two 7s, which should really surprise you if you’re an APBA player. This is the primary reason why we see more 7s than any other single number in National Pastime. After all, pitchers are only going to have so many hit numbers, and many of them didn’t have much room for more hits after their requisite 6 and two 7s.

32 players received only one 7, and none of them were pitchers:

Those orphaned 7 rolls were generally given on either dice roll 22 or 44, though a few also wound up on dice roll 33:

It looks like we might conclude that 33 came after 11 in the pecking order, followed by 22 and then 44 — though there are times when the priority seems to flip.

The strangest card is probably William Hallahan’s card — he has an 8 on 44 and a 22 on 22. We might be tempted to call that a mistake — but Hallahan was a pitcher, all pitchers received exactly one 22 and one 23, and Hallahan does not have another 22 on his card.

A number of pitchers have play result 22 on dice roll 44, by the way:

It looks like Cliff decided to switch dice rolls 22 and 44 on Hallahan’s card for whatever reason. Van Beek did that pretty frequently, actually, though he usually restricted it to out numbers.

Anyway, there’s the latest in the geeky deconstruction of National Pastime. Please let me know what you think.