APBA And Replay Baseball

Rumors and old history

APBA And Replay Baseball

It turns out that APBA and Replay Baseball are actually more closely related than I once thought.

The old story is about how Replay inventors Norm Roth and John Brodak presented APBA creator J. Richard Seitz with a copy of their game at the 1973 APBA Convention. Seitz apparently looked at the game, but declined to partner with them to turn it into the APBA Master Game.

There’s some context missing from that story, of course. Strat-O-Matic had released its famous Advanced Game in 1972:

The “new, exclusive” features for 1972 were exciting, and not just because Strat-O-Matic now had righty and lefty splits for pitchers and hitters. The Advanced Game additions were like playing a completely different game — and seriously provided a major boost to Strat-O-Matic in its continuing battle for supremacy with APBA.

J. Richard Seitz had slowly spread rumors that he was in possession of some kind of “Master Game” that was too complicated for the average APBA player to understand or play with.

However, it is possible that the “Master Game” might have only been created after Strat’s Advanced Game came out — and, perhaps only after Replay came out as well.

I did a bit of sleuthing on a few old Delphi Forums when I created the video above, and came across some long forgotten Robert Henry posts. This one from 2002 is quite interesting, for example:

Henry’s memory is good. Roth was indeed the founder of the CANAM APBA League, one of the major APBA leagues of the time. Interestingly enough, John Brodak was also the creator of The APBA Innings, a magazine that competed with The APBA Journal during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

What you might not realize, of course, is that The APBA Innings continued until after Replay was established as a competitor to APBA. In fact, J. Richard Seitz alludes to this fact in this interview with The APBA Journal that was published in June 1975:

From The APBA Journal, June 1975, page 13

The two customers noted are Norm Roth and John Brodak.

Apparently Brodak went on to form a different publication once Replay got off the ground:

There’s also some somewhat wild speculation that Roth and Brodak might have been trying to angle to get a job with APBA before Fritz Light came aboard:

And, finally, there is a rumor that APBA’s hastily prepared 1949 season might have been in response to a threat that Replay would come out with its own 1950 season. Remember that no APBA sets had been reprinted to this point (this would have been in late 1973 or early 1974), and that the original 1950 APBA set was impossible to find:

I don’t know many more details on any of these rumors, unfortunately. While I do have a fairly large collection of scans of old magazines (and I’m going to add more to the members area soon), most of this kind of gossip stayed out of print publications. The best we can do is scour old Delphi Forums posts and look for little gold nuggets like these.

In any event, Replay is an incredible game — and we’ll talk more about that later.