APBA's Relationship With The APBA Journal

Codependence?

APBA's Relationship With The APBA Journal

If you purchased any game from the APBA Game Company in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, you likely found a flyer like this in your game box:

This is interesting for many reasons — chief of which is the fact that The APBA Journal was not owned or controlled by the APBA Game Company.

That’s right. Despite claims to the contrary over the years, the truth — as far as I can tell — is that the publication was always independent. To my knowledge, J. Richard Seitz did not have editorial control over its content.

It’s actually really interesting that The APBA Journal would end up being advertised in APBA’s products in the first place. I don’t know precisely what happened in 1967, but apparently the Gaydos brothers were successful in convincing Seitz to work together with him. That led to this announcement:

Now, I’m not entirely sure what the Gaydos brothers told to Seitz to convince him to include their advertisement in his games. The push worked, however, and The APBA Journal turned into one of the largest (if not the largest) magazines in the industry by the early 1970s.

This had an interesting effect for APBA. The APBA Journal served as a means of aggregating opinions from the APBA community at large. This led to a number of changes in Seitz’ policy, such as the decision to start printing and selling cards for vintage seasons in 1974.

The APBA Journal also served as a pretty natural advertising tool for APBA — and one that didn’t cost the company any money, incidentally. This is because there was a strong incentive for The APBA Journal to encourage its readers to spend more time playing and paying attention to APBA’s games. The more reader engagement there was, the more the publication could grow.

Critics have noted over the decades that The APBA Journal also had an incentive to tone down negative coverage of APBA — after all, if its readers switched over to a different game, the publication would see its revenue drop. This is something we’ve already talked about, actually. While The APBA Journal knew that it needed to say something about the discovery of the old National Pastime game in the mid-1970s, it softened its stance considerably, both for fear of alienating Seitz (and possibly causing him to stop publicizing the Journal) and for fear of causing its reader base to stop subscribing.

Now, the other interesting thing about all of this is the old statement at the top of each of these old issues: “with permission of the APBA Game Company.”

I’m honestly not sure what that means or how to interpret it. I do know, however, that the statement continued on the masthead up to the final issue:

Did they specifically ask for permission to start The APBA Journal before Volume 1 Issue 1? I’m not sure. If you have any insights, please let me know in the comments1