Before National Pastime - Part 1
Games that could have inspired Clifford Van Beek
Before National Pastime
I need to be very careful about this. I don’t want to spend too much time tracking down a bunch of random old baseball games that are of trivial interest at best.
However, it’s history, and I’m a sucker for good history.
We’ll talk about a few games in today’s post. When we get to part 2 in a few days, we’ll look in detail at a game that others may have missed — one that just so happens to look a heck of a lot like National Pastime.
Earlier Work
I’m going to draw heavily here on work done in The APBA Journal by Scott Lehotsky back in the late 1990s.
If you don’t know that name, you probably should. Lehotsky wrote the article in the January 1997 issue of The APBA Journal about National Pastime and its discovery among J. Richard Seitz’ things that have formed much of the backbone of my research.
Now, I’ve been a little bit frustrated with the work that Lehotsky and others at The APBA Journal did on this subject. Rather than conduct a deep analysis on National Pastime, those who had access to some of this stuff decided to focus their attention instead on one of the games listed below.
I don’t want to completely divert my attention away from realistic baseball simulators and towards baseball board games that just so happen to use dice rolls in a certain way. However, I also can’t really tell this story without at least acknowledging the work that went before Van Beek.
You should know that I’ll be quoting today mostly from Lehotsky’s “Table Baseball Before APBA” article on pages 19 and 20 of the March 1997 issue of The APBA Journal. The start of that article looks like this:
I’m going to do away with captions behind images taken from that article for the time being to save time and energy.
Here goes nothing.
What We’re Looking For
I don’t think there’s any question that Clifford Van Beek’s invention was the first of its kind. Van Beek combined situation-specific boards with player cards based on real life statistics to create a game that felt a lot like real baseball.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. There was no pitching mechanism at all, nor was there much by way of fielding.
There are a few things that might prove interesting to our research:
Dice Combinations — We’re looking for any game that uses a dice mechanism in which dice rolls are combined in the APBA fashion, instead of added together. Note, though, that this method of reading dice isn’t necessarily unique or impossible to come up with. The fact that this exists in earlier baseball games doesn’t necessarily mean that Van Beek stole it.
Playing Boards — We’re interested in games that have playing boards that are divided out by in-game situation, in the APBA fashion.
Player Cards — We’re interested in game engines that utilize individualized player cards to generate results.
Colors — It’s not quite all that interesting, but it is nice to note that Van Beek used blue card backs for National League players and red card backs for American League players.
Let’s take a look.
Dice Combinations
To my knowledge, the first baseball game to combine two dice together in the APBA fashion was “The Great American Game of Pocket Base Ball” in 1910.
Here’s Lehotsky’s description:
As you’ll recall, using two white dice of different colors is exactly how National Pastime worked.
Fortunately, we can see a small picture of what the game’s “boards” looked like, thanks to this archived listing on WorthPoint:
That’s not really much of a direct connection with Van Beek, other than the way that dice rolls were read. I personally don’t put much stock into the idea that this game heavily influenced Van Beek.
Now, contributors to The APBA Journal spent a lot of time talking about a different game called Fan-I-Tis, which came out in 1913. This was thought of as the first game to use two dice rolled together and combined until somebody discovered the pocket baseball game. Here’s what Lehotsky had to say:
Here is Fan-I-Tis, in all its glory:
This all comes thanks to this old Heritage Auction. The auction also included this picture of the Fan-I-Tis boards:
You can see an even better picture of these documents in the “APBA Compendium” that The APBA Journal apparently published (I’m not certain that this issue was ever actually “published”) on October 31, 2002:
From what I can tell, the only resemblance Fan-I-Tis has to National Pastime is the way that it combines dice.
Eric Naftaly, the final publisher of The APBA Journal, teamed together with a few other staff members to play a series of games using the names of former prominent contributors to their fan publication. And this is the part that makes me cringe when I read the name Fan-I-Tis.
I’m sure it’s a fun game, but, honestly, it isn’t the predecessor of National Pastime. As the article itself notes, the bases empty chart shown above results in 11 hits in 23 at bats, which is pretty bonkers. There’s no strategy whatsoever, there are no player cards — there’s nothing but dice.
I wish that the final years of The APBA Journal didn’t include this quixotic quest to find what Van Beek must have been influenced by. And, as you can imagine, this is why I was so reluctant to start looking into the subject myself.
Boards
I’ve always thought it was interesting that Van Beek divided his game results up into various base runner situations. He certainly wasn’t the first to come up with that idea, however. I mean, Fan-I-Tis clearly used the same on-base situations as seen above.
Lehotsky also notes a 1914 game called Hatfield’s Parlor Base-Ball Game as an early forerunner of this concept:
Once again, I was able to locate an auction with photos that offered at least some clarity of how this game worked:
Rather than boards, this game utilized playing cards that had 8 outcomes, one for each base situation.
Here’s a much clearer image from the game’s Board Game Geek page:
Again, it’s not quite National Pastime, but I suppose these cards count as “boards” in their own right. We see similar mechanisms today in games that utilize fast action card systems.
Player Cards
This is where I get stuck. I haven’t found any pre-National Pastime games that use individual cards designed to represent how players performed in real life.
If you know of any, please let me know.
Colors
I don’t think this point is really all that important, but Lehotsky does mention it:
As is the case with the dice, I don’t think that the fact that National Pastime used similar colors to Fan Craze necessarily means that Van Beek was inspired by that game. It’s not hard to come up with colors like red and blue for your card backs. Plus, if you look at Fan Craze card backs, you’ll see how different they were from National Pastime:
I haven’t been able to locate any images of blue back Fan Craze cards.
Wild Goose Chase?
Now, I can see the argument that Van Beek might have been influenced by one or more of these games. However, when I look at their components, I just don’t see it happening.
National Pastime looks a lot different from the chaotic “boards” that Fan-I-Tis offers. It doesn’t use board results written onto cards that are then shuffled together. It’s not a pocket game. It does have multicolored backs, but they look absolutely nothing like what Fan Craze had to offer.
However, I did find something that looks a lot like National Pastime. More on that next time.