Evolution of APBA's 7 with a runner on first

A change nobody talked about

Evolution of APBA's 7 with a runner on first

I’m not sure that this change has actually been discussed much or not. I figure I’d talk about it here, since I haven’t been able to find much discussion elsewhere.

If you’ve played a lot of APBA, the National Pastime board reading for play result number 7 with a runner on first base should ring a bell:

For the early years of APBA, Seitz used the exact same result for a 7 with a runner on first, provided that the pitcher wasn’t able to stop the hit:

Interestingly enough, this changed sometime around 1977:

Now, I should note that I’m not certain if the 1977 date (which is on the playing boards collected over at the Zack Handbook website) is correct or not. I went through every issue of The APBA Journal from both 1976 and 1977, but was unable to find a single article or mention of this change. And that’s a bit odd, since this actually was a major development.

The Master Game, which came out in 1976, looked different, of course:

I won’t get into too much detail about what the numbers mean, other than to say that a right handed hitter hitting a base hit to let field with an advancement rating of 31 isn’t going to send any runners to third base anytime soon, unless they’re particularly fast and the outfielder has a bad arm.

And the 1987 revised Master Game charts make it even worse for the runner:

Now, the really interesting thing here, the thing that nobody talks about, is that APBA changed the boards again.

In 2005, the boards were changed to read like this:

And, to my knowledge, this is where the boards currently stand.

It’s amazing to me that I can’t find any sort of discussion of this anywhere on the Delphi forums. Maybe all the APBA players are using alternate boards — or maybe they’ve all memorized the old results and don’t think about it much.

What do you think?