How Was This Even Possible?

Strict limits in the era of undercarded teams

How Was This Even Possible?

I suppose this is more a question to those of you who are older than anything else.

I found this advertisement in an old issue of The APBA Journal:

From The APBA Journal, August 1969, page 19

This comes from August 1969.

Now, as most of you know, the APBA game company didn’t offer many players per team back in 1969. In fact, the 1968 APBA season came with 20 players per team out of the box, and perhaps an extra 4 per team if you got the extra players.

The reason why this is a problem is because rosters in 1968 were a lot bigger than 24 players. And you can see that this is a problem without even having the lineup sheet to double check.

Check out the 1968 Boston Red Sox for example. Here are the top 12 position players in terms of games played:

Let’s say you’ve got 8 slots dedicated to pitchers:

Now, the obvious problem here is that you’ve got 20 players already. And yet you’ve got numerous played games that are simply missing.

Russ Gibson and Elston Howard combined for 145 games at catcher, for example. Where do the other 17 games come from?

I didn’t show the games started totals for pitchers. There are 46 pitching starts spread across 4 pitchers that don’t show up in this hastily arranged list of 20 players.

Of course, the rules of the project indicate that you could choose the players you want to play once all limits are reached. But the problem here is that you know ahead of time that you’re going to reach those limits no matter what you do. So why use such an aggressive playing time limit system? And why insinuate that people who don’t use such a system aren’t serious?

I’m certainly happy that we no longer have to deal with those extreme limits.