Inspiration From The APBA Journal

Celebrating One Year Of The Baseball Research Journal

Inspiration From The APBA Journal

You probably don’t realize this, but today marks the one year anniversary of the start of this blog.

Most of you haven’t seen the first post. Here it is, in all its amateur glory:

I’m not sure that things have gotten better over time. However, I do know that I feel more comfortable writing now than I did back then.

And, of course, I’m not going to stop yet.

I wanted to take a little bit of time today to look way back at an old APBA Journal series that served as the chief inspiration for this blog. I initially wanted to delay getting into these old articles until we got through National Pastime and into APBA. However, National Pastime is proving to be a much harder nut to crack than I thought. Instead of waiting, we might as well push on.

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APBA Journal Memories

My dad had a small collection of copies of The APBA Journal back when I was a kid.

I read them cover to cover, over and over again. There were a few from the 1983-85 range and a couple from 1991 and 1992. They served as a second Bible for me, a window into the wide world of baseball simulation that none of my friends seemed even the least bit interested in.

There are a number of series from the Howard Ahlskog era of The APBA Journal that really stand out in my mind. This one, however, stands out to me for reasons that will soon become obvious.

The first issue of this three part series goes back to May 1983. We pick it up starting on page 15, the old APBAlone section. I’ve cropped the images a bit to help with readability.

I think you can see where my inspiration comes from.

I mean, I try my hardest not to make this a personal diary. Sharing personal information, like the name of a child or the time a spouse goes to bed, is obviously not appropriate in the internet age.

But it really adds something to the flavor of the project, doesn’t it? Instead of being a story about an imaginary season reported after the fact, you feel almost like you’re playing with the man. The excitement of the start of the project mixes in very nicely with the ins and outs of everyday life.

It continued in the April 1984 issue on page 5:

As a kid, I always got a kick out of the idea of spending time in the Hall of Fame library, rummaging through old issues of The Sporting News to help a replay come alive. It’s easier now, of course, thanks to Paper of Record and the miracle of digitization. Going through those old newspapers always gives me that thrill, though — no modern technology can take that feeling away.

The final installment of this diary appears to have come in June 1984, unless I missed something. This starts with page 4:

I don’t know if this guy ever finished his replay. I haven’t seen any mentions of this in the later APBA Journal issues. If you know what happened in the end, please let me know.

Anyway, this project stuck with me over the years. I wondered for a long time if this sort of thing couldn’t be replicated. I guess you can say that this blog is my big experiment.

And now we’ve hit our first year!