Steele's Inside Baseball

A look at the boards

Steele's Inside Baseball

Steele’s Inside Baseball was released somewhere around 1913. It’s one of the many “dice baseball” games that came out before National Pastime. It’s also likely one of the chief influences on Clifford Van Beek’s board design, as I explained in this post:

Fortunately, a reader was able to find a higher quality picture of the game board. It’s still obfuscated, but it’s high quality enough to let us look at the play results that Steele used:

Now, keep in mind a few things:

• Three white dice were rolled, and the number was read from smallest to largest.

• There were no individual player cards. The game was entirely dependent on the imagination of the players.

While there is an obvious connection between the “combination” way the dice were read in this game and how National Pastime (and, later, APBA) dice are read, it’s not necessarily the case that Clifford Van Beek stole that from Steele’s game. Actually, a lot of the old dice baseball games used systems that combined dice rolls instead of adding them together. It allowed for a larger variation of results, after all.

In this case, though, it looks like Steele didn’t know the first thing about how likely certain events were — even for the deadball era.

The chances of rolling a triple number is 1/216 (1/6 for each of the three dice). In other words, regardless of the base situation, you’ve got less than a 0.5% chance of hitting a home run.

In fact, base hits in general were really rare. You’d have to roll triple numbers (again, a 1/216 chance) to get a double or triple regardless of the base situation. Singles are a tad more likely, with a roll of 123, 234, 456, or 566 giving you a single.

As I understand the math (and note that I’m not a mathematical genius), the odds of rolling any combination of three unmatching numbers is 1/36. This is because you’re rolling three dice: you’ve got 3 chances of hitting a 3, 2 chances of hitting a 2, and 1 chance of hitting that last 1 that you need. I believe the math is something like 3!/6^3, or 6/216, which gives you 1/36.

Of course, you’re much more likely to get “strike” or “ball” on these boards no matter what the on base situation is. And, paradoxically, that means this game just might play slower than National Pastime, even though there are no cards to look up.

The lack of offense is clearly a problem, by the way. Check out those scoresheets on the bottom left. It seems that it wasn’t uncommon for games to go into extra innings (though the 14 inning game on the bottom was probably not tied after the end of 9).

Anyway, there are some similarities between this and National Pastime. In addition to the board layout, which is almost the same, you’ve got stuff like

• The existence of ball and strike results on the boards (though, thankfully, Clifford Van Beek kept that restricted — something that I wish J. Richard Seitz had done with the APBA Master Game);

• Base running that is determined by the boards (something that has irked a lot of sim fans over time);

• “Good” results coming from double roll — or even triple rolls.

But, having said all that, it’s clear to me that Van Beek’s system was uniquely his own. It’s simply a lot more refined and better developed than the old Steele method.

The more I study this, the more credit I think we should give to Clifford Van Beek for devising such a versatile and complex game engine. We tend to spend too much time worrying about the extra base hit number balance and the arbitrariness of the boards, and too little time thinking about how much better National Pastime was than its predecessors.