The APBA Pitching System
I initially planned for this post to be released in late April. However, I hit the wrong button, and really didn’t want to unpublish it once it went out. So enjoy a rare double post day!
I can see the comments section already. I know I’m going to get totally blasted by some of you for even insinuating that the APBA baseball “basic game” pitching system is anything less than hot garbage.
But the truth is that it’s not really that bad. In fact, when you consider what Seitz was trying to do, and what he had at his disposal, it’s actually a really remarkable and innovative system.
Let’s take a look today at what Seitz had to work with, what he wound up doing, and what other solutions people have created for the National Pastime framework.
National Pastime
National Pastime had no pitching system.
There was nothing. Pitchers only received batting cards that said “pitcher” on the top.
Lefty Grove was the best pitcher in baseball in 1930, and was arguably one of the best in the entire history of the sport. This is the card Clifford Van Beek gave him:
Lefty Grove was no more effective in preventing hits in National Pastime than any other pitcher.
It’s actually kind of ridiculous when you play the game. If you decide to throw reality out the window and just roll to your heart’s content, you realize pretty quickly that there’s no reason to pay attention to positions at all. Heck, you could have Rogers Hornsby pitch every game for the Cubs if you wanted to.
The positions didn’t matter at all. There was nothing in the rules to stop you from making ridiculous decisions like that.
And it was a problem.
The Seitz Solution
J. Richard Seitz realized that there were two reasons why National Pastime was so popular:
It was really easy to understand; and
Games played really quickly.
I can’t overemphasize either of these points. National Pastime is by far the simplest of the baseball sims. You stick the players in a lineup, you start rolling the dice, and you look at the chart.
And the games go by in a flash. There’s nothing to remember, nothing to worry about. It’s just roll, look up, and write on the scorecard. Occasionally you might need to reroll because there was a strike or ball or something. That’s it.
Now, Seitz knew that he needed to keep the game simple and fast. But, at the same time, he also knew that he needed a pitching system. It was ridiculous that Lefty Grove could get shelled by those awesome 1930 hitters, after all.
Additionally, Seitz had a limited budget. He needed to keep costs down — both to make sure that APBA Baseball wouldn’t be too expensive, and because he was literally running the company on money he made from his day job. He couldn’t use a solution that would require him to print a bunch of other stuff.
And so that’s where the APBA pitching system came from.
It’s not complicated. It’s got some elegance in its simplicity.
Some pitchers are sometimes able to stop base hits. For example, with the bases empty, pitchers with a “C” grade can stop play result number 9. Those with a “B” grade can stop play result number 8. And the rare “A” pitchers (there was only one in that original 1950 set) could stop both:
Now, APBA has gone through a lot of changes over the years. For example, Seitz created a pitcher grade advancement and demotion system sometime around 1956. But there wasn’t anything like that at the beginning. A “C” pitcher was always a “C” pitcher.
Whitey Ford (ever heard of him?) will always be a C pitcher in your 1950 single column APBA games, assuming that you play according to the original rules. He will never turn into a B, and he will never become a D. He simply pitches at the same grade.
This is the inelegant way that Seitz described his own system:
Now, there was another component to the Seitz system — one that most of us don’t think about when we think of APBA. The other, somewhat obscured component was the fielding system.
Back when it first came out, the APBA baseball fielding system was extremely simple. Each player had a fielding grade. You added up all the numbers and got a team fielding total. That would determine if you were under fielding column one, two, or three.
Again, later developments have complicated what was originally a simple system. There was no individual fielding option in the old days, nor was there “infield fielding” (a development that I still find fascinating). Seitz saw fielding strictly as a team sport.
The effect of this, though, was actually pretty profound — and you can tell immediately if you play a National Pastime game and then switch over to APBA.
Pitchers actually matter in APBA, for one thing. There was now a reason to take a pitcher out and put another guy in. And there was sometimes a reason to stick with your ace even if he was getting shelled.
For another thing, Seitz had created a very subtle ability to control the number of base runners pitchers gave up. A pitcher with a higher grade (i.e. a B) would likely have fewer runners on base than a pitcher with a bad grade (a D).
The fielding system played a role in this as well. Sometimes poor fielding would really hurt a pitcher, causing him to allow more base runners and perhaps have a higher ERA or a worse won-loss record. For example, with runners on first and third, play result number 16 gives you this under Fielding Three:
If you’re in Fielding One, though, this is the result:
The run scores either way, sure. But there’s a difference between having runners on first and second and just a runner on first with one more out.
Now, when you look through those original boards, you’ll realize that Seitz didn’t necessarily make huge changes in the fielding results between the three columns. Fielding Three tended to allow a lot more base runners for play result numbers 15 through 21 — what we know of as the traditional National Pastime “error” results. Occasionally Fielding Three would cause the team at bat to score an extra run or two, though it really depends on the base situation. Seitz was careful, in other words, to not let his fielding system destroy the batting average balance that Clifford Van Beek had created.
The best part about this system, though, is that it was easy. It was easy and it was fast.
APBA games with the 1950 cards and the original boards don’t take any longer than National Pastime games take. The flow is exactly the same. You have a little bit more strategic control as a manager, but that’s it.
I really need to emphasize this point. When playing with the original system, you don’t need to worry about any recalculations, any rerolls, or really anything other than what was written on the cards and what was written on the boards.
In that sense it was a thing of beauty. Seitz didn’t create a “proper” pitching system. Instead, he basically stuck a pitching filter of sorts on some of the base hits, and supplemented that with a carefully constructed fielding system.
The Interaction Problem
So why mess with that? Why not just stick with a good thing?
Well, you see, some people like the feeling that the players are actually interacting with each other. And, truth be told, APBA was never quite successful in getting that feeling across.
The APBA Baseball Master Game system, which we’ll cover in detail one of these days, was really just an extension of the original system. Pitchers could only impact a few play result numbers, and everything else was based solely on the batter’s card. The presence of 30 different pitching grades is actually kind of a mirage, since the difference from one grade to the next is fairly minuscule. Seitz could have created 100 grades, or 1,000 grades, and the effect would have been the same.
There are a number of alternate systems that have come up over the years. We’ll talk about some of them in more detail in the (distant) future. Some of them, like the famous CMBA system, require a bit more explanation and investigation than I’ve got time for at the moment.
There are two systems that I would like to mention, though — largely to show how they contrast with what Seitz came up with.
Bill Staffa’s National Pastime System
A little over 20 years ago, back when the heroes of the tabletop world first reprinted National Pastime, Bill Staffa came up with a simplistic pitching system.
This system allowed for pitchers to impact certain base hits. However, it committed two sins that Seitz would have found unpardonable.
The first sin was the presence of an extra roll.
Here’s the instructions for the Staffa system:
Adding in an extra roll for certain play results really is an issue. It’s an issue because it adds in one extra step.
Now, the way this system works is pretty ingenious. Each pitcher has a number assigned to him, as well as a special pitcher card that corresponds with that number. For example, the Philadelphia Athletics have two pitchers with these numbers:
George Earnshaw’s pitching card looks like this:
Basically, if you roll a 32 or a 46, you’d need to reroll a single die. If that die lands on a 1 or a 6, change the result to a 14 — a walk.
In contrast, Lefty Grove has this pitcher card:
If you roll any one of those 15 play result numbers, you have to roll a third die. Land on a 1 or a 6, and it changes to one of Grove’s out numbers.
You can see the problem here, right? Now you’ve got at least two more cards to keep track of while you play. Your attention is divided, and the flow of the game is slightly interrupted.
The second problem, of course, is that Seitz would have had to print extra cards for pitchers if he adopted this kind of system. The nice thing about his system, of course, is that it was kind of an overlay on top of the National Pastime framework.
The Van Beek System
Now comes the real fun part.
Clifford Van Beek allegedly claimed at some point in time that he created a pitching system in the 1950s that worked similarly to the Strat-O-Matic system.
I don’t believe him.
We’ve talked about Cliff before. He was a nice guy for sure — but he also had a habit of spinning yarn. I doubt Van Beek thought for two minutes about National Pastime in the 1950s.
Anyway — Van Beek created a mockup of his system sometime in the late 1970s. Bill Staffa (there’s that name again) created a full set of 1977 season cards based on Van Beek’s proposed system.
It’s a really simple system, and, as you’ll see, actually does look like a combination of APBA and Strat-O-Matic.
Say that Ken Tekulve is on the mound. Well, Tekulve has this kind of “pitching card:”
Half of the dice results show up on Tekulve’s card.
Now, let’s say that Lee Mazilli is at the plate. Here’s his revised hitter card:
Now, there are some obvious issues with this system. Strat-O-Matic, for example, succeeds so well because of the vast number of possible play results in its 3 columns. Each column on both hitter and pitcher cards has 11 results (2 through 12), many of which are split up by the famous “split roll” system — a system that legitimately dates back to the 1950s. Furthermore, not all numbers have equal probability in the Strat system, which leaves a lot more room for less common results.
Van Beek’s system allows for 3 columns of 6 numbers each, and each number has the exact same chance of showing up.
The system can work mathematically, of course. I haven’t seriously played with these cards yet, but I am convinced that they work just fine in a season replay. But you can see the issue with the play design.
There are two more problems here, of course.
The first is that this requires you to have two cards in front of you as you roll the dice. The simplicity of holding the card in your hand, rolling, looking at the board, and then moving on is gone. This is actually a step down in a sense from the Seitz system, since you’ve got two cards to worry about instead of one.
The second issue is the same one that the Staffa system faces. If Seitz were to have gone down this path in 1951, he would have incurred additional printing costs.
Other Options
Now, the most frustrating parts about these systems is the lack of actual interaction between the pitcher and hitter.
The same goes for Strat-O-Matic, by the way, as well as the many games that were clearly based on the Strat-O-Matic system. It’s a game of whether the hitter or pitcher “wins,” not really a game of how the two interact.
As you likely already know, there are quite a few board baseball games out there that offer systems with actual interaction. We’ll cover those more in the future as I start playing one game after another.
If you take anything from this, though, just keep in mind that the Seitz pitching system isn’t as bad as you thought.
I play basic APBA all the time and have no
problem with the pitcher grading system ⚾️⚾️⚾️⚾️⚾️
I had no problem with Basic grade, although I have been been interested in in Bill Stafford's
pitching sytem