The Arbitrary Carding Rules
What things used to be like
The Arbitrary Carding Rules
The first issue of The Strat-O-Matic Review in March 1971 included this interesting note:
Now, it’s certainly not a surprise that The Strat-O-Matic Review would have something nice to say about Strat-O-Matic.
The interesting thing here, though, is the problem that was being addressed. You see, in those days neither APBA nor Strat-O-Matic really knew what to do with players who changed teams very late in the season.
I don’t believe that APBA gave any of these players cards in its original 1970 season. The Zack APBA Handbook has information about at least three of them:
We’ve really come a long way since those days. I’ve never been able to understand why the creators of these games didn’t just make cards based upon player performances for both teams, instead of insisting on making an arbitrary cutoff and looking only at performance on the final team.
My recollection is that APBA only based the card on a player's stats for his final team if the player changed leagues. (Remember that the AL and NL had different statisticians and MLB didn't issue combined stats. At least a couple of pitching categories were different -- BFP in the NL vs AB in the AL, for one.) During the season, a player had to clear waivers to move to the other league, though as things turned out there were few if any objections to a good player being dropped. So there were relatively few interleague deals, and I think most of those had cash or minor leaguers traveling the other way. As for carding a player for his last team, Seitz knew from his own experience with National Pastime that people would be trying to use the cards to play the upcoming season, so putting a player on his final team -- and avoiding putting him on a team he'd been traded from or released by -- made some sense. In at least a few early instances, APBA chose to card a younger substitute for a team over one who had retired or been released during the season.
I own the 1970 set, my mother found the complete card set at a garage sale around 1979. When I started to look at my Baseball Encyclopedia and the cards my 14 year old self saw the Wilhelm, Grant and Chance issue. I made 3 home made cards fir them and put them in ther respective teams. Problem solved.