The Replay Time Forgot
Conrad Horn's 1949 American League Replay
The Replay Time Forgot
I bet you’ve never even heard of the replay we’re featuring today.
The APBA Game Company came out with its first full past season in 1974. This was the 1949 season — a fitting prequel to the 1950 season, which was the company’s first, and a welcome respite for players from the defense-heavy baseball of the mid-1970s.
As you can imagine, APBA fans were excited to play the 1949 season. In fact, as far as I’m aware, 1949 wound up being the most replayed season in the APBA Journal era.
There’s one replay that stands out from the rest, however. And it’s one you’ve never heard of.
Conrad Horn’s 1949 American League
As far as I can tell, Conrad Horn was the first replay editor of the APBA Journal.
It’s kind of hard to tell exactly what was going on back in the early 1970s. The APBA Journal seems to have changed from month to month. Names come and go in the early issues, and there is this contageous sense of exictement and optimism, as if the sky were the limit for the hobby.
Those of you who remember those days might want to correct me. I believe that this article by Conrad Horn marked the first attempt at a serious replay section in the pages of the APBA Journal:
Sadly, Horn’s column was not a regular feature. It came and went over the next year and a half.
I think I know why. It turns out that Horn was working on his own publication:
There are 25 issues of this newsletter in all — one for each of the 24 weeks of the regular season, and then a summary issue that summarized the season, the pennant race, and so on.
I want to thank the kind person on Twitter who photographed and uploaded these issues about two years ago. My apologies, as I forget your name.
Horn’s newsletter was quite interesting. As you can see, it was professionally designed, with columns, charts, and excellent typesetting. He was even able to create his own boxscores:
This is extremely imp권준ressive work for a man playing a baseball game with cards and dice. The amount of work required at that time to compile statistics alone was not trivial. Creating a newsletter like this in the days before computers must have been extremely time consuming.
So how was his replay?
Results
Well, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that the pennant race itself was satisfying:
The Red Sox won the pennant on the strength of Ted Williams’ triple crown. Williams hit .350 for the season, winning the batting title on his last at bat. He recorded 39 hoome runs, and added on an incredible 171 RBIs.
That RBI total brings us to the problems, actually. The most glaring problem lies in the runs scored:
Every team scored more runs in the replay than in real life. Some, like the Red Sox, came close to record setting numbers. The league as a whole saw almost 1500 more runs than in real life, which is an issue.
The problem wasn’t batting average, by the way. Horn reported a .265 league batting average, which is very close to the .263 rendered in real life.
No — the problem came from bases on balls.
Fortunately for us, Conrad kept track of walks issued per pitcher. Though he didn’t summarize them in his own newsletter, I took the liberty to add them up in a spreadsheet for the sake of comparison:
The replay saw an increase in bases on balls by almost 13%. Some teams, like the Red Sox and Yankees, were relatively close to real life. Others, like the St. Louis Browns, gave up walks in this replay like it’s going out of style.
The Big Picture
So what does all that mean for us?
Here are a few points I’ve taken away from this replay:
There is a problem with walks in the original 1949 APBA cards. We’ll go deeper into this problem in a later post.
“Unrealistic” results don’t really take away from the replay as a whole. This project is amazing precisely because of the meticulous way it was recorded and preserved. In other words, it’s more about the journey than the destination.
The balance of runs scored per team in a replay is absolutely crucial. If you’re a long way off, you’re going to wind up with some fairly ridiculous results.
Even the most ridiculous replay findings really should be preserved for others. You never know what lessons we might learn from them!
Conrad Horn disappeared after this replay ended. He started a brief 1958 American League replay, but seems to have abandoned it after the third week. I’d love to know if anybody out there knows what happened to him.
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This was such an interesting post. Never heard of the gent but he did quite a job. I look forward to another feature. Back in the seventies, I think, I was able to purchase the new 1949 season with twenty players each. I played here and there but the notebooks are long gone. Makes me want to play that season again. The Summer of ‘49. Thanks.