About ABL

My original league

It all started with the Cubs; my love for baseball. Although was a White Sox fan growing up on the South side of Chicago, the Cubs were on every afternoon after school. So I would end up watching them play, and lose, quite a bit. One day when I was 10 years old, I found a major league schedule of all the games for the 1970 season. It was a little booklet and I used to thumb through it. I started to imagine what if I played these games myself and watch the standings and stats. I didn’t have any idea how I would accomplish this feat as I was unaware of games like Strat-o-matic and APBA.

Enter All-Star Baseball; with this game of individual players on round discs I could create my own league, sort of, and watch the season unfold.  I would use the major cities and give them my own nicknames. I would control the rules and the play. Since ASB only contained all-stars and not all the players it took a few years but I formed an eight team league called the Action Baseball League.

Then in my teens I discovered an Avalon-Hill game called Statis-Pro Baseball. With the full complement of players now I could add six more teams and divided the league into conferences. The original ABL would become the National Baseball Conference and the new teams would be called the American Baseball Conference Six. Playing a full season seemed a daunting task so I played shortened seasons and had a lot of fun watching the stories unfold of players and teams ups and downs; challenges, triumphs, and heartbreak. One big problem I had with playing seasons were getting through the meaningless games of losing teams playing each other. You would kind of rush through them to get to the matchups that mattered in the standings.  Also It took a lot of time I didn’t have in college to play these seasons.

I decided to add two teams and play a double elimination tournament called the Baseball Tournament of Champions. I enjoyed playing the tournament but I found that the team that won it was a team I wasn’t that interested in. I spent most of the time in the elimination rounds watching a couple of teams battle for survival with one emerging from some tough close games to challenge the club that had won four straight at the beginning. I admit I was a little disappointed when that team won the tournament.

I put the game away for a while and got on with life. Despite all my efforts I could seem to find a balance to time spent and interest. I decided to play a single elimination tournament called the Grand Tournament of Baseball. I figured it would be one great hurrah and crown a champion and have the best of both the time and interest worlds.  I enjoyed this experience so much that I decided to play a second tournament. Then the idea came to me to create a tournament style season called the Grand Tournament Circuit where the 16 teams would compete in 15 tournaments. The first round of the each tournament served as a head to head schedule for standings and the success in the tournaments earned the winning teams of each round “victory points” 1 – first round, 2-second round, 3 for achieving the tournament championship game and 4 for the winner. The champion of that tournament would earn 10 victory points. These points would serve as a second set of standings called Tournament Standings where the team with the highest victory points at the end of the year would go into the post season. In the event the head to head standings leader and the tournament standings leader was the same team then they would be declared division champ. But if they were two different teams there would be a division playoff to determine the champ. Later I would make the first round of each tourney a three game series to make the head to head standings a little more interesting.

I played three tournament seasons and enjoyed the drama and action, especially in the tournament championship games and the postseason as well. But there was one glaring problem. The stats were skewed. Good teams played more games by winning and poor teams played sparingly.

Then while browsing at a computer store back in the early 80s, I discovered something call APBA Baseball. I always wanted to play the game by computer and had even begun programming the Statis-Pro Fast Action Cards into my Commodore 64. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was my dream come true; a computer game just like Statis-Pro with an announcer and everything.

I played a tournament circuit season and decided to move to the next level; a full season.

In 1998 I decided to tackle a full season with the computer game. Then I decided to put all the results on a website called members.aol.com/ActionBaseball which later became actionbaseballleague.com. You can see the remnants of my site on the web archive WayBack Machine by following the link.

That was 15 or so years ago. After frustration with fantasy sports (I really don’t like working so hard just to have your key players come up lame and you lose) I decided to take another stab at playing a full season on the computer. APBA is still around as good as ever. And I have created the National Baseball League. The same teams from ABL are back in their conferences and divisions but since this is a fresh start the league has been re-drafted. This is the inaugural season of a new league and since I have season disks from 1990 thru 2002 I will be able to watch this league evolve into a wonderful hobby.

I will blog the results of the league on this page to share my passion for baseball and APBA.