Tom's Baseball Game

 

We are remember how much Tom loved baseball and how knowledgeable he was about the game and the players. In the early 60s Tom and I played our own fantasy baseball game that we developed together but of course it was mostly his ideas and his rules. It was a Dice Baseball game. I think we got the idea from playing some of the dice baseball board games in the game room at the Winkler's in the Poconos where the family vacationed during those years.  

I don’t remember all the details of our version of the game. We created teams based on real players but the teams were Philly neighborhoods and not MLB. It was like a board game that we made up. We used rolled dice to play and each game would take about 20 minutes. We played for hours every day during that time. We kept track of everything in a school notebook including the league standings of our teams. I think we had about ten teams in the league and we would play through an entire season on rainy days in the summer up in our room. We always played on the floor and never on a table. It would have been nice to have a board like in the pic here but we got along without it and still had loads of fun that went on for a few years.

I also remember Danny standing there gripping the sides of his crib intently watching us rolling the dice. The three of us shared a room for a while but that’s another story.

I remember there were ten teams just like the major league in about 1962.

The Teams:

• Germantown
• Roxborough
• Mt. Airy
• Manyunk
• Nicetown
• Kensington
• Port Richmond
• Chestnut Hill
• Oak Lane
• Tioga

There is an interesting article on the subject - Dice Baseball: A Tabletop Tradition.