The Wall Street Journal

A while back, Mike Sielski of The Wall Street Journal wrote a FANTASTIC article about Cadaco All-Star Baseball… I hope that you all subscribe to the WSJ and support this great publication. I say that in the hopes that they will send a cease and desist before they sue me for pasting their content below (josephhagen@gmail.com)

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By MIKE SIELSKI

Whenever Joe Hagen and his friends get together to play the board game All-Star Baseball, his girlfriend sits in an adjacent room and tries not to laugh.

As part of their league of the game, Hagen and his buddies have designed uniforms for their teams and a website to track standings and statistics, have built a cardboard ballpark modeled after Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium, and perform play-by-play “broadcasts” of their contests as if they were Vin Scully wannabes.

“Our wives call this the ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ of baseball,” said Hagen, 33 years old and a Kansas City resident. “We’ve taken it to a whole level of nerdiness that is completely unreal.”

For those who still play All-Star Baseball regularly, nerdiness is next to godliness. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the retail debut of the game, which was created by a former New York Giants outfielder, and it remains popular among a cluster of enthusiasts who still cherish its place as a primitive antecedent to fantasy leagues, sabermetrics and the quantitative analyses now common to real baseball.

“J. Henry Waugh lives,” said Curt Young of Chittenango, N.Y., referring to a 1968 Robert Coover novel about an accountant who immerses himself in a baseball parlor game. “ASB taught many of us at an early age about on-base percentage, slugging, lineup optimization and record-keeping.”

Indeed, while other similar games, such as Strat-O-Matic and APBA, have had more staying power with the public, All-Star Baseball predates them as a realistic, stat-based facsimile of actual baseball, and its creator, Ethan Allen, had roots in the New York region. Allen, who spent three seasons with the Giants in New York and coached baseball at Yale University for 23 years, designed a game that would become something of a cult classic, even if few remember it. “I never played or even ever saw a copy of [the] game until…well, until I was past 30,” said statistician and author Bill James.

Cadaco-Ellis, the company that first produced and distributed All-Star Baseball in 1941, stopped issuing it after 2004, but a Yahoo! web group dedicated to All-Star Baseball minutia boasts more than 650 members, many of whom played the game as children and still appreciate Allen’s efforts to make it as authentic as possible.

Using career batting data, Allen created performance discs that represented actual players’ offensive tendencies; numerically coded and multi-colored, the discs resembled pie charts. Babe Ruth, for instance, had a much larger home-run category than Ty Cobb, but Cobb was more likely to hit a single. By sliding a disc into a spinner and flicking a metal arrow, opponents let chance and probability determine the outcomes of “at-bats.” Another spinner determined how a team “fielded” a ball in play.

Because Allen, who died in 1993 at age 89, periodically released new disc sets, All-Star Baseball allowed fans to compare major-league greats of different eras. Who was the better leadoff hitter, Lou Brock or Rickey Henderson? And now, thanks to technology and easily available advanced statistics, ASB junkies can make their own player discs. Gene Newman of Pelham, Ala., 76 years old and one of the moderators of the online group, has used disc-making computer programs to form teams comprising Japanese, Taiwanese and Cuban players. John Rose of Richmond, Va., created replicas of his favorite Baltimore Orioles teams of the 1980s and 1990s.

If there was a hole in the game’s conception, it was that Allen didn’t account for the varying abilities of pitchers, and the omission divides All-Star Baseball devotees into modernists and traditionalists. Rose, who corresponded regularly with Allen and has written a comprehensive history of the game’s development, devised a pitcher-rating chart that he uses in his league. Hagen, meanwhile, hasn’t bothered to revise Allen’s original vision, allowing the game to keep an element of mystery.

“In our league, there are two pitchers who always throw good games—Johnny Podres and Robin Roberts,” Hagen said. “I complain when I have to face Robin Roberts because, for some reason, there’s some mojo there where I can’t do anything.”

All-Star aficionados know that they’re a little different, that it’s easy to say they cling too tightly to antiquity. The truth is, most of them don’t want the game changed much, if at all. Developing a digitized online version of it, for instance, would miss “the whole point of the game’s fascination,” said Yahoo! group member Phil Haberkorn. “It is the utter, raw, indisputable power that comes from looking at Hank Aaron’s disc and knowing that every home run he will ever hit again is in the palm of my hand.”

That fondness for the threads that connect the sport’s past to its present seems to unite those who still treasure Allen’s invention. Bill Judge, 73, who grew up and still lives near St. Louis, has been playing in the Trans American League of All-Star Baseball since 1982. He makes the league’s discs—a supply of retired and active players that he updates and replenishes. The TAL has 19 teams and a 156-game season and is 63 years old. He’s done his share of updating.

The league’s participants are scattered from Delaware to New Mexico. If a manager can’t get to a competitor’s residence for a game, he gives his lineup and strategic instructions to the opposing manager, who spins the spinners for him. “You’re on an honor system,” Judge said.

He named his team the St. Louis Cardinals, and his roster includes David Ortiz and Magglio Ordonez. He’s disappointed, though, that he doesn’t have a first-round pick in the TAL’s upcoming offseason draft– he won’t have the chance to select one of the long-retired players who will be shuffled back into the league for the first time in years: Stan Musial.

Write to Mike Sielski at mike.sielski@wsj.com

Download the free player discs I created for this story here