Recently, Kevin Weber’s request that we honor Jackie Robinson by having a nationwide APBA Jackie Robinson Day on April 15th and report back our results to the APBA community. To that end, I have challenged his brother and TAB contributor Kirk Weber to an APBA GO baseball game so that TWO Jackie Robinsons will be on the field at the same time.
We’re working out the details but so far we do know which teams are playing. Kirk has taken the 1951 season which features Robinson’s most powerful season. He slugged .527 with 19 homeruns and still maintained an .338 batting average.
As for me, I’m taking the 1949 Brooklyn Dodgers. Batting champ Robinson was bit younger and leaner, hitting .342 with a league-leading 37 stolen bases.
One of the reasons I picked 1949 Brooklyn was that it was the very first APBA season set of the past that I owned. Imagine owning a APBA set representing a season from decades ago! Outside of limited products like Great Teams of the Past and BATS, that concept was foreign to us previous to the 1949 offering which was first published in 1974.
As I was looking over my APBA GO default lineup of the 1949 Dodgers, something didn’t add up. Duke Snider was batting seventh. So I went to Baseball Reference to check on Brooklyn’s most commonly used lineups (read on how to do that here!).
This is what I found…
That looks more what I expected. Also, I’m going on memory here but wasn’t Carl Furillo rated as a slow baserunner? If so, don’t tell Kirk! Shh!
Finally, if you’re looking at the above graphic, you may be thinking “Wow, Cal Abrams led off for the Dodgers in ’49!”
If you listened to Double Take’s interview of me this week, I talked a bit about this whole concept of how “real life” gets in the way of managing like we would in APBA. Sometimes, managers don’t have APBA cards to look at when they make lineups.
I used the example of 1966 Ty Cline. In this case here, Brooklyn manager Burt Shotton led Abrams off for the first seven games of 1949. After going 2 for 23, Cal only saw one more at-bat for the rest of the year.
I think Cal might suffice as a decent pinch runner.
