Ruths, Bonds, and Gehrigs be damned. 2012 Stephen Strasburg is my monster card this week. Why? He singled-handedly broke me out of my five game losing streak in the Illowa APBA League this past weekend. After losing the first five games of the weekend, he not only pitched our team…
Don Smith may have rolled out of last place this past weekend Despite torrential rainstorms and a fender bender in the driveway (I won’t say who), the Illowa APBA League had a fun and successful get together in Champaign, Illinois this past weekend. Here are some photos… Thanks to John…
St. Louis native William Lee Jennings played for his hometown Browns in 1951. Unfortunately, the shortstop didn’t wow the fans and that was his only year in the majors. Jennings got plenty of playing time in ‘51, all things considered. He came to bat 224 times. Not only that, he…
This week’s Monster Card is 1974 All-Star Ralph Garr which has several interesting features which includes a fancy-dancy 51-7 Garr led off for 136 of the 143 games he played the Atlanta Braves in 1974. I find that interesting. Yes, he has a nice .383 on-base percentage but consider that…
Getting traded midseason in 1987 to the American League didn’t seem to help Sal Butera. It just meant he played a lot more. Butera batted a total of 9 times between 1983-1984. In the next two years, he never had more than 120 at-bats. I guess Cincinnati finally gave up…
Sammy Sosa has the somewhat dubious honor of having been chosen as a Terrible Card and a Monster Card. Back in January, I posted his 1991 card on my Tuesday column, justifiably so I think. Ten years later after Sosa made umm, certain changes to his training regimen, his stats…
This is not your father’s APBA Baseball replay. Indeed, the idea of doing a pre-1900 replay would never have been on my radar 20 years ago. But Rod Caborn (who The APBA Blog did a Fan Profile of a while back) is quite a ways into a 1883 National League…
Following up on my post which featured Geoff Schmitt’s APBA Golf tournament, here are the results of his second tournament. Geoff is using APBA Golf for Windows for these tournaments. According to him, the pace is lot faster with the Windows version than the dice and boards version. I’m not…
This certainly isn’t the worst APBA card in the world. in fact, for a .232 hitter, 1984 Darrell Evans has a pretty decent on-base percentage. But consider the context… In 1983 (the year before this card), Evans hit .277 with 30 homers with a nifty .516 slugging percentage. In 1985…
Lefty Grove deserves a mention in this column and there’s no time like the present. Grove’s stats are amazing enough but what makes them most unbelievable is that he accomplished them in the batters’ heyday of late 20s and early 30s. When teams were scoring well over 5 runs a…