2 of 5

Write now Article Tools

"Baseball" and My Brother


The best baseball card game I ever played was created by my brother. The game was magnificent in its simplicity and memorable for being inexplicably accurate.

My brother and I kept our collection in team order and the latest ones up to date. In other words, when Ellis Valentine was traded from the Expos to the Mets for Jeff Reardon, we went into our most recent cards and moved Valentine to the Mets and Reardon to the Expos. So our teams reflected the rosters of the actual Major League teams.

When we wanted to play a game, we would take a deck of playing cards and remove the two red aces, the two red kings, the two red queens, and the two red fours. If we wanted more offense, we would leave them in but I was a fanatic for no hitters and perfect games, so we left them in. Why those eight cards? They represented offense and leaving them in would lead to an unrealistic abundance of runs scored. Of course, this was in the seventies and eighties. It might be more realistic today to leave them in.

We would each grab a team (or I would grab two teams when playing alone) and we would pare each down to twenty five players, representing the real life twenty five man rosters of a Major League baseball team. Then we would put our starting nine in batting orders and put the bench players to the side. Sometimes, we would use a score card; sometimes we would just keep track of the score and details in our heads.

The starting nine for each team would be placed opposite each other and the visiting team would shuffle the deck of playing cards. He would then turn over the first playing card representing his leadoff hitter's at bat. If he got a single, he would move to the right side of his team's cards and then to the second base position if he got that far, etc. This became unnecessary when we used the scorecard since we could see where each runner was. At the end of each half inning, we would have to be careful to realign the cards in the correct batting order with the correct guy leading off.

When someone was on base and wanted to steal, he would just declare it and turn over the next card. A black card was safe and a red card out. This was a risk because the card you used to steal a base may turn out to be an ace or a king, in which case you just lost a home run or a triple. If you declared that you were bunting for a hit, it was the same scenario black was safe and red was out, but if you got a red jack, which would normally be a single, we still

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Best baseball card games?
We want to hear your view. Write now!