Who among us did not nurse a fevered infatuation with some form or forms of simulated baseball game while growing up? If not for that, would we be here today? I mean at Ask Rotoman, not in the larger existential sense.
My father introduced me to a dice baseball game he invented when he was in school when I was a boy, and I recreated the Mets’ early years and documented the simulated seasons just as enthusiastically as he had done the New York Giants of his youth. This involved cutting out the day’s box score and pasting it into a notebook beside the simulated scoresheet of the dice game. I know, crazy.
The baseball writer Jay Jaffe has a similar story, which he tells in this piece at Old Time Family Baseball. Charmingly.