My new book is published! And this one is a game ... a game nearly four decades in the making. My senior year of high school, I received The Baseball Encyclopedia for Christmas. In the months that followed, I developed a baseball simulation game based on the actual player statistics that had become available to me in the Encyclopedia (Internet didn't exist back then). Percentile dice determined the outcome of plays and at-bats. A spiral notebook served as my scorecards. It was a lot of fun replaying the World Series from different years and having star players from different eras square off against each other.
I played the game off and on through college and graduate school. It never had a name, just "My Baseball Game." The original rules were scribbled in pencil on a sheet of notebook paper (BTW, I still have that sheet from 1987!). After finishing grad school, my job and writing pursuits took precedence. Years passed and the diamond legends of yesteryear took the field less frequently.
Then about a year ago, I thought about a baseball history scenario that I could play out in my game. It was a "what if" season in which the 1936 St. Louis Browns signed Negro League stars Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Bill Holland. Also in my fictional season, the Browns owner convinced Connie Mack to sell him Jimmie Foxx, rather than sending him to the Boston Red Sox as happened in actual history. In the simulated 1936 season I played, the "improved" Browns won the AL pennant and the World Series.
The experience was a lot of fun. So much so, it got me thinking that maybe others might enjoy this game. So I revised, expanded, and clarified the rules I had been using. This effort eventually became Diamond Legacies 1934. This first volume includes the rules of the game and ratings for players on all the major league teams in 1934 (AL, NL, NNL). Future supplements will contain ratings for players in other years in baseball history.
Diamond Legacies 1934 is available at Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle E-Book. I hope you have a lot of fun recreating your own baseball games!
