Baseball Games Played as a Kid (Games 13-20)

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Game 13: Baseball Simulator 1000 – The time spent playing this game as a kid has to measure in the thousands of hours range. 2 friends and myself would play 30 game season after 30 game season with this game. We had a Major League team draft where we each drafted 6 Major League teams that we would play the game with. Each season consisted of 6 teams, so we each would pick 2 of our teams to be in each season. You had to use each team once before you used another team twice and you had to use a team once before you could dump it and choose another MLB team. We would then input every player for the 6 teams and give them stats that they should perform to, but each team only had so many stats to allocate per team. So if you gave Cecil (yes Cecil, not Prince) Fielder 40 HR’s and you could only allocate 100 for your entire team then you risked putting all your eggs in one basket. This game was the ultimate option at combining the ML replay with statistics, competition between friends and the decision making of real baseball.

Game 14: Slip and Slide Baseball – This was more about rundown fundamentals than the overall game of baseball, but I’m not sure anything was more fun. You take the 30 foot version of the ‘Wet Banana’ or ‘Slip ‘N’ Slide’, you lay a water hose at one end, turn on the water and you have hours of rundown or pickle fun. We used a tennis ball and everytime you made it down and back without getting tagged you scored a run. After 3 outs, you moved to defense and the next guy ran. Don’t remember how many innings we played, but we probably had to stop playing due to water usage more than reaching an inning limit.

Game 15: Fantasy Baseball – In our Junior and Senior year of HS, a few buddies and myself played fantasy baseball using the statistics from the Sporting News and figuring the points by hand based on the scoring system we created for our league. When everyone went off to college we stopped playing, but we created the league again in 1998 and it’s still going strong to this day.

Games 16 though 20: Catch, Hot Box, Simulated Hitters, HR derby and Pepper – These are your more traditional baseball games that kids still do today with friends or dad. Obviously, nothing beats going out and throwing with a buddy or dad. Hot box is basically a rundown or pickle game, which is a fun choice when you’ve only got 3-4 people available to play. Simulated hitters is basically a pitcher-catcher type of game where you go against your friend and the imaginary batters walk or strike out based on your control. 4 walks in an inning is a run and the pitcher to give up the most runs over a set number of innings loses. HR derby is self-explanatory and Pepper is kind of a dying game, but is a good hand-eye coordination and defensive game.

So there you go. 20 games from my childhood that fed my baseball addiction. There really weren’t many days that went by, regardless of the time of year, when I wasn’t doing something baseball related. I’m 36 years old now and there still aren’t too many days where I don’t fit something baseball related into my daily life. When they talk about baseball being a romance in the movie Moneyball, I can totally relate. It just has an element about it that lends itself well to so many variations. There is also something about baseball where just when you feel like you know everything there is to know, the Baseball GODS introduce you to another layer that makes you realize you know nothing at all.

WRITTEN BY JASON CLYMORE (President & Founder)

Originally posted on October 21, 2011 on our old website