Noteworthy, Random Info-Post!
(Keith Avallone, PLAAY Games; photo credit to Glenn Carstens-Peters at unsplash.com)
I probably don't get as much mileage out of the PLAAY games blog as I ought to, I seem to feel like each blog post needs to be a complete, fully-developed, on-topic, focused piece of literary skill. This blog post will be none of those, haha! But I did want to communicate/clarify a couple of things, so here goes...
• Baseball's 2023 All-Star Game is tonight (07.11.23) in Seattle, normally we have cards available a week or so ahead of the game so you can play it on your tabletop before sitting down to enjoy the real thing on TV. Running a little behind this year, but this year’s All-Star Game cards for History Maker Baseball are available, here. Previous year's all-star game cards are available on the HMB free stuff page.
• YouTube Stream Schedule Clarification: At the end of last week's Big Baseball Show, I mentioned that we would be moving our Second Season Football College All-Star Game stream to this Friday rather than Thursday. This is different from the stream schedule we posted in the June CONNECT e-newsletter, where we had a "Now-To" session for ROLLER RUMBLE. Sorry for the confusion! We will do the Roller Derby "Now-To" this Friday (07.14.23), and the all-star football game NEXT week, Thursday 07.20.23.
• There's been some buzz on the various social media platforms about the status of our full-play Hoops and Tennis games. We've been hesitant to post information until we have it locked down. The boxed re-entry of the tennis game will happen this year, most likely late-summer, and we're hopeful that the full-play hoops game will be released in 2024. We'll get more information out about these games as soon as we can.
• Correction on Red White & Blue Racin' "75 Years of Racin'" card set liner notes: there are only 18 red group drivers in the set, not 20. (There WERE, at one time, 20 red group drivers, but we switched a couple to the white group late in the process.) Also, the Richmond track race length should probably be listed as 30 turns, not 27. Long story short, average race length at Richmond was 270 miles (hence 27 turns), but that's sort of a rolling average, as the venue hosted races of various lengths, most common of which being a 300 mile race (30 turns).
As long as we're blogging, here are a few random thoughts from PLAAY HQ...
• We're about to release the 2022 Pro Season for Second Season Football, and there are the usual assortment of eyebrow-raising ratings challenges. For example, pro football reference lists the Minnesota Vikings' expected 2022 win-loss record as 8.4 wins and 8.6 losses, basically 8-8-1. They finished 13-4. All season long, we heard TV announcers gush over the Viking's unblemished record in one-score games, I think they finished 10-0. I think it will be difficult (impossible?) to re-create that on the tabletop without some serious strong-arming of the ratings schema, which we opted not to do. Normally, we would have given them a healthy number of "game on the line" stars. However, I felt like that would have assumed that their games WERE, in fact, close. So instead, I bumped up the numbers a bit, in the interest of re-creating wins rather than trying to re-create CLOSE wins.
• PLAAY Gamer Chris Dinkins says we need a PLAAY kick ball game. What do you think--do we? (I have an idea for one...)
• We're doing a seminar during our upcoming convention on creating your own fictional sports league, I think we'll have a good crowd even tbough it's a lunch time "brown bag" workshop, as we are out of available slots! Special guests Bob Hansen and Lenny laFrance, both known in the community for their fictional creations. I'll share a few thoughts as well!
• Now that our first vintage fictional baseball set has been released--the 1974 Continental League--I'm starting to put together a list of potential Hall-of-Famers for the PLAAY fictional baseball universe. From the real-life player list, these four players come to mind: Rod Kanehl, Purnal Goldy, Von McDaniel, Ernie Fazio.
Kanehl was a fan favorite with the early Mets teams, a hard worker who could have made a name for himself in an alternate pro baseball circuit.
Goldy was viewed as the "new Al Kaline" in the Tigers spring training, until pitchers figured out that he would pretty much swing at anything. In our world, we'll assume that Goldy developed the discipline he never discovered in real life.
McDaniel had a similar story: a meteoric career rise, and then an inexplicable crash. His brother Lindy put it this way: "He lost his coordination and his mechanics, there was no real explanation.”
Fazio was another player who “might have been a star,” highly regarded coming out of college, the first player ever signed by the Houston Colt .45s. But, for one reason or another, he just never put it together. In our world, he will!