1954 Century League Baseball Card Set

Here's the second installment of our series of vintage season card sets for the PLAAY Games fictional baseball universe--the 1954 Century League!

The thought process of a fictional baseball time line-sprung from a conversation I had in 2022 with PLAAY gamer Larry Merithew about a possible Baseball America Hall of Fame, which Larry suggested might be a part of the league's 10th anniversary season. That conversation expanded to encompass all three fictional baseball entities in the PLAAY universe: the 1940s Century League (which was released when the game came out in 2013, we just freshened up the "look" of this set), Baseball America (also inaugurated in 2013, with yearly updates), and our one-off pseudo-fictional 1961 Continental League, which features REAL players who would have been available to populate rosters of a 1961 Continental League, IF the league HAD played.

The thought germinated, what if we could weave all THREE of these leagues into a single fictional baseball story line? In May of 2023, we created a timeline for this, in which the Century League forms in 1946, the Continental League launches in 1961 and operates side-by-side with the Century League (coexisting with the real-life American and National leagues), and the two leagues merge in 1974. This 1954 card set represents the evolution of the Century League, eight seasons into its history. It includes eight clubs; per the PLAAY timeline, the Pittsburgh franchise was disbanded in 1950, with the former Baltimore franchise now relocated to Newark, NJ.

There are lots of reasons to love the idea of building out a vintage/classic fictional history. One of them is the flexibility it allows gamers. You can set up your project however it works best for you. Vintage fictional baseball also has a broad appeal to sports game hobbyists-it's uniquely "old" and "new" at the same time. While the story is set seventy years ago, nobody's actually experienced the 1954 Century League season to know how it's supposed to turn out! That's for YOU, the gamer, to determine on your own game table! It's like discovering a secret door into a time machine that transports you back to the '50s to an undiscovered world of professional baseball. I feel like there's strong appeal in this approach.

To me, the key thing to all this working properly is the presence of authenticity. In other words, we want the 1954 Century League to "feel" like 1950s big league baseball. The goal is for the game and cards to generate a sense of going back in time to a specific era of baseball. To accomplish this, we've considered a number of things...

• The Look of the cards. We've designed the cards to look like they came from the 1950s. The fonts and colors reflect the presentation of baseball trading cards and board games from the mid-1950s.

• Statistical similarities. The '54 Century League will generate numbers within tolerance of real-life 1950s big league baseball. That means fewer strikeouts, stolen bases and home runs than what you'd see in contemporary baseball, and more bases on balls. We've also engineered the set to be expected to produce a very tight and unpredictable pennant race, between as many as six clubs.

• Plausible, interesting, realistic player career progression. This is more difficult than it seems, I think. We want to be able to encompass the universe of career possibilities, and it's a big universe. Many players are going to have a career ascent and descent that's going to be fairly steady, but could span a relatively few or many years. Then there are the "flash in the pan" guys who light it up for a season then--disappear! The guys who have unremarkable but very long careers, with no real ascent. Players who start strong, fall off for whatever reason (injury, emotion) but then have a big comeback--momentary, or prolonged.

As we outlined in our 2023 stream and blog post, we've mapped out the PLAAY fictional baseball universe moves from the entirely fictional universe of the Century League, absorbs a roster of entirely real-life baseball players in the Continental League, and then returns to an entirely fictional presentation for Baseball America. Thus, the '54 Century League incorporates only fictional players. Eight years removed from the league's launch, it's reasonable to expect that many of the younger players active in 1946 would still be playing in '54. Some would be in the prime of their careers, others would be in the twilight. There are 62 hold-over players from the '46 set (about 23% of the league's original roster) who are also carded in this new vintage set. Some of the familiar names from the ‘46 set still playing in 1954 are Cactus Ritter, Fingers Muldoon, Long Ball Benson, “Slammin’ Sammy” Solorzano, Frying Pan Poage, “Sarge” Allard, Digger Doughitt, Babe Werber, Rabbit Dennison and many more! We’ve included a comprehensive list of “veterans” with the card set, along with their age in 1954. The league's average player age is 27.2, about a year younger than the AL and NL average.

Like the American and National leagues of that year, we suggest the 1954 Century League be conducted as an undivided collection of eight teams: Boston Minutemen, Chicago Brawlers, Cleveland Stevedores, Milwaukee Barrelmen, Newark Blue Sox, New York Shamrocks, Philadelphia Oaks and St. Louis Showboats. We've included projected winning percentages for use in tandem with the HMB Universal Instant Results grid.