11/14/2023 0 Comments Dicebox gamesYou can see, then, how home runs might be easy to come by. Seven, eight, or nine was a good old-fashioned out. Anything between four and six swung and missed. For a player like, say, Jeff Bagwell, a dice roll yielding a two or three cranked one out of the park. We took two dice and their 11 possible outcomes (2-12) and created a reliable baseline to determine baseball’s vast array of offensive possibilities. Using player attributes from EA Sports’ Triple Play 2002 as a reference, we created personalized “hitting charts” for over 100 players. If this sounds like early-2000s baseball - and shit-loads of fun - it’s because it was. Ross and I played 110 games of dice baseball (the Raleigh and Ross Dice Baseball League’s colloquial title) that summer, and not a single game went by without the sound of our whispered home run commentary, “It’s back, to the wall, it’s outta here!” Most games featured a half-dozen homers. The game was rudimentary and fast we might have been accused of injecting the dice. We used two dice and consulted no theorems or charts, Moneyball or bell curves. Without any somebodies to become, we had all that humid and empty space in which to dream, to create, to conjure up worlds - or, in this case, take one that already existed and make it our own. We were perfect partners in what our fathers would have called the unforgivable crime of our own sloth. Sleep would postpone itself until sunrise if we had Friends to watch. It is what I remember most about our teenage summers: the energy we snowballed towards one another, neither of us ever turning down an experience, a journey to the next neighborhood over on our bikes, another run of Triple Play, another roll of the dice. Josh would come over to the house to talk to my dad about working out Ross and I would slink downstairs to the PlayStation. We felt his plyometric training, weight-clanging full-body workouts, and taking a summer job at 15 in efforts to purchase a car reflected poorly on our lack of drive. We did not take kindly to Ross’s older brother Josh. Even now, into my thirties, if any couch-lounging lasts longer than one 20-minute television episode, I hear my father’s voice prodding me from my idleness, urging me to go out and do something.ĭespite our shared fatherly antagonization, Ross and I were fervently committed to our own relaxation. Our fathers were athletes, hard workers, and great bemoaners of laziness. We spent our summers cultivating happiness and comfort at every turn. We passed the dice between our hands: baseball’s infinite possibilities at our fingertips, clattering on the aluminum bleachers. Talking through the basics, we jotted notes with his mom’s blue pen, our handwriting smudged and distinct. (There’s no data for the probability of this event, but it seems, in hindsight, unlikely.) We also scavenged it for pen and paper.īaseball is a basic game - throw, hit, catch, run - and beautiful because of it, its grassy outfield expanses leaving room for deep sabermetric dives and back-of-the-baseball-card numbers alike. We were bored, and Ross’s mom must have had dice in her purse. But summer league baseball games - even those pitched by future Cy Young winners - are for scouts and sunscreen-slathered moms, throned in their visors and folding chairs. (The opposing pitcher that day? Nashville’s own David Price). In 2002, I was 15 and Ross was 13, and we were there to watch Ross’s ambitious older brother Josh play for his travel team. The basics of the Raleigh and Ross Baseball League were dreamt up on the oppressive bleachers of Trevecca Nazarene University’s baseball field - a field on which I, merely four years later, would play one bench-bound season of collegiate baseball. “Sometimes,” Ross smiled at me, “you gotta roll the dice.” We watched as Josh took the sign and laid down a perfect squeeze bunt. On the field, Ross’s older brother, Josh, played out another dreary, meaningless summer league baseball game.
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