Bored Game Theory

In the incomparable Preston Sturges screwball comedy The Palm Beach Story Claudette Colbert wants a divorce, so she hops in a cab and asks the cab driver where he’d get a divorce. (They don’t call ‘em “screwball comedies” for nothing.) The cabbie looks at her and says, “Well, most people go to Reno, Nevada, but for my money, it's Palm Beach. This time of the year you've got the track, you've got the ocean, you've got the palm trees. Three months. You leave from Penn Station.”

I was thinking of that this morning as I was framing the lede to this column. Most people who want to seriously lose their shirt go to Vegas, but for my money, you invent a game. You got copyright costs, printing costs, marketing costs, shady middlemen, the evil Wal-Mart megalith, Third World knocker-offers, Toy Fair booths, licensing fees, legal fees, sales tax, cease-and-desist orders, and in the end nobody buys games anymore anyway. Three months. You leave from Penn Station.

Throughout the Handful O’Landfill era I was connected in some way with the creation of half a dozen games, some better than others. The collectible card game I created in a morning in a construction office in San Clemente, Calif., was not so good. The APBA sports-simulation games, particularly an incredible hockey sim Baron Bedesky and I cranked out over two days in a Buffalo hotel room preparatory to eating fried-baloney sandwiches at a Bisons game, were much better. The APBA board games were okay, the game-like things we did for SkyBox and Pinnacle were game-like, and today’s subjects are right in there.

And this doesn’t even cover all the other games that made it onto the garbage truck without my help, including Marvel Overpower and DC Whatever, countless reboots of the Cadaco All-Star Baseball game, MLB playing cards, Donruss’ ill-fated Top of the Order game which wasn’t really ill-fated because it got what it deserved, and the Topps MLB collectible-figurine game that I still claim was the greatest waste of a can’t-miss license this side of Comic Ball.

The facts were that APBA and Strat-O-Matic players didn’t want the purity of their cards sullied by non-necessities like pictures, nothing was more fun than a 1968 Topps baseball card game, virtually all game play came down to rolling dice and/or walking a pawn around a board, and how can that compete with a virtually realified first-person-shooter game where you steal zombies’ cars and kill pirates with nuclear missiles you fire out of your ... uh, nostrils?

It is into that environment that we chuck today’s game contestants, Spellcast and the Jim Thome Baseball Game.

We got to know the creators of Spellcast at the New York International Toy Fair. We were booth neighbors, back in the part of the exhibit hall otherwise inhabited by goldbricking janitors, union stewards, intravenous drug users, and our client’s accountant, who liked to hit on women. The exhibitionists didn’t even go back there because, hey, they’re not doing this just for their own gratification, you know.

Two Manitoban sisters, Nicole Rondeau and Karen Laboissoie, created the game as an alternative to knitting curling stones. (The nights get long and boring in Winnipeg, and yarn is cheap.) Spellcast deals with magic and witches and spells, obviously, it’s ostensibly for girls without being hopelessly girly, it’s designed beautifully but totally unprofessionally, in a way that torches as much money as possible, and it plays in a delightfully roundabout way. It also includes stones, which makes it pretty much unusable for anyone under the age of four, and all boys.

Its few flaws aside – nothing that couldn’t have been corrected by a major manufacturer with a little want-to – Spellcast is a fine game totally deserving of a larger audience, yet the game’s chances of going big were about as great as the accountant’s chances of getting to first base with the sisters. Dice and stones and want-to can only take you so far.

It was quite a trip to New York for Karen and Nicole nonetheless. They came to the city with a gross of sellsheets and a handful of clips from the Winnipeg Free Press and the Vicki Gabareau Show. They came away with a gross of sellsheets minus 17, a couple of presumptive wholesalers who were extremely excited but obviously worthless, and the memories of a mugging at the World Trade Center. (Pre-9/11, obviously.) I tried to help on all fronts but there wasn’t much to be done.

I lost track of Nicole several years ago, and Karen long before that. The printers were not being kind to Nicole, the sisters had split, and she was trying to go it alone. She was slowly, reluctantly coming around to the realization that despite all her best efforts, it wasn’t going to happen.

The part of the business that sucks the most is when good people with big dreams get whacked. It happened to Nicole and Karen, and it also happened to the people behind the Jim Thome Baseball Game.

“Nice” doesn’t begin to describe the JTBG people. They’re the people who would stop their car on a screaming freeway to free a butterfly from their windshield wipers, and they wouldn’t care if it wasn’t a butterfly anymore but a collection of butterfly parts. If they were soup they’d be homemade chicken dumpling, if they were power tools they would be an electric chainsaw with no chain, and if they were a TV show they would be Teletubbies.

And Jim Thome! Name a nicer 600-home-run hitter not named Henry Aaron. Name a nicer nearly active 500-home-run hitter who doesn’t walk around with a chemical cloud over his head. Name a nicer 400-home-run hitter who actually hit 600 home runs.

Naturally the JTBG people were from Wisconsin, some quaintly named southern-Wisconsin hamlet like Roche-A-Cri or Montello. They were led by a retired businessman named Bob Montminy, who had assembled an army of local investors around a concept that was going to revolutionize tabletop baseball games. There are these dice, you see, and these pawns that you move around the board, and this part of the box stands up so it looks like a stadium wall, and when you roll snake eyes it’s actually a “big double,” and that means everyone on base scores, and –

Listen: I’m not trying to mock these guys because they’re so doggone nice, and I know Bob Montminy dumped all his financial and personal capital into the project, but the Jim Thome Baseball Game is just another baseball game, no more or less playable than a score of similar games.[1] It is, however, the best baseball-simulation game with the picture of a really nice 600-home-run hitter on its box.

Not content with one unnecessary cash outlay, the JTBG folks quickly reskinned the game as “Ebbets Field Baseball,” and switched the JTBG’s generic wall for the legendary ballpark’s legendary wall, with similar results. The resale shops and five-and-dimes of south-central Wisconsin teem with these games the way Buzzfeed teems with literary Pixy Stix. It’s not an accident.

I wish I could write about how games were the Yellow Brick Road for Karen and Nicole and Bob Montminy, how they were better than a Palm Beach divorce for a screwball heroine. They weren’t, and we’re all a little worse off for that.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to dry my tears and fire a few more rounds out of my … nostrils. I love the smell of cordite in the morning.

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[1] The rule of thumb with baseball board games is: The more realistic the game the more painful it is to play. The extreme example of this is Pursue the Pennant, which has been linked to more than 7,400 cases of OxyContin abuse.

Happy Baseball Freaking Birthday

So I reached into one of the file boxes holding the entire history of the Handful O’Landfill era in press releases and sell sheets and pulled out a folder with a Sharpie scrawl that read “Misc. Non-Card Baseball.”

O frabjous day calloo callay. It couldn’t have been better if I had answered the doorbell and found Tim Tebow on my stoop, in the arms of Lindsey Vonn. And Newt Gingrich.

The folder was surprisingly thin. It did contain a press release from demi-legendary semi-legit cardmaker Little Sun touting its first set of high-school all-stars, the set that put Little Sun on the map, albeit somewhere in southwestern Oklahoma. This was the first card that showed Manny before Manny was Manny being Manny, even though technically Manny couldn’t be anything besides Manny being Manny without running afoul of immigration or the Social Security Administration or amazon.com or something.

That’s a topic for a different column, Manny and Little Sun and the first card of big-league malcontent Tyler Houston, sporting a sneer that put to shame even the twisted lips of James Thurber’s great dysfunctional national hero, Pal Smurch. This column is about some of the other stuff in the folder.

In addition to an embarrassingly self-congratulatory press release from the U.S. Playing Card Company, makers of a set of big-leaguer playing cards I was all prepared to like in a future column (how’s this for self-congratulatory: “Sales for the first edition were extraordinary. Over 600 customers eager to receive the new deck called during the first week of the 1990 All-Star playing card release in April.” Six hundred customers? In a week? A hundred customers a day, in a business where press runs of under a million were considered scarce, and collectors rang the phones like Quasimodo on speed? Oh, mur-der), there was this press release, from the legitimately high-falutin’ firm of Silverman, Warren/Kremer (their punctuation, not mine) in New York:

Many Top Baseball Stars To Be Featured In Unique Gift Idea;

‘A Happy Baseball Birthday’ To Reach Retailers In April

A Happy Baseball Birthday. And what goes into a Happy Baseball Birthday, you may well ask?

How about: a cassette tape. Hoo doggie.

Lest we forget, there was a time when a cassette was on top of the high-tech ziggurat, when the idea that you could record a whopping 45 minutes of music on a piece of iron-oxide-coated plastic only slightly more expansive than the hook to a Black-Eyed Peas song (but much deeper) had the stupendous import of a French nail treatment done in iPads.

We were discussing this the other day in the context of car CD changers. Cars these days have six-disc changers the way they have engines, but when in-car CD changers came out it was like the day they quit putting whalebone in corsets. You mean I can put six CDs in my car? At once? And I can listen to music five hours straight and not have to do anything else? And at this point most people fainted dead away and had to wait until their cars smashed head-on into telephone poles to be revived. Or not.

Of all the defunct audio technologies I've tried to explain to my kids, they get cassettes least. Phonograph albums they get, in a prop-driven sort of way. Eight-tracks even make more sense to them, probably because they've never heard an eight-track. But they have the idea that the cassette tape and cassette-tape players, especially portable ones like the Walkman, were invented by Playskool and sold to three-year-olds whose parents couldn't afford iPods.

Anyhow, enough about the technology. Think of the execution. The Happy Baseball Birthday card carried an MSRP of $7.99. Now, imagine you're a seven-year-old in 1991 and you're having a birthday party. Your mom has told all the invited guests not to spend more than $10 on you – a reasonable amount in those days. (Heck, a reasonable amount in these days.)

So it comes time for gift opening, and you get the usual hodgepodge: Some G.I. Joe figurines, a couple of LEGO sets, a Furby ("From Tyler" – figures; I never liked the little dweeb anyway) and then a thin package with a couple of lumps and bumps.

"Oh, boy – Sega Game Gear," you think. Just what you'd wanted, forever and ever and EVER! So you tear open the package with trembling fingers and discover (switching back to Silverman, Warren/Kremer mode here), "a high-quality audio cassette with a two-minute birthday greeting from a Major League Baseball star [Kevin Maas, in this case], as well as a special photograph collectible card with the player's autograph printed on the back." And three packs of strawberry Bubble Yum.

You seek out the offender and find him buck-toothed and smiling in the corner, smeared with Rocky Road from ear to ear.

"Get out of my party!" you scream at him, pounding him with tiny fists of rage and shattering his genuine gold-plated-plastic Screaming Siren Sound Effect, imported from China at $15 the gross. "I never want to see you again! You're not my friend any more EVER!" And so on.

Don't be thinking it was just the fact that little C.J. chose as his gift a card of an ineffectual though good-looking slugger with more holes in his swing than in an average Dancing With The Stars costume. The Happy Baseball Birthday thing came in many other flavors, including Tony Gwynn, Dennis Eckersley, John Smoltz, Mark Grace, the Ken Griffeys, Kevin McReynolds, John Franco, Kevin Mitchell, and – look, chicos! – Ruben Sierra, reading his special birthday greeting in Spanish (because if he read it in English you'd think the wow and flutter was all out of whack again). It's just that on the bang-for-the-buck scale it's no Kim Kardashian, if you catch my drift.

It should be obvious from the fact that no one has wished their buddy a Happy Baseball Birthday for a good 20 years that this particular attempt to scoop a ladle off of the gravy train went a-glimmering, and it's probably for the best. Think of what the 2011 model of a Happy Baseball Birthday would look like:

It's Wyoming's seventh birthday and all his friends are there: Cheyenne, Cody, Sheridan, Casper, Douglas, Laramie, Powell, Rock Springs, and Utah, the little neighbor boy.  His mom has told all the invited guests not to spend more than $15 on Wyoming – a more-than-reasonable amount these days.

So it comes time for gift opening, and Wyoming gets the usual hodgepodge: a couple of Bakugans, two LEGO sets, a Wimpy Kid book, a Webkinz ("From Lander," the little dweeb) and then a thin package with a couple of lumps and bumps.

"Oh, boy – Pokemon," you think. Just what you'd wanted, forever and ever and EVER! So you tear open the package with trembling fingers and discover ... nothing.

"It's actually a high-quality mp3 with a two-minute birthday greeting from a Major League Baseball star [Brennan Boesch, in this case]," little Torrington in the corner pipes up, his face smeared with dirt-and-worm cup, "and a special virtual collectible card with the player's autograph printed on the back. Oh, but it's all in the cloud."

Wyoming's little lower lip starts to tremble. "So you got me ... nothing?" he says, as visions of a full-scale evacuation dance through his mother's head.

Well, I also got you this," Torrington says, and reaches into his pocket and produces three packs of strawberry Bubble Yum.

You can take it from here.

Blunder Down Under

Some trifectas were made just so perfectly conceived that you’d swear heaven was triangular. The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. Chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Magic, Kareem, and Worthy. Tinker to Evers to Chance. Dodge vs. Chevy vs. Ford. Chico, Harpo, and Groucho. Moe, Larry, and Curly. The French Connection line. The three Godfather movies. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

And then there are accumulations of three that make you wonder whether the prophets at Schoolhouse Rock had it all wrong, and three is indeed not a magic number. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. The three Porky’s movies. Wade and Bosh and LeBron. The K cars. That three-wheeled Chernobyl made by the Company Formerly Known As Ski-Doo. Pat Listach to Scott Fletcher to Franklin Stubbs. Moe, Larry, and Joe Besser. Bacos, lettuce, and tomato. And last but not least, Australia, James Donaldson, and baseball.

And yet these things happen and continue to happen. The Brewers persist in trotting out a DP combo of Yuniesky Betancourt to Rickie Weeks to Cecil Fielder, an assemblage that is to slick fielding what Michelle Bachmann is to reasoned political thought. National Treasure 3 is in production. Alabama is back together. And not too long ago, Donaldson promoted Australian baseball through the mercifully short-lived Australian Baseball League set.

Once you break through the realization that this is one ménage a trois that’s really a ménage, it’s fairly easy to draw lines between any two of the three. Australia and baseball is logical enough. Baseball is sort of equidistant between cricket and Australian Rules Football, that aboriginal aberration played by sides of 18 that find Brian Urlacher too much of a sissy-boy for their tastes.

Australia and James Donaldson is doable. The former Washington State big played there after a 10-year NBA career where he moved more glacially than a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s. Baseball and Donaldson is a bit of a stretch until you realize they’re both mortally slow sports. It’s connecting all three that’s the reach. Yet there they all are in the Australian Baseball League set, linking arms and singing “The Kookaburra Song” while the dingoes howl in the distance.

Triangular logic notwithstanding, it’s hard to fathom how a continent whose No. 1 contribution to the National Pastime was David Nilsson, a catcher who couldn’t catch and couldn’t stay healthy enough to hit, merits a set of cards for its incestuous minor league, a sort of multicity crumb tray for all ANZAC players worse than Trent Oeltjen.

On the other hand, in the Handful O’Landfill Era every league that didn’t have the name of a towing service plastered across the fronts of its uniforms was prime territory for a card set. It just so happens that this league was about 50,000 miles away from its target market, with no network broadcast contract and no way of engaging its potential audience other than a set of baseball cards whose most recognizable name got beat out of a starting job by Mark Eaton.

With that said, the ABL cards are a pretty patch in a semipro sort of way. Fronts are clean, photography is right-side up, and backs are no worse than Sally League quality if a little too influenced by the Star Company for their own good.

The real question now, looking back at this set through the crystal-clear lens of retrospection, is what the plan was, how this set was going to do anything for anyone. The logistics – the big leagues are way over here, and the ABL is way over there – were just too heavily stacked against the ABL. The league was positioned as a low-level winter league, the winter equivalent of an upper-echelon independent like the American Association. While it was certainly possible that someone would take a path to stardom that ran through the ABL, the odds were against it. It was much more likely that someone would bounce from the Cape Cod League to the Northern League to the low minors to the upper minors to the bigs, with stops at Maracaibo and UPS and 50 games off for what they swear was an over-the-counter allergy medicine.

It was asking far too much of ABL cards to elevate such a turkey, and the cards' murky distribution – no one in my vast network of gainfully employed former card geeks can remember seeing these cards anywhere except in my file cabinet – ensured that no one would make money on the deal and the printer would be running hard after someone, holding aloft a sheaf of official-looking papers and reeking of acetone.

Ah, but the ABL had a secret weapon: James Donaldson. He shows up in the set, certainly not as a player or manager and not really as a general manager or owner. Seeing as the Donaldson card shows the big man bereft of any mascot clothing, he apparently was just lending moral support to the operation, which needed all the help it could get.

Here's how bad off the ABL was: When it finally gave up the ghost (and the Paramatta Patriots) in 1999, Dave Nilsson bought the entire league, lock, stock, and James Donaldson, for $5 million. MLB now owns 75 percent of the operation and runs it as a trading-card-free, fundamental-stressing South Asia developmental league, which is what it should have been all along.

The Australian Baseball League may not have merited cards, but it got 'em. But so did Dinotopia and Campbell's soup. At a time and place where they were still called baseball cards, it probably deserved them.