PREFACE

The summer of 1978 was the summer before my 13th birthday. In other words this was probably the last summer where baseball meant everything and the real world had no bearing on what happened in my day to day life. Of course that is if you don't consider baseball or pennant races part of real life. For a 12 year old male, back in the dark ages of the late 1970's, baseball WAS life. Your day started with baseball and ended with baseball. It started when the newspaper was delivered, or in my case, when you delivered it. Naturally you read the paper from the back cover on in. For all those not schooled in the art of newspaper reading, the back cover is the domain of the sports section.

The first thing one would do is look for the previous night's box score or as we called it: "the holly grail of numbers". Here is where you got to see how your team and more specifically your favorite players performed the previous day. Living in NYC, specifically the borough of Brooklyn, put you at a HUGE disadvantage. The paper of choice, NY Daily News, went to bed by around 11pm. If your favorite team's games were not completed by then you would NOT get to see a box score. Instead you'd see the the worst 5 letter combination in the alphabet next to your team: night. The translation was simple: Your team played a very long game with lots of action or they were playing on the West Coast.

I know this all seems foreign today where we live in the internet dominated era. Instead of waiting for the boxscore the following morning you can see the boxscore being updated with live feeds or watch the game itself on mlb.tv. Boy times have changed.

One thing that hasn't changed is the baseball classic Ball Four by Jim Bouton, which was truly the first adult book I ever read...if you can call the exploits of a bunch of prolonged adolescents playing a kids game for a living, adult.

When I read it the first time it was an eye opener. My real life heroes became human and not just a bunch of pictures on a bubble gum card. I remember it like yesterday when Steven Shapiro ( who left us all to early just before his 40th birthday) "lent" me the book. In our working class neighborhood you didn't exactly run out and buy your own copy. Shapiro was the first to read it, and then one by one the whole gang read it. The summer of '78 was highlighted by the great Yankee / Red Sox pennant race and a bunch of pre-teen Brooklyn ethnics doing their best to "shoot beaver".

Fast forward 30 years later and I decided to re-read this classic and see how a 42 year old kid can interpret it. To add a twist to it I decided to use Action PC Baseball to replay the actual season that it chronicled (1969). I'm excited to play the role of Joe "pound them buds" Schultz and lead the rag tag Pilots on their maiden, and as it turned out their only, voyage through the AL.

I will also be using this blog to chronicle my version of the season by doing my best Bouton imitation. Fast forward to the fall of 1968...just before the expansion draft, to begin our journey.