So, back in the dawn of prehistory, I used to get a quarter a week for allowance. If I mowed the lawn or did some other significant job (such as “helping” my father fix the brakes on the family car) I might get another quarter. Once each week I would head to the local “Pak-a-Sak” (a convenience store chain since bought out by “7-11″) to spend my hard earned loot. (”Save it?” you said “save it”? What planet are you living on?)

A quarter doesn’t sound like much these days, but back then a quarter would buy me an Icee (frozen soft drink), a candy bar and a pack of baseball cards. (Or that’s what my memory says, Icees were a dime, baseball cards were a dime and a candy bar was a nickel. Tax? What’s that? Don’t interrupt my story…)

Each pack of baseball cards also had a stick of gum in it. It was a particularly cardboardy tasting gum, but what the heck, I wasn’t a Rockefeller heir, and cardboardy gum was good enough for me.

Of course my brother and some friends also bought baseball cards, and as such we ended up collecting quite a lot of them. In fact, enough to have to put in a box and separate according to teams, positions and alphabetically by name. (No, I am NOT anal retentive. I don’t know what you’re talking about). I loved just sorting and reading them. I had pretty much all the game’s biggest stars… Gaylord Perry, Ferguson Jenkins, Reggie Jackson, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, etc…

But one day my older brother (Drax) came home and showed me a new thing that was included in the packs of cards. It was a baseball game card. This was part of an effort by Topps, the company that sold the cards, to increase interest in their product. Basically the game cards indicated an in-game action, such as “Strike out” or “Single” or “Double” or “Double Play” etc…. the intention was to collect enough of the game cards to put a deck together and then sit down with a baseball score card and play a “fantasy” game of baseball.

So we dutifully collected the cards until we had a suitable deck, and then we sat down to play paleo fantasy baseball. We had a draft. Drax picked Fergie Jenkins, I picked Gaylord Perry. “Gaylord Perry! He’s a cheater! I can’t believe you like Gaylord Perry!” Eventually the scorn ended as we fielded two full teams from our collections. Since his collection was about four times the size of mine, and the rule was that you had to own a card to use the player, he had a much better team. Not that it mattered, but it did.

Then we created what today would be called “spreadsheets” where we listed the players, and then listed all of the possible things they could do. Then we started playing paleo fantasy baseball. Whoever was up to bat would create their lineup and draw a card (no sissy “designated hitters” in our game). If it said “single” you would move the player’s card to first base, and put a tick mark in the “singles” column on the scorecard by that player’s name. If the next card was a “Double” it might say “advance two bases” or “clear bases” and you would move both cards according to the result. This would continue until you got three outs by drawing cards for outs. Any runs you scored would be tallied up. Then the next player would get their turn. And you did this for nine innings.

Yes, we played this game for hours. We kept meticulous records of our best players. And we did have “best” players. It was uncanny how the randomness of the game would produce stars and goats, and by trading or demoting goats and drafting new players, new stars or goats were born. In my case it worked out that Willie Stargell was my best player. For as long as we played, when Willie Stargell was at bat, I knew things would be OK, and they mostly were. He always led my team in batting average, runs and RBIs. Drax had his own stars as well.

When “fantasy baseball” first started getting popular, I thought back to our days playing paleo fantasy baseball. It never occurred to us (that I recall) to use the player’s actual stats from the week to play our game. I guess if it had, we’d be rich now and I’d be hiding from Paparazzi instead of typing on this blog.

Those were fun times though. Even when the game would end in a tornadic explosion of cards flung in every direction… I learned a lot about statistics playing that game. Without even realizing it. And math, of course. And baseball too. Funny how a lot of games I played as a kid did that…