Finding Something to Do

When I was young, grade school kind of young, I developed an interest in schedules and standings. It sprang as an accident when my mother bought me two copies of Baseball Digest. She knew I liked baseball and figured I would like the magazines. To be perfectly honest, there wasn't a whole lot in them I found interesting. But the one edition did have something which I found just fascinating. It was a grid showing all 24 professional teams and the dates when each played where.

About the same time I was given a diary. Not being able to keep the diary up I did the next best thing. I translated the schedule grid into my diary. Now I could jump to any day throughout spring and summer and know which teams were playing where.

But that wasn't enough. I elected to then devise a means by which I could pretend to play every one of those games. That way, the teams I wished were best would be. It would prove to be the beginning of a lifelong interest in pretend leagues.

Using two decks of ordinary playing cards I devised a way to play each game, granting an "edge" to better teams, and "penalties" for weaker teams. And I played the whole thing out. Uh, my team did win the World Series, by the way.

Eventually, I expanded my play to include Hockey and Basketball. And knowing that no two seasons could be the same I began to devise my own schedules. I learned just how complicated that can be. I also learned how to schedule play-off grids, and tournament grids. By the time I was in high school I had become quite good at it, and began to view all tournament grids with a critical eye. It amazed me how people who just had no clue at all were given the task of devising these things.

One thing I always wished for was some way to automatically calculate random events, and to store and calculate season averages. Wasn't I happy when home computers came on the scene? I wrote a strategy baseball program on an Atari 800. Use all by 2 bytes of the available memory. The program was stored on a cassette tape and took five minutes to load. But once loaded it ran very fast. After all, it was a strategy program and had no graphics.

I played nearly two seasons with that program. It actually took longer than a year to play a season because each game took more than an hour to play. At some point in the second season the cassette tape became damaged and I lost the program. My backup didn't work.

I used to think I was unusual in this joy I got from playing make-believe seasons with make-believe players. Then I learned it is actually quite common. Lots of people find living vicariously this way to be a great stress reliever.

Personally, I do not like the video games for playing sports. They all require something which I do not like at all: dexterity with game controls. That's not what interests me at all. Timing when to swing a make-believe bat on a television or computer screen doesn't do it for me. What does do it is being the manager, giving the steal sign to the runner on first, and getting pissed off because he gets thrown out at second. Or putting on the hit-and-run and watching it succeed.

It's kind of like writing a story. Ultimately, I am in control and have the final say on everything. Yet it is interesting to just let the players play sometimes and see how they do.

Not sure what brought this up. Hope you're having a good day.

What do you do to amuse yourself? Anything you made?