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Going Ball Nuts with Jeff Polman

Recently, I joined Jeff Polman, baseball writer and Strat-O-Matic fiend, for a few games and to discuss his newest novel, Ball Nuts, available now on Amazon.

Ball Nuts is born from one of Polman's recent replay blogs where, using Strat-O-Matic cards, he replays an entire historical season, letting the chaos and wildness of the dice dictate where it goes.

At first glance, you may wonder why, but when you consider the sheer randomness of actual reality, and the bizarre occurrences during the real season, why the hell not? While we like to believe that the events that we witnessed from the stands or on TV are the one 'true' outcome, when looking at it from a multiversal perspective, you realize these seasons may have been played thousands of times with thousands of outcomes. But maybe I've just been watching too much True Detective.

Thinking of string theory is a perfect starting point for Ball Nuts. The story follows C. Buzz Gip, a Red Sox fan currently living in a mental hospital, found as a child living under the Fenway bleachers. After being contacted by Timeco Incorporated and given time-traveling 4-D dice, Gip is transported through time, forced to replay the '77 season, watching the games in person as it goes. Naturally, things go wrong and Gip and a number of his fellow inmates, including a certain catcher's-ass-obsessed woman based off an old ex-girlfriend, are trapped in time, watching the season play out.

Sadly, when I arrived at Jeff's house, we were not playing with any 4-D dice. Instead, I joined Jeff in his office and baseball den, sitting down to play a few games of Strat-O-Matic, surrounded by a bookshelf stuffed with baseball books, photographs of old ballplayers, and a tall, beautiful painting of Tris Speaker made by Jeff's wife, Carmen.

If you've never seen a Strat-O-Matic card, this is what they look like. Though at first glance, it appears to be an impenetrable series of nearly meaningless numbers, once you get in the swing of it, the game is quite easy to follow.

(2001 Barry Bonds card via Sports Mogul)

One die tells you which card to look at for the result (1-3, you look on the batter's card, 4-6, the pitcher. Naturally, if you're at the plate, you want to have your batter's result more often than not.), the other two are added for the outcome. Once the ball's in play, there are a dozen other possible outcomes with steals, passed balls, errors, extra bases, etc--all the variables of a real game having been distilled into a tabletop version.

While baseball video games get updates every year, hoping that the updated graphics and a new player engine will create a sense of realism, these cards have hardly changed since they were created in 1961. The company is the subject of cultish devotion for many like Polman who write about their games and replays online, with some even showing up in Glen Head, New York every year to be the first to get their hands on the new rosters.

Jeff's been recently fooling around with the 1961 cards, so we start there, Jeff taking the Reds and their powerful roster of Vada Pinson and a young Frank Robinson. I choose the Cleveland Indians, less because of the interstate rivalry, and more because the team features a powerless Vic Power, Barry Latman (it's close enough to Batman), and Frank Funk. What can I say, I'm a sucker for names.

We start throwing the dice, my unfamiliarity with the game gumming up Polman's system, as he can usually play a game in about fifteen minutes and I'm constantly asking, "Wait, so I throw the black dice and the two white dice here? Why?" Somehow, thanks to some timely hitting and a combined shutout from Mudcat Grant and Funk, I defeat the Reds 4-0. Let no one ever tell you there isn't power in a name.

Next, we bust out Polman's own curated teams of Hall of Famers, given names like the Culver City Coffees, Burlington Champlains, and Iowa Field of Dreams. It's a difficult choice, trying to decide how to get both Jackie Robinson and Joe Morgan into a game. Somehow, thanks to Koufax's big strikeouts in key parts of the game, my Burlington Champs win 6-2, nearly a dozen players left on base for Jeff. Though I didn't know what I was doing, somehow I came away with a clean sweep. I think there's a life lesson in there somewhere.

After the games, and after we drank our afternoon beers, we move into discussing the book.

OTFB: When did you start playing Strat-O-Matic?

Jeff Polman: I started when I was about 8 years old. I went to my first major league game in 1963, a Red Sox-Yankee game at Fenway that Mickey Mantle and Maris played. That same year, my older brother, Dick, sent away for the game in the mail through one of those old baseball magazines that have the ad in the back that you clip it out and you mail it in. I don't think they even had zip codes then.

I got into it pretty heavily and all the kids in our neighborhood in Western Massachusetts played it. We had this little half-assed leagues going every summer.

That was in the 60s, so I guess I've been playing for 50 years. I took a break when I was in college for about four years because I didn't want to bring it to school and not get any work done and be ridiculed.

I picked it up a few years after I graduated college in the late 70s. I was in very few leagues, mostly did solitaire play. I started playing full seasons, the first full season I did was the 1970 cards when the Mets went all the way, beating Oakland.

I must have done at least a dozen full seasons, just playing solitaire. And now currently I'm in a league called the ECBA, the East Coast Baseball Association, which is a nation wide draft league that's been around for its fortieth year. There's a lot of Strat heads in there like me. I'm in my fifth season now and we play a 160 game schedule and get together for a yearly convention in Maryland.

OTFB: What brought you back to the game after college?

JP: I really enjoyed it and I think I was just waiting for an opportune moment to start playing again. Things like life intervened and actual girlfriends. [laughter]

The game really captures baseball, it captures the realism. As opposed to rotisserie, where you're basically picking players and following their stats all year, here you're actually managing the games. It's really different, it helps you learn how to manage and you start seeing things on TV when you're watching a baseball game. 'What are you putting that pitcher in for, he can't get lefties out,' and you know that because you've been playing with him in Strat-O-Matic.

OTFB: When did you actually start writing about these replays?

JP: Back then I wrote these little yearbook summaries like a Street & Smiths or Sporting News yearbook where you would have the little write-ups of every team that you would play.

Now, there's a website called the Strat Fan Forum, which is basically this place where everybody plays the game and puts results of their replays, usually just game results, standings-- it's just this big stew of replay results. I did that for a 2007 year that I played and asked that if anybody wanted to manage the teams. I would roll the games, but I would be using their managing instructions. That was a big hit on the forum and I got a whole bunch of people to do that with me.

As I wrote the blurbs for that season, I got a lot of good feedback, so I thought I should take this to the next level.

I took the 1924 season and created this fictional story around it. A 17 year-old Phillies fan was talking about the National League games and a Detroit Tigers beat reporter was talking about the American League games and I alternated. I was running this blog five or six days a week. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed it so much, I had no idea I was writing that much. But when I got to the end, I had a lot of good feedback, and I thought, yeah, I could turn this into a book. I whittled it all down and took out most of the American League beat reporter stuff and just made it this kid's story, that's what became 1924 and You Are There, the self-published book version of this.

Ball Nuts, which is the new one, is from my 1977 blog called "Play that Funky Baseball," which is a much wackier story than the other one.

OTFB: Moving to Ball Nuts, it's kind of a crazy story. You have 4-D Dimensional Dice, mental hospitals, time travel, where did that idea come from?

JP: There's obviously One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest inspiration in there. That movie came out around that time,1975, I think. That book and movie obviously made a big impression on me just to get the story started. Basically, with Ball Nuts, and 1924, these stories just tend to write themselves as I go, as I see how the results of the games are.

For Ball Nuts, I had a general idea that I wanted more characters than I had in the previous one, and make them funny and wacky and represent each team that they're rooting for. That was the starting point and once I had the time travel thing worked in, then it was anything goes from there. The hard part with that one was finding the way to keep all the characters consistent and keep everything on track and find a way to wrap it up in the end, story wise. I think I was definitely able to do that in the end.

OTFB: When you are approaching these stories, how much research do you do?

JP: I tend to research them as I go. I did this a lot with 1924, if I was going to be in Cincinnati at old Crosley Field, I would have the characters be in Cincinnati after the game and wanting to do something at night. So I'd go online and look up old newspapers from that period from Cincinnati and look for movie ads, restaurant ads-- just look for places I could use in the framework of the story that were real.

OTFB: What were the inspirations for the characters?

JP: The main character is usually somewhat derivative of me, I think that's the case anytime you write fiction, there's always parts of you in the main character. And it's really this guy, C. Buzz Gip, who was a Red Sox fan in the late 70s, and I was living 20 minute walk from Fenway Park in 1977. So I got myself the smallest package season ticket plan, which came to something like $7.50 a game and we'd just walk over and watch the amazing team. Yastrzemski, and Fisk, and Rice, and Lynn, and Boomer Scott hitting home runs. That character is definitely me.

I don't know if there are any particular people I had in mind for any of the other ones. If I thought about them, maybe I'd come up with a few. But usually they're just an amalgamation of people you've seen in movies, people you've seen in your life, nobody stands out in particular, though Crazy Amy Gulliver was based on an old girlfriend.

OTFB: When you're doing these seasons, what's the schedule for yourself?

JP: When I'm doing a full season--there's a classic schedule that was used from 1901 to 1960, 154 games, eight teams in each league. That was every year, same thing. They were perfect schedules, they're just the right amount of games for me to replay a full season with.

For instance, what I've done with 1997, I've taken the best 8 teams from each league and taken the 1947 schedule. So I'm re-doing it as if it was an old schedule.

It's great, I can average about four games a night easy, I can play a game in about fifteen minutes now. In a week I can get through at least four or five days in the schedule. It usually takes a little over a year to replay a full season.

OTFB: What's your favorite baseball memory?

JP: Favorite baseball memory is easy, that's the Ball Nuts year, 1977. I went to two games of a three game series with the Yankees in the middle of June and the Red Sox swept the series and out-homered the Yankees 16-0.

The Saturday game I went to was the game where Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson fought in the dugout, so I was able to watch the whole thing with Jackson jogging in from the outfield, like 'what did I do?' He gets in the dugout and suddenly there's all this commotion and they're being separated.

(via Real Clear Sports)

The following day was just ridiculous, Jim Rice hit a home run that went over the back wall in center field, behind the bleachers, Yaz came up next and hit one that skipped over the right field roof, it was ridiculous. And of course, the Yankees won the pennant and the World Series. [laughter]. Nothing changes.

OTFB: What's next?

JP: I was thinking of doing almost a half-replay, half-memoir. If you're familiar with Josh Wilker's great book, Cardboard Gods, where he took his baseball card collection and basically wrote about himself, I was thinking of maybe trying to do something like that. Make it a fictional thing, but use a lot of stuff from my life in there. I'm still not sure if I want to do that or how much of my life I want to put in a book directly.

The other idea I had was to change them up and make it more fictional and just create a story that's a little like Universal Baseball Association. It's about a guy who had a dice game that he invented. He created all these characters and all these players that didn't exist and he wrote this whole book about a guy who was obsessed with them. And on one of his charts, one of his players was hit by a pitch and died, the whole thing was how he was going to deal with this. So I was thinking of creating some kind of new fictional thing like that but using Strat-O-Matic teams.

But as far as the Strat stuff, I have the 1951 season and I was thinking of doing one about these three old guys, one's an old Yankee fan, one guy's an old Dodger fan, one guy's an old Giant fan--that's the year of the Bobby Thomson home run.

So basically something's happened where they're actually reliving it. They've got this grudge from the Bobby Thomson home run from years and years ago and the Dodger fan hates the Giants fan and the Yankee fan is just kind of above it all because he's a Yankee fan. It would be a dialogue between them and they're reliving the season as it's replayed. I'm not sure how it would all work, I'm sure there would be more time travel involved. That's something I might do, but it probably won't be until next year.

OTFB: Okay, last up. Lightening round. A-Rod or a corpse?

JP: Oh, corpse.

OTFB: Yasiel Puig or Bo Jackson?

JP: Puig.

OTFB: Mike Trout or Miguel Cabrera

JP: Trout

OTFB: Mike Trout or Batman

JP: Trout

OTFB: Mike Trout or Superman

JP: Trout

OTFB: Bud Selig or the embodiment of human suffering

JP: I have to go with Selig, but make him suffer.

OTFB: Justin Verlander or Max Scherzer

JP: Verlander

OTFB: Verlander or Kate Upton?

JP: Kate Upton

OTFB: Verlander or Taco Bell

JP: Verlander

OTFB: Bobblehead or Garden Gnome

JP: Garden Gnome

OTFB: Arroyo's music or Bernie William's music

JP: Bernie Williams, I like guitar.

Thanks to Jeff Polman for taking the time to walk me through Strat and answering my questions. You can purchase Ball Nuts on Amazon and follow Jeff @jpballnut.

If you're in the Southern California area, be sure to go to the co-book reading at Joxer Daly's in Culver City on May 15th. Jeff will be reading from Ball Nuts while Dan Epstein will be reading from his new book, Stars and Strikes, about 1976.

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