From the earliest days of tabletop dice and chart‑driven baseball games to today’s sophisticated computer simulations, fans have long sought to relive the sport’s history through the lens of probability and imagination. The lineage stretches back to the mid‑20th century, when games like APBA and Strat‑O‑Matic transformed living rooms into miniature ballparks. It’s difficult to determine when the first replay was documented for all the world to see, but it could have appeared in the pages of the APBA Journal, a long running newsletter that served the APBA community for 35 years, first published in 1967. In addition to the APBA Journal, games like Strat-O-Matic, Replay and Extra Innings also published their own newsletters allowing their fans to document their replays. Today, those publications have been replaced by online platforms like the Delphi Forums and Facebook as the primary means of documenting replays, providing hobbyists with a more efficient way to share their projects with the simulation community.
The concept of the “replay” — reconstructing a past season or tournament to see how it might unfold again — became a cornerstone of this hobby. What began as a curiosity soon turned into a form of historical research: a way to test theories about team strength, player value, and the eternal balance between hitting and pitching. Replays allow enthusiasts to explore “what‑ifs” that the record books can’t answer, in many ways, these projects incorporate sabermetric analysis, but with the added pleasure of storytelling.
For those who participate in this hobby, the motivation goes beyond numbers. It’s about connection to the game’s eras and it’s heroes and it’s also about nostalgia, about reliving the seasons of your youth. The process brings a quiet satisfaction: the click of dice, the feel of the cards, the unfolding of a season that feels both familiar and new.
As the replay community has grown, so too has the variety of approaches, tools, and philosophies that shape how fans reconstruct baseball’s past. Some replays strive for strict historical accuracy, preserving lineups, injuries, and managerial tendencies exactly as they occurred. Others embrace experimentation, using alternative rotations, optimized lineups, fictional drafts or auctions to create brand new teams from historical seasons, etc. Still others focus more on narrative immersion — chronicling each game as if reporting from the press box, blending box scores with the drama of unfolding storylines. This diversity reflects the richness of the hobby: no two replays are quite alike, yet all share a common desire to understand the game more deeply and relive past seasons.
What becomes clear, once you speak with replay enthusiasts, is that these projects are not merely solitary exercises. They form a shared language within the gaming community — a way for fans to compare experiences, debate outcomes, and celebrate the quirks of different engines and systems. The joy comes not only from the final standings but from the journey: the unexpected heroes, the statistical oddities, the seasons that unfold in ways both familiar and strange.
It is this collective creativity that inspired the SABR Games and Simulations Committee to launch the Replay /Survey Project in October 2025. By gathering data from across the community — documenting the games used, the seasons selected, the methods applied, and the outcomes achieved — the project aims to capture a clearer picture of how fans engage with baseball through simulation. The spreadsheet of results represents an attempt to map this vibrant replay landscape. What follows is a look at those findings – insights that reveal how replay enthusiasts continue to keep baseball’s history alive through the art of simulation.
Total Replay Projects Reported: 203
Seasons Represented – 84
Platform Used (PC or Cards & Dice)
- Cards & Dice – 124
- Computer – 79
Types Of Replays
- Historical Replays – 161
- Fantasy Replays – 40
- Tournaments – 2
Types of Replays (Seasons/Leagues, Teams or Individual Players)
- Season or League – 189
- One Team – 9
- One Player – 5
Most Popular Seasons
- 1908 and 1977 – 4 replays
- 1905, 1908, 1911, 1920, 1922, 1926, 1967, 1971, 1975, 1976, 1990 – 3 replays
Most Popular Decades
- 1970’s – 32 replays
- 1960’s – 29 replays
- 1920’s – 24 replays
- 1910’s – 18 replays
- 1900’s – 16 replays
- 1980’s – 15 replays
Number of Games Represented: 31
Most Replays Per Game (Top 10 most used games)
- APBA – 34
- Out Of The Park – 33
- Replay – 33
- Strat-O-Matic – 21
- Ball Park – 9
- Action PC – 8
- Diamond Mind – 7
- Dynasty League – 6
- Fall Classic – 6
- Payoff Pitch – 6
As I communicated with the respondents to this project, it became evident that the amount of time and passion devoted to this hobby was immense. Not everyone shared their results with me, but many that did demonstrated remarkable skill and attention to detail, whether it be in constructing websites or applications to document their projects, compiling detailed PDF summaries, creating excel spreadsheets comparing actual stats to replay stats, detailed posts on the Delphi forums, etc.
Below are some excellent examples:
Terry Pohland built an impressive website to document his 1982 season replay using Dynasty League Baseball powered by Pursue the Pennant. This is a Cards & Dice replay, so we’re talking about a long-term commitment here! https://www.mlbreplay1982.com/
Leonard McKnight, a long-time Baltimore Orioles fan, replayed the golden era of his beloved Orioles (1964-1983), using the APBA computer game and built a database application to document the project. Below are links to a video describing the project and an article Len authored on our website.
Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rImCJwyQjgs&t=5s
Article – https://sabrbaseballgaming.com/2026/04/30/1964-1983-golden-era-replay-project/
The game of choice for Michael Mathias is Replay (Cards & Dice) – he has replayed 27 seasons and has documented this herculean effort via his website:
Rod Caborn is another prolific replayer using cards & dice. Rod’s replays are completed using APBA, Rod extensively prepares for the replays and at their conclusion crafts a detailed PDF report for each season.
Report for the 1911 season replay: https://www.apbablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/11-NL-Yearbook-PDF.pdf
Rod is also a frequent contributor to the APBA Blog: https://www.apbablog.com/author/rod
David Artemiw built a website to document his 1977 Cards & Dice Strat-O-Matic replay. https://thelongestseason.davidartemiw.com/about
Glenn Evans has taken on the task of replaying every season in MLB history using the Out Of The Park game. Glenn’s project will re-imagine 1901 to the present day with a number of key differentiators and divergences from the historical record introduced along the way. Foremost among these is the removal of the color line to allow for a fully integrated version of the leagues from the get-go. Here is Glenn’s most recent post on our website chronicling the 1927 season: https://sabrbaseballgaming.com/2026/08/27/crossing-the-tracks-1927/
Not everyone has the inclination to build a website, but the replay passion shines through in different ways. The method of choice for many hobbyists is to share their projects via Delphi forum or Facebook postings, below are a couple of excellent examples:
Steve McPherson – Using the Diamond Mind Computer game replays the 1962 season: https://forums.delphiforums.com/DMBaseball/messages/?msg=2418.1&gid=2015524401
Delphi user RockBB Coach replays the 1973 season using the Fall Classic game, then creates these aged newspaper style articles to document the games: https://forums.delphiforums.com/dir-docs/fallclassicgame/0ddf3b05-9ba9-4e1b-a975-e6148ddad839/1_Aug_xGMx2x_under_2.88MB.jpg
In addition, many replayers simply do an excellent job of tracking the statistics of the replays and contrasting them to real life stats. Due to the random variance inherent in the game of baseball and in simulation games, you will never achieve 100% fidelity with real life stats, but most of the replayers I communicated with were satisfied with how closely the replay results correlated with real life. Below are a couple of examples:
Richard Moore conducted a Hank Aaron career replay using APBA. There is a handy excel formula (correlation coefficient) which measures how closely two sets of numbers align, the closer you get to 1, the closer the correlation. In the Aaron replay, Home Runs have a correlation of .91 and OPS of .94 – excellent! Hank Aaron Replay_Copy.xlsx
Dana Hoch completed a replay of the 2024 San Francisco Giants season using two games (Strat-O-Matic and Replay), the results were remarkably close to real life: Real ERA 3.92 vs. Replay 3.88, Real OPS .655, Replay .654, Real RBIs 654, Replay 665. Giants 2024 replay versus Real Season Stats.xls
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this endeavor! We intend to keep this project/survey open ended so if you have not already done so, please consider logging your replay project on our spreadsheet. The link below will take you to the Google form to document your replay and to the Google sheet that has all the projects that have been reported.
I've been a baseball fan since 1974, I was originally a New York Mets fan, but in 1989 I discovered Fantasy Baseball, in the span of a few years, I switched my allegiance from the Mets to the yearly batch of players on my Fantasy Teams. I'm still the commissioner of the two Fantasy Baseball leagues I started in 1989! In my work life I'm a Compliance Manager for a Hearing Aids manufacturer. In my spare time, I like to read, play baseball game simulations and spend time binge watching science fiction shows with my wife.
