Superstar Baseball began life in 1971 as Sports Illustrated Baseball. This product came packaged in a small blue box with an elegant silver line drawing of a baseball player embossed on the box lid. I scanned a black-and-white image of this cover, as you can see.

The 1971 game covered the 1970 season, so an oddity about this edition is that you can manage the Milwaukee Brewers in the season which was (up until April) supposed to be the Seattle Pilots' second year. As for the 1971 game itself, the charts were quite cumbersome. They measured slightly larger than 11 x 17 inches and were tri-folded. On the front 'cover' of each team's charts were names, jersey numbers, and minimal statistics for the 1970 season (HR, Average, and RBI for batters; Wins, Losses, and ERA for pitchers). Upon opening the chart, you'd find two separate batters' charts-one for facing lefties, and one for facing righties. These charts listed each player's jersey number along the top, and the familiar 10-39 dice combinations down the sides. At the bottom, you'd see the running rating (0-5) enclosed in a colored star. Green stars were good bunters, and Red stars indicated poor bunters.

The pitchers batting (which wasn't broken down for the righty-lefty platooning) occupied the third batting chart, placed between the 'vs. left' and 'vs. right' position players charts. The actual pitching charts were on the back. Finally, one panel of this tri-folded behemoth showed a ballpark layout and included notes about the team. While informative, this design did not lend itself well to ease-of-use.

A sample chart is shown at right.

So...

In 1972, covering the 1971 season, the charts were radically changed. At that time, the charts were reduced to slightly more than a standard 8 1/2 x 11 document, printed on both sides. On one side were all of the batters charts, with each batter reserving two 'rows' (one for vs. lefties, and one for vs. righties). The dice combinations (10-39) ran along the top of the page. On the reverse side were all pitching charts (for pitching and for pitchers batting). This streamlined form of the charts is about as close to perfect as Sports Illustrated would come.

In fact, this format was so good and the game was apparently popular enough for Time, Inc. (parent company of Sports Illustrated) to market a new game (though the copyright date is 1973). This game was called Sports Illustrated All-Time All-Star Baseball, and is a treasured game by collectors to this day. It came in a manilla envelope and cost a whopping $5.95, as I recall. The charts were identical in form to those described for the 1971 season, but only the original 16 NL and AL franchises were included in the set.

For each team, the Sports Illustrated staff determined the best players for each franchise and produced charts covering the five (or seven, depending upon who's account you read) best consecutive seasons for those players. This was a conscious decision, as using the entire lifetime averages would diminish each player's abilities. And after all, we all remember players in their heyday, not struggling to perform in their past-twilight years.

To see a portion of an All-Time All-Star chart, click here.

But it all went to hell in 1972.

Probably due to production costs (after all, the previous charts were on glossy stock and printed in full color), the 1972 season's charts were printed in single-color format on perforated sheets of cardstock. The charts still included lefty/righty abilities, but the colorful indication of hits (green in the original charts), outs (red), strikeouts (blue), and walks (yellow) had gone away. Instead, a cold undelineated two inch by 1 1/4 inch card was substituted. Also, the iconic results had been replaced by two-letter mnemonics. For example, the "(1+)" result which used to indicate "single [1], with runners on second and third scoring [+], with an option for baserunners other than the batter to advance [( )]" was replaced with the much-less-aesthetic '1D' result. Likewise, "(F)" became "FM", "1*" became "1A", and "(SF)" became "MS."

Furthermore, the new set, renamed Pennant Race and issued in a long box format, included only 13 batters for each Major League team and very few pitchers (half of the teams got 6, the rest got 7). Worst of all, the tiny cards did not even include the familiar 10-39 dice combinations. Rather, you had to place each card into a small 'frame' on the board to determine which result lined up with which numbers.

To wax nostalgic, I've included the box art and a sample card. The card is really about 2.5 x 1.5 inches, but it's bigger here for readability purposes. Note the lack of dice roll numbers. You had to use the silly frame on the board to determine that Richie Allen's homers against righties are on 21 and 22.

Then came the game called Superstar Baseball. It gets a little fuzzy here, as some folks insist that Sports Illustrated first packaged this game to include large perforated cardstock versions of the All-Time All-Star game. I have heard recently, though, that SI packaged 90-odd players from the original ATAS charts into a long-box format called Superstar Baseball. This set included a few modern players (like Tom Seaver). In short, they converted the highly-regarded ATAS game to an ever-so-slightly more acceptable version of Pennant Race.

At this time, The Avalon Hill Game Company purchased the entire line of Sports Illustrated games, lock stock and barrel. When Avalon Hill released Superstar Baseball, in a bookcase game format, it included most of the 96 players from the SI Superstar Baseball game, though one or two cards of modern players were replaced with other 'modern' stars. I'm not sure why this slight change was made.

This is the game you get today when you pick up a copy of the no-longer-printed Superstar Baseball. Like Pennant Race before, this game suffers from the fact that individual cards do not include the 10-39 dice combinations.

To Avalon Hill's credit, they consulted their crystal ball to determine which contemporary players (mid 1970s) would some day be considered 'all-time all-stars,' and they published a 48-card upgrade to the game including these players. Some of the guys were no-brainers, but others didn't pan out (like Don Money).

Well, to wrap up, the event sponsored by Avalon Hill during the prime of AvalonCon was known as the Superstar Baseball tournament, as that was the game Avalon Hill sold. But the event has never included only the players from that 96-card product. Fans of this game still fall back on the old tried-and-true Sports Illustrated All-Time All-Star Baseball. That's the best of the lot and the benchmark for all baseball simulations which attempt to include career reflections of baseball players' statistics.