All Star Baseball is one of the two most popular baseball board games of the last sixty years, and has been honored as one of the fifty most influential American board games of all time. It was manufactured by Cadaco-Ellis and designed by baseball player Ethan Allen.
The game first appeared in 1941 and a special version is still sold today. It was the best-selling baseball board game of all time, and is the only such game to have been distributed through mass market channels and toy stores for any extended period of time. The annual versions of the game were discontinued in the mid-1990s due to the loss of market share to video games and greatly increased player licensing costs, but a commemorative version was issued in 2003.
Unlike more simulation-focused competitors, most notably Strat-o-Matic Baseball, ASB is aimed at a younger audience and is simpler to play. The initial target audience was boys 9–12 years old. It simulates batters' performance well, but makes no attempt to model the performance of individual pitchers.
Nevertheless, many fans passionately bought each year's cards and collected statistics from neighborhood leagues, some amassing as many as 2,500 games worth of paper box scores and comparing those totals with the actual players' statistics.
Read more about All Star Baseball: Game Play, Players, Cards, Variants
Famous quotes containing the words star and/or baseball:
“To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)