Monday, December 1, 2014

2003 Billy Williams Cadaco Disc

I picked up at oddball for the Billy collection that set me back a whole quarter.



This comes from the 2003 Cadaco All Star Baseball game.  The Cadaco baseball game has been around since 1941.  It was invented by a former big leaguer (the Cubs were one of the six teams the played for) named Ethan Allen.


The game was fairly simple:  You had a card for each player.  When it was that player's at bat, the card was placed on a spinner, you spin, and use the following the chart to see what he did:

1 Home Run
2 Ground out
3 Fly out (Formerly Safe on error)
4 Fly out
5 Triple
6 Ground out
7 Single
8 Fly out
9 Walk (Base on balls)
10 Strikeout
11 Double
12 Ground out
13 Single
14 Fly out

The spacing of the numbers on the discs varied depending on the talent of the player.

Yearly updates of the discs were issued for years until licensing issues in the 1990s made the sets too expensive to produce.  The last regular game was made in 1993.

My Billy card came from a special Hall of Fame version that came out in 2003.  You can see the HOF logo on the back of the card.  Nothing new has come out since 2004.

I found a pretty comprehensive history of the game that you can read here.

As a kid, I didn't have any of the baseball board games, Cadaco, APBA, or Strat-o-Matic.  I had this one....


....Tudor electric baseball (the picture is borrowed from Ebay).  The board games strove to mimic a real game.  Tudor...not so much. But with Tudor we could whack the magnetic baseball.  And at least the runners had a track to run on and keep them moving in the right direction (unlike the football version where the players went all over the place).

Anyone else play the board games or the Tudor game??

1 comment:

  1. I had electric football as a kid, and in my teens I played a baseball board game called Statis-Pro. It's similar to Strat & APBA in that it's a statistical game, but it just never caught on the way that the other two did. I could never get my short-attention-span friends to learn how to play, so most of the games were played on my bed with me managing both teams.

    One thing that was interesting about Statis Pro is that they gave you the formulas to create your own cards based on player statistics and some subjective judgements on things like fielding... Because of that, you can usually find current card sets on eBay.

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