May 2024

Bring Me the Stats of Biff Pocoroba

by Jon Fain

Paul was a big boisterous guy with a blonde brush-cut, a little older than me, a Vietnam Vet who got hired as the shipping and receiving clerk at the wallpaper company. Soon after he started, he came in to work in a St. Louis Cardinals jersey.

You didn’t see many of those around Boston, and when I asked about it, Paul told me he wore it “in solidarity!” During the previous year, 1981, after a couple of months of games, there had been a strike in Major League Baseball. The strike settled, and teams resumed play and completed a second short season. The Reds and Cardinals finished with the best winning percentages in the National League, but overall records didn’t matter, only the division winners made the playoffs. Cincinnati and St. Louis finished second in their divisions in both seasons. The Cardinals got especially screwed because in the second short season, the Montreal Expos through a scheduling fluke played and won one more game than the Cardinals, and so St. Louis got edged out for the division by a half-game.

Numbers mattered to Paul, who was something of a math savant. Maybe it was hereditary; he had two older brothers who worked at MIT. In Vietnam, Paul had been in Army intelligence (“insert joke here!”), tasked with deciphering troop and supply levels from captured soldiers’ documents. As the wallpaper company shipping clerk, he was always writing into notebooks, which I assumed at first was something like the weights and costs of everything he sent out. I would find out that they were about something else.

Paul loved baseball, although claimed he’d never played. He was not a fan of any team — he hated the Red Sox, their followers and “quirky bandbox!” especially. He didn’t seem to care particularly about individual players. He did like some of their names, however. One favorite was “Biff Pocoroba!” that he shouted for a while as a salutation whenever he saw me coming. But his real passion showed itself in a different way. The notebooks he kept weren’t for shipping — they were for stats.

Whenever Paul had a free moment, you’d see him tossing dice on the top of boxes of wallpaper pushed together. It wasn’t craps. He had created a dice baseball game, and if you came by, he’d invite you to play. Which basically meant you rolled the dice when it was your team’s turn, sometimes one at a time, and Paul would tell you what happened, less in a radio announcer’s play-by-play than a basic just-the-facts narrative. Every roll of the dice meant something different according to score, baserunners, numbers of outs, what inning. There were rolls for home runs, walks, strikeouts, and double plays. He eventually gave me a copy of a “rulebook” filled with charts, descriptions, and drawings that I still have. In it he says once you become fluent with the rules you can play a nine-inning game in nine minutes.

Paul designed his game to reflect actual big-league averages over many seasons and set up a seven-team league that played a 150-game schedule. You had to admire the rigor of his obsession. The most striking thing — in a manner of speaking ­— were the rules that described hit batsmen. If you rolled a two with both dice, then with a single die a four, it meant the batter was hit by a pitch. Then you rolled both dice to determine the extent of the player’s injury. If you rolled doubles next, the batter was injured and had to leave the game. But then, if a 12 was rolled three times in a row — like Roy Chapman, the only one it happened to in major league history — the player died from the injury. According to Paul’s rulebook, the “odds of a potential death in dice baseball are precisely 60,466,176 to 1.”

But the best part was that before Paul started each of his “seasons” he went to the Boston Public Library and looked through telephone books from around the country, to find names for players. He kept detailed stats in those notebooks of his, memorizing what happened in each game and recording the results when he was finished. He charged himself 10 cents admission for each game he played, and then, after going through the season and having playoffs, wrote checks to all the people whose names he had borrowed for the team that was the champion, and mail them to their addresses from the phone book. He didn’t send any note or anything, just the checks. I asked him what happened, and he laughed and said they usually just cashed them.

The wallpaper company had been in process of moving its whole operation across the country to San Francisco when Paul joined us, and like me, he had turned down the offer to relocate. A few years later, I’d moved out of town, but while walking down Comm Ave one morning after being back in Boston and spending the night at a friend’s, I heard someone call out my name from the street.

Paul was passing by on his bicycle, headed to work. We talked for a few minutes, one of those cool times when you’re unexpectedly in the presence of someone you knew for a while and liked a lot. And then they go away on their bicycle again.

Later, since I’d told him where I’d moved, I hoped that he might hunt down my address, add me to one of his teams, and if we won the championship, I’d get a check for my playoff share. I’d cash it with pride, remembering a great season. But I never heard from him again, and he’s one of those who’s even eluded any internet search.

Who knows? Maybe he ended up in St. Louis. I can see him in that replica Cardinals’ jersey, throwing dice and keeping track of hits, runs, and errors. And the occasional hit batsman, of course.

Jon Fain is a writer and editor living in Massachusetts. Some of his recent publications include short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety and The Argyle Literary Magazine, flash fictions in The Broadkill Review and Midsummer Dream House, micro fictions in Blink-Ink and ScribesMICRO, and a chapbook of flash fiction, Pass the Panpharmacon! from Greying Ghost Press. He has stories forthcoming in Yellow Mama, The Twin Bill, and elsewhere.