Video APBA: Look at me, I can lose long distance too

The APBA baseball league I’m in, the Illowa APBA League, is a face-to-face league. Considering that we play a 162-game schedule and that we have managers in Iowa, Illinois and Pennsylvania, we do pretty well to get all our games played.

Our schedules do play tricks on us though. When Teddy Ballgame couldn’t make it to the last IAL get-together in May, those of us scheduled to face his Chicago Champions were left to our devices to find ways to get our games played against him.

Teddy had a intriguing idea, though. Why not play using our video webcams?

Now, I’ve played APBA over the phone. And I even remember the old days when we used to send each other instructions over snail mail and play our home games solitaire. But I have to admit playing via video over Skype interested me so I thought I’d give it a try.

So Tuesday night, I fired up my Logitech webcam, connected to Skype and dialed up Teddy who was already online. Once we got the connection established over Skype, it worked pretty well. There were times that the video was a bit jolting but audio was clear as a bell.

This new format however, didn’t help my hapless Thunderchickens. We lost all six games against Teddy and his Chicago Champions. Just look at Teddy and the superior look on his face in the screencap above. I’ll tell you if we we’re playing face-to-face…

The first night I had the cam attached to the monitor. The second night, I had it attached to the stand that came with the cam. That was in hopes I had a awesome dice roll and I could easily give him a good “in your face” view of it. Alas, we didn’t have too many good rolls I could do that with since I think we led for a total of about 2 innings for the whole six game series.

Playing APBA via webcam doesn’t replace the real thing but in a pinch, it was best alternative I’ve come across. We were able to banter back and forth and talk about the latest in baseball news, my trip to the Big Ten Tourney. He could even say hi to the wife and kids.

Great idea, Teddy. But we hope you can make the IAL weekend next time.