The Veet’s Rare Event Card Deck – pt 2

January 16, 2025

I was looking back at some old newsletters of mine that I had written for a
very small audience back in the 80s, and stumbled across a game report from
around ’86 or ‘87 that described a fight breaking out between two teams in an
exhibition game. Since no other Rare Event chart of my creation had provisions
concerning a fight interrupting a game, I am forced to deduce that The Veet’s
Rare Event card deck was in use at the time. According to the writeup, Cleveland
pitcher Early Wynn “was given a warning for throwing too close to (George)
Sisler’s head. Wynn left the game, but in the seventh his replacement Mike Garcia
drilled Paul Blair in the shoulder. Blair charged the mound, both benches
emptied, and fifteen minutes later, Blair, Garcia, Nap Lajoie and Al Rosen were
tossed out of the game.”

Hit batters are handled in Extra Innings thusly: when a 2-1-1 comes up on the
first roll, the batter is hit if both he and the pitcher are right or left handed,
and there are less than two out (with two out, it doesn’t matter which side of the
plate you hit from). So, if both Wynn and Sisler are right handed, then Sisler
would be plunked if there was less than two out. But we know that Sisler is a lefty,
and it so happens that the situation above occurred with less than two out. In this
case there is no hit batter. In my imagination however, this goes down as a case of
chin music; the batter gets knocked down. This is not enough to ignite a fight. I’ll
eject a pitcher if he hits two batters in a game, but this also does not instigate a
fight. In order for there to be a fight, here’s what has to happen: First, a rare event
has to be triggered on the first roll; anything from 2-3-6 to 2-5-6. Next, the rare
event card that is drawn has to be the one that says “BENCH CLEARING BRAWL.” This
card reads, “Roll first roll again- if it is a hit batter, fight ensues.” So you can
see, a fight is contingent on a couple of things, triggered first by a rare event roll,
followed by a roll of 2-1-1, which has a 1 in 216 chance of happening. The amazing
thing about this rare event fight occurring way back then is that nearly forty years
have passed before it happened again!

In 2021 or 22, The Veet and I were playing a game in our Negro Leagues King of the
Hill tournament. We played by phone as he was in Atlanta while I am in California.
My other EI buddy Eddie Ballgame was present, flipping the rare event cards as they
came up, while providing sarcastic commentary on the game being played. In the top half
of the fifth inning in a game between the visiting Hilldale Daisies and the home
Atlantic City Bacharach Giants, Hilldale shortstop Jake Stevens was up with two out and
a runner on second and Atlantic City pitcher Red Grier on the hill, when the Bench 
Clearing Brawl rare event card was drawn. The Veet put his phone on FaceTime and we
saw him roll a 2-1-1! Grier had hit Stevens!! The benches cleared, and we had a good old
fashioned donnybrook going on! These are the instructions on the rare event card that
explain what to do next:

Roll to determine each player’s possibility of ejection, including the bench…

We had to roll for each player! It was hilarious! Just the fact that after decades of use,
having a batter get hit by a pitch after drawing this particular card amazed us and we
just went into fits of laughter as we rolled for each player. By the way, the possibility
of ejection differs among pitchers, bench players, fielders, etc. In all, three Hilldales
and five Giants were sent to the showers.

Most recently, there were a couple of key games rolled in my Top 8 1990 league where the
rare event deck loomed large…

The final days of the regular season were as nail-biting as you can get, and in the second
game of a four game set to end the season, the top two teams were going at it in a slugfest
of a duel…The visiting A’s entered the game three back of the Mets, and they saw an early
3-1 lead disappear in the bottom of the third when the Mets put up a five spot to give them
a 6-3 lead. Each club put up a run after that, and with the score 7-4 in the top of the ninth,
the Mets had their closer John Franco on the mound, and he ran into trouble. Cutting to the
chase, with two out and one run in thanks to Rickey Henderson’s third homer of the game, the
A’s had two runners on base with switch hitting shortstop Walt Weiss at the plate. The first
roll triggered a rare event card, which read: “Homer or triple for any player not rated for
these hits.” It so happens that Weiss is rated for home runs, but not for triples, so he got the
rare event triple to tie the game at three, in a game that the A’s eventually won in extra
innings to put them two out with two to go! I’ve got plenty of stories like this that have
happened through the years. Since I do have a penchant for rambling incessantly, let’s stick
to this recently completed project in the interest of time…

There was a rare event card that triggered a rain delay in game two of the Top 8 1990
Championship series between the Mets and the Pirates. The rare event card came up in the top
of the fifth, and it called for a rain delay (rainouts have been forever banned from all my
leagues…) with the duration to be determined by a roll of all three dice. My roll resulted in
a one hour rain delay. The card further instructs that when play resumes, deduct one point
from pitcher’s effectiveness for each half-hour of delay. In this case, Pirates pitcher Neal
Heaton was reduced to -1 on the hits, and Mets starter David Cone went from -5 2 1 1 to -3 2 – 1.

For Heaton, the delay mattered little, as he went on to pitch six innings, allowing three earned
runs. For Cone, the effect was immediate. He gave up three singles and a walk and was removed
without recording an out in the bottom of the sixth. The Pirates wound up scoring five runs in
the inning, three of them belonging to Cone. The Pirates won 5-3 and would go on to lose the
series in five to the Mets. Now, I admit I have no recollection of whether any of those hits came
as a direct result of the reduction of effectiveness in Cone’s ERA adjustment. It could be that
one or more of the hits would have been an out if he continued to take away five lines on singles.
I just don’t recall.

At any rate, using The Veet’s rare event card deck adds the element of surprise, which can
sometimes have a say in the outcome of a game. And this, in my mind, takes the entertainment
value of Extra Innings up a notch over other tabletop baseball games.