APBA (All-Pro Basketball Association) is a licensed baseball simulation game that allows users to play virtual baseball games using cards that each represent a real Major League Baseball (MLB) player. While APBA does provide official cards for current and historical MLB players, it is also possible to create custom cards for fun or to represent specific leagues, seasons, or what-if scenarios not covered in the official sets.
The first step is to select the players you want to create cards for. This could be players from past or present MLB teams and seasons, or entirely fictional players you invent. Make sure to come up with key stats like name, position, batting/throwing hand, age, team, etc. You’ll also need to research their actual career stats if representing real players. Sites like Baseball-Reference are great for looking up stats.
Once you have your player roster selected, you need to assign ratings. APBA uses a scale of 0-9 for key attributes that determine a player’s abilities in different aspects of the game. The most important ratings to focus on include: Contact (ability to make contact hitting the ball), Power (ability to hit for extra bases/home runs), Eye (ability to recognize balls and strikes), Speed (baserunning speed), Arm Strength (throwing arm talent), and Fielding (defense/range at their position). You’ll want to study actual career stats and performances to determine appropriate ratings that best summarize a player’s skills and talents.
In addition to the 0-9 attribute ratings, APBA cards also include specific season stats like batting average, home runs, runs batted in (RBI), stolen bases, wins, earned run average (ERA) and more. For real players, use their stats from a single representative season. For fictional players, use your research and creative discretion to come up with realistic single-season stats. Things like batting average and ERA usually fall within certain typical ranges based on the attribute ratings you assigned.
Once you have all the relevant stats and ratings populated, you can begin laying out the design of the actual cards themselves. APBA baseball cards have a standard template to follow that includes spaces for things like the team logo, player name, position, batting stats, pitching stats, attributes, and any special notes. You can either recreate this template by hand on index/playing cards, or find custom baseball card templates online to populate digitally if printing yourself.
Get creative with added visual elements on the cards as well. Things like action shots of the player, achievements and awards from their career, or fun illustrations all help bring the cards to life. You can also include small bits of flavor text with quotes, fun facts, or career highlights. Make sure all relevant info is legible at a small card size once printed.
With your roster of fully-designed cards complete, the next step is getting them into playable form in an APBA game. There are a few options – you can either include them as purely for display/collecting, incorporate them into a custom league roster file for the APBA computer/mobile games, or even print out full rosters, stats sheets andtemplates to use your custom cards in an physical tabletop game of APBA.
No matter how you plan to use your created cards, following the APBA template and standards for attributes, stats and player details will help them seamlessly fit into the existing APBA game system. With some research, creativity and patience laying everything out, you can have a fully customized set of baseball cards ready to enhance APBA games with historical, fictional or just downright fun player representations not seen anywhere else.
