A recent blog post by Sports Collectors Digest Editor T.S. O'Connell made me chuckle. In it, he decided a good way to pass the time if he were to ever end up in prison. He didn't name the offense that would land him in such a predicament, but it he were there, he would pass the time by rattling off the stats on the Strat-O-Matic cards. He knew them from heart since he was a teen growing up.

While I didn't play Strat-O-Matic, I did play RBI Baseball on the first generation Nintendo, a practice I am proud to say I still enjoy from time to time. The copyright date on the "start" screen says 1987, which sounds about right. I had to play Nintendo at other people's home since I didn't get a Nintendo until some other systems were already in vogue, like the Sega Gensis and others.

A few years ago, I purchased a used Nintendo to replace the one I sold just after high school. And I bought RBI Baseball off of eBay. Last weekend, I challenged a friend of mine to a friendly game and we dove into an two-hour-long marathon. While we played, my friend kept asking me who the players were and I rattled them off like nothing. He said, "How do you remember that."

Part of that answer is easy - these were the guys I watched in my formative years and the ones whose cards I pored over nearly every day. (Who would keep Tony Armas on the bench with that home run total?) The second part of that answer was I played this game until my fingers bled and the book that came with it included the rosters with full names. Recalling this information was like riding a bike. I can tell you almost the entire roster of that game if I tried hard enough.

So now I ask you, are there any sports games that you can replay in your head easily and spit out "facts" from that game until you're blue in the face? I know there are a lot of other people out there like me and T.S.