TOWER GROVE — Nothing beats the real game. Grabbing a glove. Testing the weight of a few bats. Fielding bad hops and snow-coning liners. As W.P. Kinsella wrote and I have shamelessly borrowed a few times: The thrill of the grass.

But on nights like this one, when icy rain is falling and I’m racing to write this in case my power goes out (again), the grass is more chill than thrill and the game can be found elsewhere.

For sheer, unrelenting realism tabletop baseball’s best is Dynasty League Baseball, a deliciously detailed game that takes three dice, a stack of player cards, a couple guidebooks  and turns them into limitless ballpark possibilities.

The game is the son of Pursue the Pennant and the brainchild of Mike Cieslinski.  I’ve played a few times with the dice and several more times in the computer games and still  cannot comprehend the galactic possibilities of the game. Take, for instance, the ending of the ballgame MLB.com’s Matthew Leach and I  played for the purposes of this blog earlier this week.

The last roll of the dice was a natural 500.

If the three dice — red, white and blue, read in that order — equal 001-499, the hitter’s card is used. If the dice total 500-999, the pitcher’s card is used. Some riverboat-gambling managing left me with Don Sutton closing the game for the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers, facing  Rafael Ramirez, the shortstop for the 1982 Atlanta Braves. The defensive teams rolls, so protecting an 8-6 lead, I rolled.

Up came the 500. We turned to Sutton’s card and read:

BIZARRE

But more on that later.

Cieslinski’s Dynasty League Baseball will be one of the presenters at this weekend’s Winter Warm-Up, and it is worth going by the game’s both just to see for yourself how detailed it can be. A roll of the dice is just the start. Each roll is judged based on splits — different for a lefty vs. lefty than it is for a righty vs. a lefty or elsewhere. From there, the game spins into action with the type of hitter a player is (right-spray; left-pull) plays as much into the game as the ability of the defender he hit the ball toward.

In the game Leach and I played, shortstop Robin Yount made two diving “range plays” for me to squash Brave rallies. It took a total of three dice rolls to determine it was a range play, it was to shortstop and it was snared by a diving Yount.

A “deep drive” at Wrigley Field results in a different outcome than a “deep drive” at Busch Stadium. One place it most likely will be a home run.

At the other, it’s an out.

Cieslinski came by the Cardinals’ spring training campus in Jupiter, Fla., last spring and we played one full game with his computer simulation. We played a “World Series game”, pitting his Cardinals against the AL team of my choosing. I went with the Yankees. Jim Edmonds had a diving catch in the game to rob Gary Sheffield of an RBI  hit.  Mike Mussina tired quickly. And, if I remember correctly, Junior Spivey had the  two-out, RBI single that broke open the game for the Cardinals.

It was spring training.

The  computer game is  quicker to play than  the original, three-dice game and it gives you a play by play that is similar to the tabletop game. But it lacks the  tension of the roll. Leach and I brought out the dice and set up teams for our game this week.

Leach selected the ‘82 Braves and I went with the pennant-winning Brewers, who will be celebrating their 25th anniversary this season. He started Phil Niekro, and I went with none other than Clu Haywood … er, Pete Vuckovich.  Vuckovich walked in a run in the first inning and Leach’s Braves went up 3-0.

In the third inning,  a two-out grand slam by Milwaukee’s cleanup hitter Cecil Cooper put my wallbangers ahead.

And so it went.

Leach’s team took the lead and after Paul Molitor smoked a line drive off Steve Bedrosian for a single — seriously, that was the result of the dice roll — and scored to tighten the deficit, Leach brought in  Gene Garber.

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Milwaukee nine that day.

The score  stood 8-6 with  but  three more dice to cast.

Ben Oglivie led off the ninth with a solo home run. Pinch hitting for closer Rollie Fingers – whom I brought in to halt the Braves in the eighth — Ned Yost had a key RBI triple. The Brewers pulled ahead, but I had to find a pitcher to close out the game. This being a one-game exhibition and all I went with Sutton.

Then things got BIZARRE.

With the 500 on the board and a BIZARRE on the card, Leach went to the rule book. We hadn’t encountered this before. A few more rolls of the dice and it turns out that Sutton winched as he bounced a pitch to Ramirez. That meant a visit to the mound and another roll on the injury spectrum. Sutton’s durability came into play, as did how much he pitched and so on. I rolled.

He was OK.

Ramirez struck out.

Leach will get a rematch on this one, too.

This weekend at Bird Land: Updates of news, notes and anecdotes from Winter Warm-Up.

-30-