VintageMeld

I was surprised and excited to come across a picture of a gentleman holding up a couple of Strat-O-Matic cards in this past Tuesday’s edition of Newsday. The gentleman it turns out is Hal Richman, who invented Strat-O-Matic as an 11-year-old in 1948 and unleashed what I believe is the most realistic and most fun baseball simulation game ever on the world in 1961.

From the product Announcement page at Strat-O-Maticmedia.com:

Strat-O-Matic Negro League All-Stars will be available on Nov. 1, 2009 on both CD and as a traditional Strato dice game. It includes 103 of the greatest players in Negro League baseball history including Gibson, Paige, Bell, Chino Smith, Ray Dandridge, Martin Dihigo, Rube Foster, John Beckwith, Buck O’Neil and many more. The set brings to life every Negro League player inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, well known players who were candidates for the Hall during the special election of 2006, plus a few special players recognized by the Cuban and Mexican Halls of Fame.

I first came to Strat-O-Matic by sort of an accident. I remember when I was very young my cousins had the 1978 or ‘79 APBA game which I loved playing with them. Similar to Strat in that each major league player has a game card which decides the results of their at-bats by the toss of dice, at the time it was pretty basic, though I have played since then and see more of the complexities of that game now than I did when I was, what, 7.

Another game which comes streaming back as I write this was my Dad’s old Sports Illustrated game, which just had a folded sheet of paper for each of the 1969 teams with each player listed on it and results also dictated by the die. In fact, I recall looking for that one on eBay awhile back, and I believe they’re quite collectible now as are the APBA cards.

But way back when in 1984, when I finally had enough paper route money together to buy my own first game I couldn’t find APBA or a modern version of Dad’s SI game, but I did run into something I’d never heard of called Strat-O-Matic on the Toys-R-Us shelves. Well what I got just blew the other games away. To this day what I remember about APBA were the cute nicknames they applied to each players cards; what I remember about the SI game was quality time with Dad; what I remember about Strat-O-Matic was the realism.

The front of a pair of 1969 season Strat-O-Matic cards. These are what I always thought of as the fronts for basic play. Typically the backs of the cards are set up for righty-lefty match-ups and that's when it gets really fun!

Righty-lefty splits, ballpark factors, more info on each card and as I began playing out a season what I found to be a very realistic picture of the stats. While it was fun to play the more basic versions of the cards such as those shown above–they made the 1983 version of Rance Mulliniks an MVP candidate and Steve Lake a must at catcher–I also had the option of flipping my cards over to the Advanced side, playing the splits and turning those two players back into their far less than spectacular selves (But Rance sure did rake on his half of the platoon, plus he’s the last person I’ve ever run across named Rance! If your name is Rance please comment below so I know you’re out there.).

Anyway the point here is that during that summer, age 12, I was obsessed with this game. I made up scoresheets for each game I played, rolled my dice through a full season of an 8-team league. I made trades between the teams as they were issued and grabbed all the players I only wished my real Yankees had traded for. I wrote out leader boards and standings. While always proficient in math I noticed that I stopped gaining ground in the advanced classes around the same time the mathematical concepts pushed beyond the realm of relevancy to baseball stats–man, if only sabermetrics were a little further along then!

So it was paging through the local Long Island paper that this all came streaming back to me this week. The Strat-O-Matic company is local, based in Glen Head, Long Island, which may explain why I found a copy so easily 25 years ago. This Negro league set is based more on the idea of their Hall of Fame set, which rather than basing the card results on a single years worth of stats (like my old ‘84 set) the results are based on a compilation of the main 5-7 years of a player’s career. According to Richman this is something the Strato company had been looking to do for a long time, but they just didn’t have access to the proper date to create the cards. Then along came Scott Simkus of Chicago, a customer with access to more than 3,000 Negro League boxscores, who made the Negro League game possible and will be rewarded with royalties for his contribution.

Great game, great idea, great company. Thanks to Newsday for bringing me back to 1984 (or yeah, really 1983, those are my stats) and to Hal Richman for continuing to bring this fun and involving game to new generations and collectors alike.

PS: There’s a pretty fun version of Strat-O-Matic that can be played online through the SportingNews.com. You can get yourself though a season in a few weeks and become as involved as you want with setting lineups and match-ups. I play regularly during the baseball off-season when I’m suffering from Roto withdrawal.

But if you like rolling the dice and playing the way I used to play, you can pick up the latest edition of the Strat-O-Matic Baseball game on Amazon.com (and yes, that’s an affiliate link).