A Strat-O-Matic Baseball Memoir
Player cards were cardboard discs that slipped over a spinner. Each disc was divided into numbered sections, with each number representing a strikeout, walk, single, out, home run, and so on. Players who had hit more home runs, or struck out more, in real life had bigger home run, and strikeout, zones. I never heard it called anything but The Disc Game.
You could play a more or less realistic game of baseball. But there was no strategy; no hit-and-run, stolen base, or sacrifice. The pitcher wasn’t part of it. There was also the problem of having the spinner come to rest precisely on a line separating two sections of a player’s disc.
One of the guys in The Disc Game league no doubt saw the advertisement in a sports magazine: PLAY 1968 BIG LEAGUE BASEBALL GAMES. The ad, for a company named Strat-O-Matic, promised realistic action. Ferguson Jenkins and Bob Gibson would display pinpoint control. Hank Aaron would catch line drives other outfielders would fail to reach. Frank Howard would be among the leaders in both home runs and strikeouts. The same ad I remember seeing in baseball magazines years earlier; same copy, with only the players’ names changed each season.
The 1968 cards were ordered, and arrived, as they still do, early in the spring following the baseball season. During the moon landing / Woodstock summer vacation of 1969, when I was taking driver’s ed, while the Cubs were blowing their big lead in the NL East, the four Disc Game league guys — acquaintances of mine since kindergarten — passed the time playing Strat-O-Matic baseball.
One morning that fall, while waiting for American Government class to begin, I overheard baseball talk and asked what was up. I ended up asking to join the league. It met, almost every night during that senior year of high school, in the basement belonging to a patient and understanding set of parents.
Songs on the radio at the time — “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “American Woman,” “Instant Karma,” “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” – still bring back not only memories of record labels and colors, and finally getting out of school, but SOM sessions in that basement.
1968 was the Year Of The Pitcher. For a while, it looked like an average under .300 would take the American League batting title. Bob Gibson compiled a still unbelievable 1.12 ERA, and Denny McLain won 31 games. In the 1968 SOM game, .300 hitters and pitchers who allowed more than one hit per inning were equally rare.
Players did, as the ad copy said they would, go into slumps and have hot streaks. Managers tried various slump cures. One was to hold the fading hitter’s card in one hand and slap it repeatedly against the other. If the whole starting lineup wasn’t hitting, they all got the wake-up treatment. Cold hitters were left in a sunny spot, with the hope that their bats would heat up. Frank Quilici, a Minnesota Twins infielder who later managed the Twins, went into a slump that earned him a place in his manager’s doghouse. To drive the point home, Skip drew a doghouse on Quilici’s card.
With only the 1968 set of cards, our teams consisted of, per mutual agreement, our favorite players. Seven full 40 game seasons, about one per month, were played in the time before graduation. The SOM advertising copy didn’t warn us that players could take on larger than life personas.
Frank Fernandez was the ’68 Yankees’ backup catcher. He hit only .170 in limited action but had a high home run percentage and drew a lot of walks. In SOM, players with similar numbers often had a partial column of walks, and homeruns on 11 and 12 in two columns. “The Fern,” as he became known in the basement, went on a homer tear, often with runners on and his team losing in the late innings of close games. KOOOSH, his manager would exclaim, swinging an imaginary bat to illustrate what had just happened. Not AGAIN, more than one opposing skipper would moan upon spotting the dice, a white 1 and two red 12s, on the table top. He was also known to go yard on 2-5, a roll that produced a home run only if a draw from the 20 card split deck turned up the number 1.
Certain managers — myself among them after a while — developed a knack for, while following the flow of a game, memorizing the sequence of the split cards. They’d know that the 17, that meant death at the plate for all but the fastest runners, and outs across on the outfield fielding chart, was due. The instructions advise that the split deck be shuffled every three innings. Not us. We shuffled it whenever we remembered to, or when the shit-eating grin on someone’s face gave away the fact that they knew the 20 was on top, and that they should hold their runners on that open-ended double.
The game also gave the extroverted among us, and guys like me who’d been raised on radio, to become our own play-by-play announcers. Tiger hitters didn’t merely strike out. They “stood there like the house by the side of the road,” as Ernie Harwell would have had them do, or were called out for excessive window shopping. Cardinals who homered didn’t get the usual “it’s gone,” or even a KOOOSH. The dice fell, it might be – it could be – IT IS! Ho-lee COW . . . (Somewhere, there must be someone playing the 2005 Yankees, who wraps up every victory with “thaaa Yankees — WIN!)
The 1969 cards arrived. Pitchers, in return for doing their jobs and shutting down the offense, were rewarded by having the mound lowered by five inches. Batting averages spiked. New hitters emerged from the shadows: Carl Taylor, Pirates, .348; Rich Reese, Twins, .322; Bill Melton, White Sox, 23 homers. There were also four expansion teams, whose rosters were dotted with colorful names: Coco Laboy, Expos; Mike Fiore, Royals; Al Santorini, Padres.
By now, we had the first printing of the All-Time Teams, and Groups A and B of Hall Of Famers. Frank Fernandez’ manager also did something unheard of in 1970: he dialed the Strat-O-Matic number in Glen Head, New York, long distance from Michigan, and asked if they had any other teams lying around. They did, and sent us a complete 1967 set, and the 1966 Dodgers and Pirates.
More cards complicated the player selection process. An equitable system of player distribution became more elusive. Drafts could still mean an out-of-balance league. Several seasons were aborted once it appeared that one or two teams had tipped the scales in their favor. Demands to “pick over” filled the basement. “Pick over,” in fact, became our own Remember The Alamo. Turning the cards over and dealing them out like playing cards, subjecting each manager to pure chance, was tried, once. More howls filled the basement, from managers who had too many players “white as the driven snow,” pure from non-use, .200 hitters all, come their way. The honor system eventually fell back in place, and an inspection committee was appointed to make sure no one’s team was “too tough.”
Teams assumed their managers’ personalities. Some preferred all or nothing players like The Fern, who had low batting averages, a column of strikeouts, and home runs on 2-5 and 11s and 12s. This lineup often brought into play “the dreaded all 4 outfield,” in which all three positions were manned by fielders with the lowest rating, when a “flyball X” to an outfielder roll made the two guys playing the other game pause to watch the fireworks. Some went for pitchers who lived on the edge, walking a lot while striking out a lot and allowing relatively few hits per inning; like Nolan Ryan, who often had strikeouts on sixes, sevens and eights in two columns, with the third mostly walks.
I liked players with high on base percentages, who hit for lower averages but walked a lot, and pitchers who gave up their fair share of hits but kept the ball in the yard; who would hopefully get my picks past the “too tough” inspectors. The more positions, the better, and the lesser-known, the better. Like Roger Bresnahan, the turn of the century National League catcher, who also played third and the outfield, who was the only catcher with an A stealing rating; his blue lifetime side, not his brown best-year side.
In the summer between high school and college, Frank Quilici’s manager, by assigning a point value to each number in a SOM column — one point for 2, two for 3, and so on, back to one point for 12 — began to crack the code. He discovered that the point value of groundballs and flyballs followed by an X, that required a split card draw and the fielding chart, was the same on every pitcher’s card. By averaging the point value totals of hits and walks on 1968 and 1969 pitchers, he came up with a formula that would allow us to create a reasonably accurate card for any non-pitcher who’d played more than a half season, thus giving us enough stats to work with. The pages of The Baseball Encyclopedia were then scoured for dead-ball era .400 hitters, and forgotten players who’d put up astronomical numbers over one season. His formula became the subject of a term paper for a college statistics class. Grade: “A.”
Higher education, and the adult world, failed to stop the dice from rolling. The Fern’s manager joined the Army and occasionally drove home to Michigan from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on a weekend pass for the sole purpose of playing SOM baseball. That meant squeezing a 40 game season into two days. We didn’t mind. We were still kids, and having our friend back for even a brief time made shelving our plans worth it.
The league roster did change, depending on who didn’t have a free night, who was going to school out of town, and who had joined. We junked the draft and played whole teams; the Big Red Machine, the Oakland A’s three-time champions, the revived Yankees, the Lynn-Rice-Fisk Red Sox. We now had an impressive accumulation of cards. When members come and go, even among friends, cards and teams have a way of going with them and not returning. It was decided that someone should, for safekeeping, take all the cards we weren’t using, including our 1968 first set. The person least likely to lose them. All fingers pointed in my direction.
The popular song goes: “Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.” Wedding bells succeeded where school, work, and the Army, failed; what with wives having a natural aversion to anything that takes up too much of their husbands’ time, that doesn’t directly involve them. The 1978s were the last set of new cards we ordered. One day, we wrapped up a season and never made plans for the next one. And that was that. We kinda knew, anyway.
Out of habit, through the 80s and into the 90s, I ordered a new set of cards every spring, with the 96 additional players as a completist should. I missed finding out who had received a 1 fielding rating, and what the Tigers looked like.
Casey Stengel said that there came a time in every man’s life, and that he’d had plenty of them. There also comes a time in the life of every pack rat with a houseful of stuff and no kids (no heirs) to think about what’s going to happen to the stuff once he’s playing SOM with the angels; real angels, not the LA ones of Anaheim.
The pack rat also wonders how it would go if the league reunited, even for one night, and whipped off ten games each like in the old days. None of us would be the same person we were in 1969. Some of us might not even like each other. Precisely why I don’t go to high school reunions, and why I’m glad the Beatles never played a reunion show. The whole process serves as reminder that you’re old, and that seeing old friends one more time might really mean one last time.
The pack rat sold a few cards online; 90s sets never used, still in their shipping bags, and the broken 70s sets that, with cards missing, can’t be played anyway and belong in the hands of a collector. The rest are still here. (The finger pointers were right.) Frank Fernandez waits for a reunion; for one more night of baseball talk and B.S. around a kitchen table, and a few more shots at another 2-12 home run.
