SOM Diary: Rediscovering Strat-O-Matic

I was reading a very interesting article about the "ancestors" of Magic the Gathering by Richard Garfield. He mentioned Strat-O-Matic with its possibility to mix-and-match player cards or even draft them in a way that resembles real world drafts in the US professional sports (and inspired the limited "draft" play of Magic that I like to lay).

That mention reminded me of the old copy of Strat-O-Matic I had lying around in the basement from I-don't-remember-when-or-where. I dusted it off, found that I don't recognize any but a handful of player names (it's the 1992 edition, long before I started following MLB baseball) but checked it out again.

I clobbered together a few lineups (totally ignoring any historical facts) and tried rolling the dice for a few games. I was immediately hooked to the opportunity to generate games, box scores and statistics with real players.

This year is going well for the Red Sox, and all the teams in the AL East are playing well, so I think I'm going to get the 2013 cards as soon as they cmo out. Until then I'm running a practice round of play in the 1992 season. Here's how I set that up:

Picked 4 AL teams (Red Sox, Yankees, Orioles and Blue Jays) and 4 NL teams (Reds, Dodgers, Braves and Giants), created a small league schedule in which each team plays each own league's team 5 or 7 times (let's see how far I get, I won't finish anyway...) and each team in the other league twice.

Threw together team lineups based on the cards provided per franchise (no drafting, no transfers):
- picked 5 starters to form a five man rotation, sorted them by ERA and W-L record
- picked 8/9 batters as as tarting lineup, again based on ABs and general stats per position
- arbitrarily assigned one reliever with many saves the closer role and normal relievers jobs to all others

I downloaded the iScore app for my Android tablet to do the scoring and statistics, and am very happy how it works so far. The only thing I'm missing is a quick way to aggregate league statistics, league leaders etc. but apart from that it's a very fast way to keep track of what happens (when there are no X-results rolled, a Strat-O-Matic inning can take less than a minute to play).

I'd like to use this blog to keep track of some learnings and developments.