I managed the Giants while the computer managed the Dodgers.
In 1961, Hal Richman, a Bucknell University mathematics student, began selling an early version of his baseball tabletop game, Strat-O-Matic, out of his basement. He lost money until 1963, when his decision to release a game containing one card for each player in Major League Baseball significantly increased sales.
Richman with his Strat-o-Matic. He was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in March 2011.
In 1966, I turned thirteen and discovered Strat-O-Matic’s statistical research and development methods, which revealed players’ abilities. The set of cards that came with the game included several teams from the 1965 season. I had the Dodgers (great pitching, but not much offense) and the Giants (great hitting, but not enough pitching). I also had the Minnesota Twins so that I could replay the World Series between the Dodgers and the Twins. I was a loner, and the beauty of Strat-O-Matic is that you could play by yourself, managing both teams.
My biggest thrill was adding to my collection some of the greatest teams in history – the 1927 and 1961 New York Yankees, the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers, the 1954 New York Giants, and a bunch more.
I can’t count the hours of fun I had playing Strat-O-Matic as a youngster. I didn’t play the game beyond my teenage years, and as a young adult, I lost the board game during a cross-country move.
Later in Life, I learned that Strat-O-Matic had developed a computer version of the game. I phoned the company to order the game. The gentleman who answered told me all about the computer version and advised me on system requirements and other details. At one point, he identified himself as Hal Richman, and I couldn’t believe he was answering the phones himself! He explained that it was the New Year, and many of his employees were on a two-week break starting at Christmas.
I enjoy the computer version, but I do miss the cards and rolling the dice in the original board game version.
Courtesy Moby Games
I bought my first computer in 1996, a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion desktop, and discovered Stormfront Studios Old Time Baseball, an MS-DOS game released in 1995 by one of its chief developers, Don Daglow.
The game includes every team from 1871 to 1981, so it is a blast to play the 1927 Yankees against the 1961 Yankees, for example. You can choose either Mel Allen or Curt Gowdy as your announcer.
The graphics are rudimentary, but players’ motions are realistic. Although one can play it as an arcade game, I find it more satisfying to play the game in managerial mode. I realize that graphics have come a long way since then, with highly realistic-looking players and actions. But I am just looking for statistical realism and managerial freedom, and Old Time provides both. The game also includes 16 old-time ballparks. I play it on my Windows laptop using the DOSBox emulator.
Although Old Time did not create new teams each year, a Canadian developer, Nick Keren, did so for several years, and I was able, for a very decent price, to add teams through 2001, until Nick discontinued that service.
When I was working as a sportswriter for The Reporter, the daily newspaper of Vacaville, California, I ran a contest. I asked readers to pick any team from 1871 to 2001, and I would conduct a double-elimination tournament. The last two teams standing were the 2001 Seattle Mariners, undefeated and nominated by my nephew, Stephen Petitti, and the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, with one loss, nominated by reader John Erickson. The Reds beat the Mariners two in a row to take the title. I was afraid that if Stephen won, I might be accused of nepotism!
I also employed Old Time Baseball for the afterword of my book, The God Squad: the Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978. The God Squadders included pitchers Gary Lavelle, Bob Knepper, and Randy Moffitt, first baseman and pinch-hitter extraordinaire Mike Ivie, and outfielder Terry Whitfield.
Here’s what I wrote: ‘In 1889, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.’ But that was before computer-simulated baseball games.”
After completing this book, I was inspired to play one game between the 1978 Giants and the 1978 Dodgers on my favorite computer baseball game, Old Time Baseball. The lineups were those used most frequently by the two teams that year. The starting pitchers were Burt Hooton, who won nineteen games for the Dodgers and posted a 2.71 ERA in 1978, and Bob Knepper for the Giants. The Giants were the home team and, just for fun, I played the game at Seals Stadium, the minor league park in San Francisco where the Giants played their first two seasons in 1958 and 1959.
I managed the Giants while the computer managed the Dodgers.
Knepper shut down the Dodgers for seven innings and took a 2–0 lead into the eighth. A solo homer from Terry Whitfield supplied one of the Giants’ runs. The Dodgers reached Knepper for two runs in the eighth, so I brought in righthander Randy Moffitt, who yielded a hit, putting two runners on base with two outs and the score knotted at 2–2. With left-handed hitting Rick Monday coming to the plate, I brought in southpaw Gary Lavelle, who induced a fly out to end the threat.
In the bottom of the eighth, the Giants got two runners aboard with two outs. Lavelle’s spot was due up in the lineup, so I pinch-hit Mike Ivie for him. If you read this book, you can guess what Ivie did. He hit a three-run homer to give the Giants a 5–2 lead. John Curtis came on in relief of Lavelle for a 1-2-3 ninth inning to secure the victory for San Francisco. Lavelle got the win in relief. Knepper recorded ten strikeouts.
Whatever you may think of the God Squadders, I think we can all agree on one thing — they could play some ball!
