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Stanley thanks for sharing those great stories about your baseball heroes.
I'll just share a little bit : my first and fondest baseball memories when growing up were playing Strat-O-Matic. I grew up in Northern Va and rooted for the Senators (briefly). I first purchased SOM in 1970 - the reason I know this is 100% accurate is that I still have some of the 1969 cards with me. I recally having the best time with the '69 Senators and my favorite player, Frank Howard. 69 was the year he hit 48 homers but finished second to Killebrew for the homer race. I played that game so much I wore those cards down.
I purchased the cards again in 71 but I believe that's the year they added the lefty/righty splits on the back of the card. That was a great new addition.
I loved SOM so much I took a 2x3 poster board and made a standings board for my league - the teams, their records, and the games behind values were all on little pieces of posterboard that I'd insert into slits in the main poster. So I'd update the poster every day after playing the games.
I'd play every game by hand, more or less fairly, recording the game on the scoresheets. Once a week I'd collate the stats for each team on a sheet of paper. I'd then go through the stats for the teams and hand assemble a leaderboard page. It was a crazy amount of work.
That was before calculators too, so I had to do all the calculations by hand. Nothing taught me how to estimate fractions like doing all those baseball stats week after week after week...
Those were great days of a more innocent time, to be sure. Not sure I'd want to go back there but it's fun to think about them every now and then.
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