Strat-O-Matic getting Great reviews

[zappa1]

I said it before and I'll say it again. OOTP's value blows Strat right out of sight. No contest.

[Zorro]

Originally Posted by swoboda

Wish I'd known about that book when I was a kid ! oh well I guess I would not have been as good at the lost art of long division if I had...

They use to have these little round cardboard disk shape with a arrow overlay that you could move around and get the batting ave. They cost like a buck and were worth a million to us who kept league records.

[Zorro]

Originally Posted by zappa1

I said it before and I'll say it again. OOTP's value blows Strat right out of sight. No contest.

One mans opinion of moonlight. I respect it but also listen to the other side.😁

[zappa1]

Originally Posted by Zorro

One mans opinion of moonlight. I respect it but also listen to the other side.😁

I know the other side. I've spent hundreds of dollars, probably over a thousand, on Strat over the years for a game that is in no way equal to what OOTP gives me. Maybe you'd like to buy all my strat cards? I have at least 15 shoe boxes filled with them. Originally bought the board game in 1967. Been buying seasons up until 2017. That's why I say it's not even close. I will never give Strat another penny, ever.

Well look at that. Just as I'm typing...……..another FREE upgrade. By the way, I've just counted my Strat seasons. 49 and that's not even half of baseball. Figure the math if you'd like. Some seasons are only the cards, some are both cards and the PC version.

[daves]

Originally Posted by zappa1

I know the other side. I've spent hundreds of dollars, probably over a thousand, on Strat over the years for a game that is in no way equal to what OOTP gives me. Maybe you'd like to buy all my strat cards? I have at least 15 shoe boxes filled with them. Originally bought the board game in 1967. Been buying seasons up until 2017. That's why I say it's not even close. I will never give Strat another penny, ever.

Well look at that. Just as I'm typing...……..another FREE upgrade. By the way, I've just counted my Strat seasons. 49 and that's not even half of baseball. Figure the math if you'd like. Some seasons are only the cards, some are both cards and the PC version.

I cannot even imagine the countless hours you must have played the game? You could have carpel tunnel in your hands from rolling the dice so many times?

[zappa1]

Originally Posted by daves

I cannot even imagine the countless hours you must have played the game? You could have carpel tunnel in your hands from rolling the dice so many times?

OMG. Before the game became a PC game, I used to keep score with the scoresheets. It became too expensive to reorder the score sheets, so knowing a printer, I had him print me up scoresheets galore. I would keep my own stats. All by hand and a calculator. I basically became a statistician. I was that into it. Of course the PC version changed all of that. That's the part I liked the best about the game going to PC. It was fun at the time. OOTP has won me over. I still have the last version of Strat on my desktop. Don't know when I played it last. Be safe out there.

[maineyankee7]

Originally Posted by swoboda

Wish I'd known about that book when I was a kid ! oh well I guess I would not have been as good at the lost art of long division if I had...

I learned to use a slide rule just to figure ERAs and batting averages for my Strat players. And yes, I am old.

[Zorro]

Originally Posted by daves

I cannot even imagine the countless hours you must have played the game? You could have carpel tunnel in your hands from rolling the dice so many times?

Roflmao.

[Matt Arnold]

I guess I'm a little younger than you all. For me it wasn't the rolling of dice, it was collecting the boxscores and manually entering them into the spreadsheet to track stats. Thankfully my brother cared more about the stats than I did so he handled more of that work...

[USF]

I've been playing stratomatic since the 70s and its more than a replay game. There are leagues just like OOTP too.
I would estimate it is an older crowd compared to OOTP, with many of their loyal followers coming from a time when we still played board games on a regular basis. It all depends on what you like/want out of a baseball sim. They also do other sports like hockey, football, basketball...
I play both games and I enjoy them for what they are and don't worry about what they are not.

[Leo_The_Lip]

My first Strat season was based on 1963. I got the 1964 and 1966 seasons before giving APBA a whirl with 1969.

Computerized Strat came out in the early 1990's and I enjoyed that for 1991 and 1993, but when Baseball Mogul came out, I tried that and loved it. Then Season Ticket trumped that, and I've stayed with OOTP since.

All of these games are lots of fun, I don't begrudge anyone preferring one over the others.

That said, I'm finding now that my friends of my age (I'm 70) are now particularly interested in replaying the seasons of their youth. Hence STRAT or APBA. I also find that most of them are drawn toward the seasons where 'their' team floper-ooed in the clutch. So Phillie fans pick 1964 and try to undo the agony of that infamous collapse. Or Boston fans (who have tons of horrible choking to choose from!) will gravitate to 1978.

Seasons where scrappy underdogs won the WS are not so popular as replays because Pirate fans understand a 1960 replay will likely lead to crushing defeat unless they 'Damon Rutherford' the dice.

So I say 'enjoy!" and don't worry what others are doing.

[daves]

Originally Posted by zappa1

OMG. Before the game became a PC game, I used to keep score with the scoresheets. It became too expensive to reorder the score sheets, so knowing a printer, I had him print me up scoresheets galore. I would keep my own stats. All by hand and a calculator. I basically became a statistician. I was that into it. Of course the PC version changed all of that. That's the part I liked the best about the game going to PC. It was fun at the time. OOTP has won me over. I still have the last version of Strat on my desktop. Don't know when I played it last. Be safe out there.

This still amazes me. I actually played the Avalon Hill version Statis Pro Baseball for hours, but I drastically shortened the season to 6 games then playoffs. We had drafts in the neighborhood and had tournaments. How long of a season did you replay in Strat-o-Matic? Did you compete with others before computers?

[Leo_The_Lip]

Some other memories of early dice sports games:

1) Keeping manual stats and computing batting averages was how boys learned long division. Girls never did this. They were invariably amazed when otherwise 'dumb' boys could barrel through a long division test and get A's.

2) Seasons were shorter in the sense that you had to replay fewer games to complete a season. My biggest example is APBA pro football with 14 NFL teams. At seven games per week, we could each almost keep up playing the seven games 'on-time' and then comparing results.

3) Everybody had their own way of tracking the stats while playing the games. Invariably large gum erasers were involved as we updated.

[daves]

Originally Posted by Leo_The_Lip

Some other memories of early dice sports games:

1) Keeping manual stats and computing batting averages was how boys learned long division. Girls never did this. They were invariably amazed when otherwise 'dumb' boys could barrel through a long division test and get A's.

2) Seasons were shorter in the sense that you had to replay fewer games to complete a season. My biggest example is APBA pro football with 14 NFL teams. At seven games per week, we could each almost keep up playing the seven games 'on-time' and then comparing results.

3) Everybody had their own way of tracking the stats while playing the games. Invariably large gum erasers were involved as we updated.

I don't know how you did football games? There was a lot more strategy and there was not a way to do this solitaire. How did you do it?

And yes, this was a reason why boys were good at math and we left the long essays to girls.

[daves]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

I guess I'm a little younger than you all. For me it wasn't the rolling of dice, it was collecting the boxscores and manually entering them into the spreadsheet to track stats. Thankfully my brother cared more about the stats than I did so he handled more of that work...

Rookie!

[bd001217]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

...I could keep going but let's be realistic here. I'm not here to necessarily crap on someone else's enjoyment of a game, but SOM is and plays exactly like a cards and dice game created in the early 1960s and hasn't been significantly overhauled since I think it was the early 80s when they came out with Advanced SOM, whereas OOTP started out using a more sophisticated model (nothing against SOM but there's only so much you can do when humans have to keep track of everything and keep the game playable - OOTP is significantly more complex than Sherco Baseball and Sherco Baseball was notoriously hard to play) and has undergone incremental, under-the-hood changes every single year since it came out. The difference between SOM and OOTP is the difference between a Stanley Steamer and a modern Porsche.

Very nice and imo accurate commentary.

My first and only year with Strat-o-Matic was for the 1972 season (and as a bonus, I also received cards for the 1971 World Champion Pirates!!!!).

The version I bought just happened to be the year that the "Advanced" version of the game was implemented.

The enhancements to prior versions included:

1) Batters now had dice results against both left and right handed pitching
2) Pitchers cards now reflected results against both left and right handed hitters.

You could still play the "basic" game, the "advanced" game was on the reverse side of the player cards..

3) Batters were rated for hit-and-run as well as bunting abilities

4) Outfielders were rated for throwing arm strength and accuracy. Clemente was rated the best throwing arm at a "minus 5", which means you subtract five from the "running rating" of any player who tried to take an extra base on Clemente's arm. If Cleon Jones, for example, had a running rating of 1-14, and he tried to take an extra base on Clemente, you would subtract 5 from the 14 to leave him with a running rating of 1-9. Outfielders with poor throwing arms had "plus" ratings whereby they added chances to the runner to successfully advance. If a runner had a rating of 1-14, and an outfield had a "+5" throwing arm, the runners chances would increase to 1-19. And 1-19 was actually as high as you could go regardless of the actual arithmetic. If Joe Morgan (1-17) tried to advance on a +5 outfielder, his rating would only go to the maximum allowed 1-19.


I didn't follow strat o matic after that, I loved playing it at the time though, it was a wonderful way to pass the time.

[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, I mean I don't want to trash the game at all here. I'm all but positive that it was the first game to do anything about lefty-righty splits in a really in-depth way, and the fielding was heads and shoulders above its competitors (mostly APBA and Statis Pro that I remember). And even today, if you want to do a cards and dice league where you meet up with everyone once a week and somebody's house, SOM is still the best mix of depth and playability out there.

I personally don't play in leagues like that and haven't done so for years and years. For me, and I suspect for most modern players, all the added complexity that OOTP brings is a feature, not a bug. You don't have to necessarily deal with it directly since the computer keeps track of all that, so you're going to be able to handle a lot more than you could handle in any C&D game.

[endgame]

Originally Posted by daves

This still amazes me. I actually played the Avalon Hill version Statis Pro Baseball for hours, but I drastically shortened the season to 6 games then playoffs. We had drafts in the neighborhood and had tournaments. How long of a season did you replay in Strat-o-Matic? Did you compete with others before computers?

This was my early history, StatisPro and the fast action cards, with tons of notebooks and erasures until the pages had almost holes in them. I still can recall the guys I went after in our games. A buddy of mine and I would have an inaugural and take our teams to a best of seven for a number of great Friday nights. Ah....where'd those decades go? ....

[daves]

Wish you can play head to head in OOTP like we did in the past with the player cards?

I don't mean a long online league, just a weekend of head to head.

[sdw1000]

First sim game I ever played was Strat back in 88. But then I stopped and restarted back in 2010. Played it a few years but realized I was getting screwed if I wanted to buy season for pc. Charging $25 for a data transfer is ridiculous. I can see if I was buying the cards! That's what lead me to OOTP. Been with it since OOTP15. If Strat ever lowered the prices for the computer game seasons, I'd buy it. I figured it I bought EVERY season from 1900 on, it'd cost me over $2000. Sorry Strat...