Strat-O-Matic has joined the digital age, but you can still find fans who prefer a roll of the dice to a mouse click.
Strat-o-Matic tabletop dice baseball league commissioner Joe Beland, left, reacts after a back-to-back double play by Bill Brister, right, as Kyle Ferguson, second from left, and Jennifer North look on during their league Opening Day at Ausiello’s 5th Street Bar and Grill in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024. Lance Lantow and the San Francisco Giants both are three-time World Series champions. But Lantow has experienced something the Giants have not – a title clinching at Oracle Park.
While the REAL Giants were wrapping up a three-game series against the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, a handful of club members settled into a suite at San Francisco’s waterfront ballpark for the final round of their league’s playoffs. Kyle Ferguson, the Braves’ manager also was blown away by the experience. “I lost, but it was a blast. To actually play a baseball game at Oracle Park. You couldn’t ask for a venue better than that.”
Before COVID hit, Beland and three others had started to play the game of their childhood a few nights a month at a local comic book shop. When he got out of the hospital, the games moved outside to Beland’s backyard, and soon the field of teams expanded to six. “I didn’t know anything about it until Joe. It was all Joe,” said Laura Baker, who grew up rooting for the Padres but wasn’t familiar with Strat until she joined the league. “He’s a good salesman.”
If that’s not enough, he also orders replica World Series rings for each champion that have as much bling as the real thing. The league was started in 1972 by a group of Long Island, New York, friends and is, by all accounts, the longest continuously running Strat baseball league in the world. The game also is credited with helping spawn baseball’s sabermetrics movement because of the way statistics on Strat player cards can be evaluated. The cards, essentially 3×5 index cards, consist of three columns and 11 possible outcomes in each. The outcomes are based on each player’s actual stats.
Another Strat success story is Giants Hall of Fame Giants broadcaster Jon Miller. In a Q&A with Strat-O-Matic.com, Miller shared that as a kid, he was the ultimate Strat multi-tasker. In addition to calling out the play-by-play as he rolled the dice for both teams, young Miller supplied all the ballpark background sounds – crowd noise, organists, vendors – as well as handling the P.A. duties.
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