strat o matic apba baseball cards dice game pursue the pennant

well, my dad, who as a Strat manager played Earl Weaver to my tragicomically inept Maury Wills. I learned about the tremendous value of bases on balls and on-base percentage to an offense from. After all, he had totaled 44 homers in our league three years previous. When Cecil Fielder, after a rejuvenating detour to Japan, returned stateside and promptly walloped his way to cult-hero status, blasting 51 homers for the 1990 Tigers, I considered it little more than a case of life imitating Strat. I learned that home runs per at-bat could foreshadow a power hitter's potential, thanks to a large (and largely anonymous) Toronto Blue Jay who clubbed 14 homers in 175 at-bats in '87. (I know this because I still keep my stat book tucked away in the desk in my home office. But in games played at my family's kitchen table, Ryan, armed with one hellacious Strat card and a considerably more supportive offense, rolled to a 24-5 record and struck out 349. Dazzling numbers by any measure, yet his won-lost record for the offensively limp Astros was a wretched 8-16. In games played in the National League, Ryan pitched 211.7 innings, allowing just 154 hits, walking 87, and striking out 270.

I learned about the value of WHIP, K-Rate and the lies-and-damn-lies nature of a pitcher's won-lost record from Nolan Ryan in 1987. before the advent of Baseball Prospectus and On-Base Plus Slugging and Value Over Replacement Player and so many other modern numerical and analytical enhancements to the ol' ballgame, Strat-O-Matic taught me the value of statistics beyond the basics listed in the Sunday sports section. before Rob Neyer was even a twinkle in Bill James's Texas Instrument. So it was that before fantasy baseball became a national pastime unto itself. Despite that cruel indoctrination, baseball's grip on me was secure, and it wasn't long before a certain simple but fundamentally sound board game helped me adore the game even more. Truth be told, my first introduction to baseball came in my eighth summer, when a Rodent Napoleon named Don Zimmer mismanaged the '78 Red Sox into infamy. Patrick Sullivan (Study of NYY CF/BOS LF)īob Klapisch (The Case for Bert Blyleven)Īll right, so that title there is a modest exaggeration. Mark Armour (Rise/Fall of Artificial Turf)ĭavid Appelman (Pitchers, Pitch by Pitch) Rybarczyk ('09 Hit Tracker Projections)Ĭraig Calcaterra (Frivolity, Part I, Part II)ĭan Levitt (Empirical Analysis of Bunting) Harry Pavlidis (Johan Santana's Fast Start)īaseball Analysis at Tufts (Groundballers)īaseball Analysis at Tufts (GB Out Rates) Stan Opdyke (Baseball Radio in NYC, 1953)īrent Mayne (The Intangibles of Catching)

Strat o matic apba baseball cards dice game pursue the pennant