The Beginning of an Addiction? A Strat-O-Matic Dynasty

[Calis]

So here goes folks. Yesterday I just received a brand new copy of the Strat-o-matic baseball board game and the 1988 rosters. I spent what seemed like an eternity pulling the cards out and leafing through everything in the box trying to decide what to do. I ended up doing a test run with the Royals vs. Twins, using just the basic chart and things moved along slowly at first but I caught on pretty quickly. I had contemplated a couple different things, just replaying the ’88 playoffs for my first series, or maybe doing a fantasy draft and making up some new teams and setting up a season. I recently have grown to love college baseball, and this wound up showing.

I decided I’d take the top 24 teams in the league that year, seed them with the division winners as the 1’s, and then mostly go by record after that. We’d have 4 regionals of 6 teams a piece. This would be a double elimination tourney. I’m not sure how we’ll culminate the finals, maybe a best of 3 and best of 5, but we’ll worry about that later. This gives me a chance to see about every team in action, and yet remains a pretty easy project to finish. Lets dive right into this.

The top 4 seeds in order are the Oakland A’s, Mets, Dodgers, and the Red Sox. The A’s won 104 games that year and have a pretty stacked roster. The Mets won 100 and are not shabby themselves. The Dodgers, well..they won it all so they’d have to be favorites. The Red Sox? Well I don’t remember much about them that year, they have Clemens going strong, and Boggs is kicking around.

Regional #1
Oakland
Milwaukee
Toronto
Montreal
Cleveland
Philly

Regional #2
Mets
Reds
Pitts
Houston
Cubs
Seattle

Regional #3
Dodgers
Detroit
Yanks
San Fran
St. Louis
Texas

Regional #4
Boston
Twins
KC
San Diego
California
White Sox

My apologies to Braves and Orioles fans for being left out here, but someone had to get cut. I just chose the bottom two teams to give the boot. I’d have really liked to try the Braves out as well.

I’m going to do this one regional at a time. I think we’ll just start with #1 and work our way down. We’re going to assume the rounds happen at a rate of one per day that way we judge the team’s entire rotation. I might have a break before the final to let the Ace’s of the staff square off, I haven’t decided yet. I think that might be more fun. I’ll try to stick with the lineups most often used by the team, and the batting order if I can easily find that information, if not I’ll just take a guess.

So our first two games shape up like this.

Montreal(Dennis Martinez)
Vs.
Cleveland(Swindell)

Toronto(Stieb)
Vs.
Philly(K. Gross)

These games will be played using the basic Strat ruleset, as I want to just get the hang of things and quickly get through a game like that before moving onto more advanced rules. I’ll probably just be keeping rudimentary stats on the games, but I do plan to practice doing some more detailed box scores later on as that’s something I might help out with for a small summer high school league around here.

So, who does everyone pick to win this one? Anyone think Oakland can be upset here? I just don’t see it happening. This one seems to me to be the most lopsided bracket of the four.

Any predictions on the first two games? I think these should be pretty close ones. I'm hard pressed to say who'd I see facing the A's in the final game.

I'm going to setup the first game right now, and hopefully get a couple games done before the gf gets off work.

[st.cronin]

When you say "basic rules" do you mean playing without lefty/righty matchups?

[Calis]

When you say "basic rules" do you mean playing without lefty/righty matchups?

Sorry, yeah I'll be using L/R splits, and I'll be adding in more advanced rules as we go along. It's really not too bad at all. I just want to keep the games going quickly. Just finished up the first one and made very good time. It was fun.

[Calis]

Another thing, I will be using a DH for all games. I'm not sure why as I hate the DH rule, but we are.

Game #1 Recap

The Expos in the bottom of the first get things going. Tracy Jones draws a walk from Swindell, and then immediately after Hubie Brooks gets on base via an error by Julio Franco. They do not take advantage of this though and end up leaving those runners stranded on 2nd and 3rd. Greg Swindell then LOCKS down the game. He is looking perfect, and as he clears them out in the 2nd, and then the 3rd. He’s looking amazing out there.

Martinez was looking good as well as he sat them down in order the first two innings. He gave up a hit to Brooks Jacoby to lead off the 3rd and then Snyder singled bringing home the run. It was 1-0 in favor of Cleveland.

The 4th comes up and Swindell wastes no time in sitting down the Expos yet again.

The 5th inning and Swindell’s no hitter is still intact. He’s got two outs and it looks good as Santovenia steps into the box. It doesn’t end well though, as Santovenia cranks a triple. He’s left stranded though and the Indians still hold onto their 1-0 lead.

The pitchers are just letting very little through at this point. Hubie Brooks brings the Expos back in it with a Homer in the bottom of the 6th to kill Swindell’s shutout. It’s tied up at 1-1.

In the 8th things start to turn sour for the Expos. Martinez walks two batters and looks like he’s lost it. He’s pulled in favor of Joe Hesketh who immediately gives up a hit against the first batter he faces and that allows Bell to score. This makes it 2-1 and this is how it ends up.

Final Score
Cleveland- 2
Montreal- 1

Cleveland moves on in the winner’s bracket, and Montreal will be fighting for their survival come next game. The player of the game is without a doubt Greg Swindell who pitched a complete game only allowing two hits, as well as ringing up 8 strikeouts and allowing 1 earned run.

Not much offense on this one, but Jacoby surprised everyone by going 2 out of 3. He was the only batter with multiple hits.

[PilotMan]

I can tell you that LA won it all, and it was one of the happiest moments of my young life at the time, but that still doesn't discount the fact that they are quite possibly the worst team to ever win the World Series.

I loved Strat, it has been years since I played it at all, believe it or not I do own the original '88 season. The cards were supplanted by the computer game, and then it was replaced by a game Season Ticket Baseball which was really OOTP 2 I believe.

I still have a deep love of Strat so I will follow along with you. The advanced game really isn't all that advanced. You should be able to pick it up pretty quickly.

Good Luck!

[Calis]

Game #2 Recap

I was glancing over the cards before starting this one and was thinking, man Philly looks pretty weak offensively. This might be ugly. I was right, it was ugly, but not because Philly was lacking in bats.

Things were going pretty smoothly the first four innings. A couple guys got on base, but not much action. The 5th inning saw this change. On two consecutive plays there were terrible errors by Toronto infielders and this lead to men on 2nd and 3rd with no outs. Putting Stieb in a bit of a pickle there, I’m sure he appreciated it. He answered the two errors by walking the next batter to load the bases. Three batters later, 3 hits, 2 more hits, a sacrifice and 4 runs have scored.

The 6th inning brings David Wells out of the bullpen to replace Stieb and he proceeds to give up a homerun to the first batter he faced, the powerhouse….uhhh, Chris James? The score runs up to 5-0.

The Jays finally strike back in the 6th as George Bell drives home Fred McGriff to make it 5-1. The Jays cut it closer in the 8th when Paul Gruber doubles driving in run and shortening the lead to 5-2. Could the Jays be mounting a late inning comeback?

No

Eichorn replaces Wells in the 9th inning for the Jays, and after getting one out he proceeds to load up the bases with the next 3 batters. He tops this off by walking in a run. He is then showed to the bench and the Jays bring out Ward to finish off the game which he does so with ease. The Jays get nothing going in the 9th and end up losing the game 8-2.


Final Score
Philly - 8
Toronto - 2

Player of the game this go round is not so obvious. There’s a lot of Phillies who could be up for it, but in the end it goes to Von Hayes who went 2-4 tonight with a single and a double and brought in two runs. Ricky Jordan also had a great game going 3-5 as the DH and racking up an RBI.