In the fall of 1980, I began a six-team, 100-game, all-time all-star Strat-O-Matic league.  It was the beginning of my senior year and, through judicious choices earlier in my college career, it was a year of few taxing courses and several fun ones (I actually got credit for, ahem, badminton).  As such, I believed I had time for Strat, a game I had ignored since my senior year in high school.  It was an eventful year, Strat-wise if not personally, and the pennant was won, improbably, in the very last game of the year.  In the penultimate game, Christy Mathewson of the St. Louis BlueSox defeated the Pittsburgh Stealers to tie the two teams atop the standings with records of 55-44.  The next “day,” Whit Wyatt (from the 1941 Dodgers) bested “Prince” Hal Schumacher and the Stealers were the first CPBA champions.  As a side note, I did not know then that the winners of the last two games (Mathewson and Wyatt) would go on to become the two winningest pitchers in CPBA history; they are currently tied with 118 victories after 8 complete seasons.  In other news from the season, George Sisler collected over 200 hits in the 100-game season, batting a ridiculous .457.  Lou Gehrig bashed 39 homers and slugged over .700.  The other four teams were the Boston Pilgrims, the Chicago Teamsters, the Philadelphia Stories, and the Detroit Stars.

 

      I replayed the same six teams, allowing trades and the drafting of new players for three more 100-game seasons.  By the end of season #4, the plague of parity had set in.  Each game was as tough to call as a coin flip, and contained half the excitement of such.  No game could ever be called an upset, no team ever went on a breathtaking run of victories, and no team suffered a disturbing series of losses.  Bland baseball is bad baseball and, after the Detroit Stars took the crown with a record of 52-48 (!!), I decided it was time to expand.

 

     The Original Six teams (with a nod to hockey fans everywhere) protected some players and “anted up” others into a draft pool.  The stock from which players were to be selected was increased, as I had purchased several other seasons of players from the Strat-O-Matic company.  The four new teams were the Cincinnati Kids, the Kansas City Stengels (think about it . . .), the Milwaukee Frosties, and the Cleveland Grovers.  The teams were then split into two divisions of five teams and a World Series awaited the winners of each division.  The Boston Pilgrims defeated the St. Louis BlueSox to win that very first CPBA World Series.

 

     Partway through season #5, I had “cracked the code;” I had figured out how to make my very own – and just as accurate – player’s cards!  No longer did I have to wait for Strat-o-matic to produce, say, the 1958 season to get a hold of a magnificent Ernie Banks card (ya know, there was a time when shortstops did NOT routinely hit 45 HRs).  In rapid fire order, I created Ernie, Ralph Kiner, Dave Winfield, Robin Yount, etc.  Quickly, I followed this up with another breakthrough: pitcher’s cards!  I could now, armed with little more than the Baseball Encyclopedia and my algorithm, create any player in major league history in a matter of minutes.  There was only one thing left to do: expand again!

 

     For season # 6, I added the Washington Lobbyists to the Eastern Division and the Louisville Sluggers to the Western Division.  Boston and St. Louis met again in the World Series and the outcome was the same.  Boston entered season #7 as two-time defending champions.

 

     Well, two new things happened between seasons.  First, I got a hold of some Negro League statistics which allowed me to create cards for Josh Gibson, Pop Lloyd, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston and many, many more long-neglected stars.  Second, Strat offered a computer version of their game.  Though I had long loved the feel and rhythm of the dice-rolling tabletop game, I had to admit that the process of tabulating statistics for each team and player was choking off my ability to actually play the game.  And, with multiple expansions, it was getting worse.  So I took the deep plunge, purchased the computer game, and began the process of creating the computer teams that I had created manually, starting way back in 1980.  This was 1995 or so.  Of course, without the onus of tracking stats for everyone in the league, and with the availability of the great Negro League players, I chose to once more expand.

 

     In season # 7, I added the Brooklyn Bums, the Toledo Mudhens, the Montreal Royals, and the Birmingham Barons.  In addition, the teams were now in four divisions of four teams each:

 

Foster (after “Rube” of Negro League pitching and entrepreneurial fame) Division

 

Boston Pilgrims

Philadelphia Stories

Washington Lobbyists

Brooklyn Bums

 

Spalding (after Albert of early baseball fame) Division

 

Pittsburgh Stealers

Cleveland Grovers

Louisville Sluggers

Toledo MudHens

 

Rickey (after Branch, architect of the Cardinals and Dodgers) Division

 

Chicago Teamsters

Detroit Stars

Milwaukee Frosties

Montreal Royals

 

Landis (after Judge Kenesaw, first commish of baseball) Division

 

St. Louis BlueSox

Cincinnati Kids

Kansas City Stengels

Birmingham Barons

 

     Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis (all four from the Original Six) each took their division.  Boston eliminated Pitt; Chicago did the same to St. Louis.  In the World Series, Boston defeated Chicago to become the three-time champions of the CPBA.

 

     For the first time in several years, I decided not to expand.  Season #8 was remarkable in many ways.  Philadelphia ended Boston’s run by winning the Foster Division title with a 93-69 record. (By the way, schedules also expanded from 100 to 144 to 154 to 156 to the now “standard” 162 games.)  Pittsburgh and St. Louis won their division with exactly the same record and the Chicago Teamsters squeaked into the playoffs with an 81-81 record.  Christy Mathewson and Carl Hubbell, both of St. Louis, won a record 24 games each.  Hack Wilson outdistanced Babe Ruth and Sadaharu Oh (found his stats, too!) in the homerun competition: he wound up with 55 to their 50 and 53, respectively.  The bottom nearly fell out of the Birmingham franchise: their record was 47-115!!

 

     In the playoffs, Pittsburgh defeated Philadelphia 4 games to 2.  The Stealers, they of Rogers Hornsby, Jimmie Foxx, Carl Yaz, Whit Wyatt and Bob Gibson, were led by mid-season pickup Nomar Garciaparra who was named the series MVP.  Nomar was traded for when he was hitting .104 for the Washington Lobbyists and wound up hitting just .225 for the Stealers.  But in the first round of the playoffs he was remarkable, accounting for two game winning hits and a flurry of others to wind up the series over .400.  Chicago, meanwhile, overcame great odds and disposed of the St. Louis team in five games.  Playoff MVP Don Mossi saved several games and was nearly unhittable in the process.

 

     In the ensuing World Series, Pittsburgh’s offense was too much for the Chicago pitchers.  Led by co-MVPs Yaz and Richie Allen, the Stealers won their second championship (recall they were the league’s first champion, back in 1980!!) 4 games to 1.

 

     And so it is off to season #9.  Players have been retired (so long, Joe Beggs and Mike Donlin, Johnny Blanchard and Bill Delancey), released (remarkably, Warren Spahn awaits a phone call!), sold (KC sent the struggling Cleveland franchise $2.7 million for speedy outfielder Kiki Cuyler, for example), traded (Milwaukee sent lefties John Tudor and Jon Matlack to Pittsburgh for bottle-bat Edd Roush and Jackie Robinson, for one), lost to injury for a year (Vada Pinson and Edgar Martinez are two of six stars lost for the year), or lost to free agency (Pittsburgh lost both Whit Wyatt and catcher Mickey Cochrane during this off-season, two reasons why most fans don’t think they’ll repeat). 

 

SOME BACKGROUND INFO ABOUT PLAYERS, CARDS, FINANCES, ETC.

 

      Some players are in the league based on one of their best seasons (Al Rosen, George Sisler, and Bob Gibson come to mind), while some are represented by more moderate seasons (George Brett and Warren Spahn, for example) and some are represented by Strat’s recently created “Hall of Fame” series where players like Ruth, Gehrig, etc (in fact, all the HOFers) are represented by a best-7-year stretch of seasons, pro-rated into a single season form.  To list the ones who are represented one way versus another would be both cumbersome and boring, so I won’t do it; suffice it to say that I used players that I had in 1980-1995, then players I could create or purchase from 1995 onward.  In addition, I have taken liberties with positions at which players are eligible (Cal Ripken is rated not only at shortstop, where he did play in 1984, but also at thirdbase – via subjective personal ratings – where he did not play then but to which he later moved).  Furthermore, because I am incapable of NOT fussing around with the players’ ratings, I have – based again on very subjective personal ratings – fooled around with the players’ left/right splits, their clutch ratings, their steal ratings, their injury ratings (Norm Cash is represented by his very flukey 1961 season and the price his team pays is that he can get hurt an awful lot . . . this, of course, was not a true trait of Norm Cash, but then one could say that about his entire 1961 season!) and many other characteristics of many of the players.  Not all have been altered but enough have been so that the answer to the question, “Which year are you using for So-and-so?” is often a murky one.  I do not believe that I have truly changed the flavor of too many players as much as I have seasoned them to bring out more of their inherent characteristics.  Ahem.

 

      I have also invested a fair amount of time creating algorithms by which players earn salaries and by which teams make money.  As these two sums don’t always match, some teams get rich while others get poor.  That means some players will be sold, in the off-season, by the poor teams, to be purchased by the rich.  Sound familiar??  Also, teams can sign players to long-term contracts whereby the salaries increase by a set amount in each year of the contract (15%) no matter what the performance of the player.  Teams pay a signing fee to the league when they sign players; this serves as a disincentive to lock up players for long periods of time while producing a “slush fund” from which poor teams can help offset some of their bills.  At the end of a long-term contract a player becomes a free agent; teams with the right kind of cash flow can make bids on the player and the player “chooses” his new team via a lottery in which a team’s chances increase with larger bids.  Long-term contracts can and do drive up salaries and a previously profitable team which finds itself in the red will look to trade a valuable player to decrease its salary commitments and stay afloat, financially.  While there has been a general current of expensive players from poor to rich teams, the pool of talent from which to draw new players is very deep and bad teams can become good ones by careful drafting of players for the future.  This, of course, is done by me and I cannot tell you how or if I manage to be fair to all teams at draft time.  Nor can I state how many hours of my waking life have been devoted (read “lost”) to the very difficult decisions of, say, whether the poor little Detroit Stars should draft Addie Joss or Mark Mulder.  Each team maintains a minor league team from which they select replacements for injured players or to replace ineffective ones.  All in all, there are 32 teams which I oversee, 25 to 35 players on a team, for a total of close to 1000 players whose careers are starting, thriving, floundering, or finishing . . . .It is a madness of a sort.

   Home