Strat-o-Matic - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Strat-O-Matic is a game

Game

A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

company based in Glen Head, New York

Glen Head, New York

Glen Head is a hamlet located within the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York. As of the United States 2010 Census, the population of Glen Head was 4,697....

, that develops and publishes sports simulation games. It produces tabletop baseball

Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...

, football

Strat-O-Matic Football

Strat-O-Matic Pro Football is a tabletop board game that was first produced by the Strat-O-Matic game company in 1968. The game is a statistically-based sports game that simulates the play of American football. Each player's statistics are gathered, analyzed, and then converted into numerical...

, basketball

Basketball

Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...

, and ice hockey

Ice hockey

Ice hockey, often referred to as hockey, is a team sport played on ice, in which skaters use wooden or composite sticks to shoot a hard rubber puck into their opponent's net. The game is played between two teams of six players each. Five members of each team skate up and down the ice trying to take...

simulations, as well as personal computer

Personal computer

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

adaptations of each, but it is primarily known for its baseball game.

Strat-O-Matic began as a company in 1961, when Hal Richman, a Bucknell University

Bucknell University

Bucknell University is a private liberal arts university located alongside the West Branch Susquehanna River in the rolling countryside of Central Pennsylvania in the town of Lewisburg, 30 miles southeast of Williamsport and 60 miles north of Harrisburg. The university consists of the College of...

mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

student, began selling an early version of his baseball tabletop game out of his basement, buying advertising space in Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...

to aid sales. Richman lost money until 1963, when his decision to release a game containing one card for each player in Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...

resulted in greatly increased sales. Richman later released a football game in 1968

1968 in sports

1968 in sports describes the year's events in world sport.-Alpine skiing:* Alpine Skiing World Cup:** Men's overall champion: Jean-Claude Killy, France** Women's overall champion: Nancy Greene, Canada-American football:...

and an "advanced" baseball game in 1972

1972 in sports

1972 in sports describes the year's events in world sport.-Alpine skiing:* Alpine Skiing World Cup** Men's overall season champion: Gustav Thöni, Italy** Women's overall season champion: Annemarie Pröll, Austria-American football:...

.

Strat-O-Matic is not the first game company of its type; competitors have included APBA

APBA

APBA is a game company founded in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was created in 1951 by J. Richard Seitz. The game company on their official website states that the letters stood for "American Professional Baseball Association" which was the name of a boyhood league Mr. Seitz participated in with his...

and Replay Publishing

Replay Publishing

Replay Publishing is a game company based in Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, that develops and publishes sports simulation games for the tabletop and computer. They currently produce Replay Baseball, Replay Basketball, and PC Replay Baseball...

. Although less sophisticated and aimed at younger players, Cadaco-Ellis' All Star Baseball

All Star Baseball

All Star Baseball is one of the two most popular baseball board games of the last sixty years, and has been honored as one of the fifty most influential American board games of all time. It was manufactured by Cadaco-Ellis and designed by baseball player Ethan Allen .The game first appeared in 1941...

(introduced in 1941) has remained the largest competitor with Strat-O-Matic, since it has been distributed through toy stores for over 50 years.

In a Strat-O-Matic game, each athlete is represented by a player card, on which are printed various ratings and result tables for dice

Dice

A die is a small throwable object with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers...

rolls. A player, who may play solitaire or against another player, is in charge of making strategic and personnel decisions for his/her team, while determining the results of his/her decisions by cross-referencing dice rolls with a system of printed charts and tables.
(The basic scheme may be understood in connection with the above images:
one die selects which column is used on either the batter or the pitcher card, while the other two dice specify the outcome within the column.)
The results on the player cards are determined by a combination of the respective athlete's real-life statistics for the previous year and (mostly in the case of the baseball game) independent research of news articles and scouting reports. All Strat-O-Matic games offer a "basic", "advanced", and "super-advanced" version; the more advanced versions give more strategic options to players while taking into account additional nuances of an athlete's abilities (e.g. in baseball, differences in hitting vs. left-handed or right-handed pitchers). The computer adaptations essentially rely on the same algorithms as the tabletop games, but they have the additional advantages of faster play and statistics compilation.

Additionally, there also is an Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

version of Strat-O-Matic games, sponsored by The Sporting News

The Sporting News

Sporting News is an American-based sports magazine. It was established in 1886, and it became the dominant American publication covering baseball — so much so that it acquired the nickname "The Bible of Baseball"...

.

Strat-O-Matic games are generally recognized as very influential; they have been played by a wide variety of sports fans, including professional athletes themselves (Doug Glanville

Doug Glanville

Douglas Metunwa Glanville is a former American Major League Baseball outfielder who played for the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, and the Texas Rangers....

is a well-known Strat-O-Matic gamer). Games of Strat-O-Matic were shown being played in the Spike Lee

Spike Lee

Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983....

film Crooklyn
Crooklyn
Crooklyn is a 1994 semi-autobiographical film co-written and directed by Spike Lee. The film takes place in Brooklyn, New York and the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant during the summer of 1973. Its primary focus is a young girl, Troy , and her family...

. In the book Magic the Gathering: the Pocket Players Guide, it was mentioned that Strat-O-Matic was a strong influence in the game design work of Richard Garfield

Richard Garfield

Richard Channing Garfield is a mathematics professor and game designer who created the card games Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner, BattleTech CCG, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle , The Great Dalmuti, Star Wars Trading Card Game, and the board game RoboRally...

.

Computer sports game designers and producers such as Trip Hawkins

Trip Hawkins

William M. 'Trip' Hawkins III is a Silicon Valley American entrepreneur and founder of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company and Digital Chocolate....

and Richard Hilleman

Richard Hilleman

Richard Hilleman is an American computer game and video game producer best known for his work creating the original Madden Football game for video game consoles for Electronic Arts. Apart from Madden, Hilleman was a key figure in building the massive EA Sports brand and has spent over 20 years...

have been life-long Strat-o-Matic players, indirectly influencing the development of rival computer baseball simulation games.

Strat-O-Matic's statistical research and game development methods are implemented with the intent of replicating athletes' abilities as accurately as possible, giving the gamer the feel of making managerial decisions. Many Strat-O-Matic users have devoted uncounted solitary hours toward playing out an entire season for a team or league, then comparing players' and teams' statistics from the game play (laboriously kept with pencil, paper, and slide rule in the era before hand-held calculators and computers) with their real-life equivalents; the closer the match, the more realistic Strat-O-Matic was deemed compared with its competitors.

In February 2011, Strat-O-Matic celebrated its 50th anniversary with a opening day event at the Community Church of New York. This was a change from the normal opening day festivities of fans lining up outside the company's headquarters in Glen Head to pick up their new baseball products. At this event, over 500 people attended and heard from panelists such Doug Glanville, Rick Peterson and John Dewan.

In March 2011, Richman was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

External links

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See also

External links