Strat-O-Matic is Here!!

“It may not happen when you want it to, but it’ll be right on time.”

 

I remember watching a documentary where a grizzled blues musician sipped flat beer and coughed up those little pearls of wisdom during the course of an interview.  Not sure if it’s a lyric from an old song, or a dated Mississippi Delta self-help mantra (a way to keep yourself sane when you were getting paid $4 for a seven-hour set in some smoke-filled blues bar in the middle of nowheresville); but the expression struck a chord with me then, and now, now that the new Strat-O-Matic web site and Negro league All-Star set is available.

 

It’s been a long time coming, buddy, but it’s right on time.

 

As a long-time fan of Strat-O, I’m excited about the new web site.  Slick, intuitive; it’s a fantastic jumping-off point for the future of a great little company and their innovative selection of games.  Like the new Yankee Stadium, Strat-O-Matic’s new online home was long overdue.  A franchise such as Hal Richman’s deserves only the best and this bodes well for those of us who care about the game.

 

As has been repeated enough over the past year, to the point where its become nauseous (sorry about that, guys), I’ve spent the past several years working as a consultant to the Strat-O-Matic game company, focusing on their Negro League All-Star set.  The opportunity is really the product of happenstance, lucky timing on my part.

 

The Negro League set couldn’t have been produced 30 years ago, as our knowledge of blackball then was mired in what fellow baseball researcher Gary Ashwill has called the “hazy netherworld of unverifiable myth, tall tales, gut feelings and subjective judgments.”  Truth is the set couldn’t have been produced ten years ago, let alone thirty.  The data, or more accurately, the access to raw data in the form of box scores, was still outside our grasp.  The timing wasn’t right.

 

So why now?  How’s the research game changed over the past ten years?  What’s different?  As my involvement with the project winds down, I’ve given this question a little thought. I’ve settled on what I believe there are five key elements at play here, things which have coalesced in recent years and made the set a reality.  In list form, they are:

 

1. HISTORICAL FOUNDATION.  We have forty years of Negro league research upon which to build.  During the research phase, I must have consulted close to 100 books about the black leagues and/or its players, teams and ballparks during the past several years, all of which have had an impact one way or another on the set.  But out of this small library, there are really six author/researchers without whom I couldn’t have survived.  They are Robert Peterson, John Holway, James A. Riley, Dick Clark, Larry Lester and Phil Dixon.  Four books in particular; Only The Ball Was White (Peterson), The Complete Book of the Baseball’s Negro Leagues (Holway), The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (Riley), and The Negro Leagues Book (Clark and Lester), are really the walls of support in the foundation of blackball knowledge.  These four volumes; with their rosters, biographical info, statistical data and oral history provide the road map which all subsequent baseball historians can follow.  These authors (and the anonymous people who have helped them behind the scenes), have produced work representing what must exceed 100 combined years of indispensable research.   
2. BILL JAMES.  Yeah, I know, I know; he has an excellent chapter on black baseball in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, but blackball (by his own admission) isn’t his strongest suit.  Yet it’s the other stuff, the sabermetric gadgets: ballpark effects, MLEs and league context issues, which are invaluable for creating a realistic baseball simulation.
3. WINDOWS, INTERNET and EXCEL. I don’t want to insult anybody’s intelligence by trying to explain why these things are crucial.  I was a member of the last group at my high school to take a typing class (on a genuine, good old-fashioned typewriter).  We spent a few weeks studying the dewey decimal system.  We had to learn how to track down specific magazine articles using a gigantic Hogwart’s-like book of tiny font citations, then, if we were lucky enough to discover an abstract which may (or may not) be of value, we’d check our Library Catalog to see if they actually carried the specific magazine we needed.  They never did, so we’d return to the thick book and start over.  Certain aspects of the old days sucked.
4. NEWSPAPER DIGITIZATION. Last night, in the span of only an hour or two, I uncovered 15 or 20 new historical box scores I’d never seen before.  These are Negro league teams versus white semi-pro outfits, part of a new “mad scientist” project I’m working on.  The point is, every single day literally thousands of scanned newspaper images become available on the web, through a variety of different sources.  When I started the Strat project (before it was actually the Strat-O-Matic project), I needed to use the old-fashioned microfilm editions of the Pittsburgh Courier (and other papers) to get those Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords box scores, which required, um, leaving the house and going to a library.  Sitting in front of a machine and paying for photocopies.  Near the end of the research phase for the game, I finally got access to the Courier in digital format, which allowed me to back track and double check things with ridiculous speed.  Because of the internet and digitization, we can do things in five months which previously took five or ten years.  By the end of next year, we’ll be able to gather information in five days which might have taken five or ten years to compile in the past.  It’s a great time to be a researcher.
5. CULTURE SHIFT.  The country is simply a much different place than it was back in 1970, when Peterson first released his watershed book on black baseball.  If anything, it’s a much more inclusive place.  The Negro league legacy (warts and all), has been embraced by the Major Leagues and dozens of veterans from the black leagues have been inducted into the Hall of Fame.  In his Afterword to the 25^th Anniversary Edition of Baseball’s Great Experiment, author Jules Tygiel writes “Ironically, Americans, black and white, seem more aware of the Negro Leagues than they did in their heyday.”

 

Well, it’s about time.  I hope you enjoy the game.

QUICK TIP FOR PEOPLE NEW TO STRAT-O-MATIC: I suggest beginning with the board game to get a feel for the game engine before graduating up to the computer version.  Remember- You’ll need to get the game parts with the Negro League card set.  After putting the Negro League set in your shopping cart, you’ll have to go under the Baseball Board Game section and look under “Individual Game Parts.”  Under this section, scroll down to the product called “Baseball Game Setup.”  For just $16, this has all the charts, dice, etc. that you’ll need to play the game. 

By the way, if you have the coin, I’d strongly suggest getting the Hall of Fame/Negro League combo card set.  For just $69.95, you’ll have all the greats, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb…and Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell.

The Right Field Wall at Greenlee

There’s been a lot of interest in Pittsburgh’s long, gone Greenlee Field.  With the impending release of the Strat-O-Matic Negro League Set, I’ve been asked whether or not this park is going to be included as part of the project.  The answer, hardcore baseball simulation fans, is YES!  Greenlee, along with several other venues from the defunct black leagues will be included as part of the offering.

Now on to that mysterious right field wall in Pittsburgh.  Greenlee was the field constructed by Pittsburgh Crawfords’ owner Gus Greenlee back in the early 1930s.  It was torn down after only 7 seasons and sold to the government.  Although the home park of several legendary Hall of Famers, including Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, very few photographs of the venue survive.  There’s also been a bit of mystery regarding the construction of the park, including the size of the right-field wall.

In Philip J. Lowry’s Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of Major League and Negro League Ballparks, he writes of Greenlee “(There was an) embankment in play in front of a very low one-foot-high concrete wall in front of the bleachers in right, which were up on a hill.”

In another book (perhaps the one written by Eric Enders), it is suggested the one-foot-high wall was (and I’m paraphrasing here), the shortest fence in Major League history.  (Edit: Turns out, NO, this isn’t from Enders’ book)

Now, most of this is accurate.  There WAS a one-foot-high concrete wall in front of the bleachers (actually, the wall was probably closer to two or three feet high), and the stands were, indeed, built into the side of a hill.  But it turns out there was a fence in play, as well, which to my knowledge has never been mentioned before.  By using the zoom feature on one of the photographs at the Pittsburgh Historical Society’s online archives, we can see the outline of what is clearly a wire fence with wood frames in front of the bleachers.  In fact, it appears this fence is probably 12 or 14 feet tall!

So, yes, there was a short concrete wall, but this was merely the base for a regulation height, chicken wire fence.  Small detail, yes, but I think it’s important to set the record straight.  Take a gander below…

Close up of Greenlee Field's RF bleachers, mid-1930s.

Strat-O-Matic Negro League Set

According to Steve Barkan at Strat-O-Matic, the highly anticipated Negro League set (and new company web site), is getting very, very close.  As in…any day now.  So stay tuned.

I want to publicly thank Hal, Steve and Bob for their work on the set.  The bells and whistles on this product, as well as the superior card quality, is perhaps unprecedented at Strat.  It has proven to have been worth the wait.

Gunthers/ Pyotts Photos

Gary Ashwill has an interesting link at his blog, showcasing the newly digitized Spalding Baseball Guides which covered the semi-pro baseball scenes in several major cities during the first half of the twentieth century.  He’s posted a photograph of the famous Leland Giants from one of these guides.  They were, of course, an all-black team which was one of the bigger draws (and more talented outfits) in Chicago before 1910.  By coincidence, I recently made contact with Tom Niesen, whose Great-Great Grandfather William C. (Bill) Niesen is featured in this same Spalding Baseball Guide (page 10).  Bill Niesen was the owner of Chicago’s all-white Gunthers team from about 1901 to 1915, then later ran the Pyott’s ballclub during the 1920s.  The Gunthers and Pyotts were two of the top semi-pro teams in the city, often competing against the Lelands, and later Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants, as well as other Negro league teams.
Tom Niesen was kind enough to forward some pictures from his personal collection, two never before seen shots of his Great-Great-Grandfather’s ballclub and stadium.  Both are stunning.  The first one is a photograph of Gunthers Park, circa 1904, with Niesen’s team in action versus an unknown opponent.  The grandstands are packed and kids climb their bikes to watch the action over the right-field fence.  This venue was the site of many games with the Leland Giants, American Giants and Jose Mendez’ Cuban Stars.  The second photo shows the Pyotts ballclub outside Niesen’s stadium, dating from the early 1920s.  They had some legendary (and often heated contests) versus Rube Foster’s teams.