The original article is here and it’s good…
Trip is an awesome dude when you look at all he did in gaming. Self-made man in many ways although his family seemed to be wealthy when he was a kid.
I look at those stat tables in the top photo and my eyes glaze over. But bless those nerds. Bless them all.
Correction:
“Start-O-Matic”
My brother is in the postseason in his 1964 simulation of the MLB season using Strat-o-Matic cards. He’s kept the stats for every game played, league leaders, etc. by hand, first on notebook paper, then graph paper, and now most of it’s on his computer.
He started in September of 1965, when he was an 8th grader with a broken leg and couldn’t go outside to play football with the other kids.
That is phenomenal. What a story!
He’s also a professional sportswriter/editor, so yeah, that’s his thing. :)
I used to do stuff like that when I was a kid. I loved following baseball in the late 70s through most of the 80s. I played All-Star baseball first. It was a spinner based game. I eventually graduated to stratomatic. It was pretty cool.
I own this edition of Statis Pro Baseball…
However, my favorite sports board games ever are USAC Auto Racing from Avalon Hill and Paydirt also from AH. Bowl Bound is Paydirt! for College teams and just as good.
I also played a lot of Speed Circuit in its original 3M and later the AH box and Blue Line Hockey from 3M too. My oldest brother was at Lehigh in the late 70’s and he was the influence in my sports board gaming life but also taught me board wargaming, too. I’m glad as it all helped me later in life when I worked for CGM.
I played the full '74 national league season back in the day, keeping box scores and leader stats for the whole shebang. It took a few years and was a lot of fun for a while.
Fond memories of youth…
I played it with my brother in the late 60. The thing I remember is that they had a few pinch hitters who had very amazing stats from a very small number of plate appearances.
Statis Pro was also great! I didn’t have SP baseball, but I did have Statis Pro Football, which was a lot of fun.
Yeah, in my 1977 edition of SoM, there was an errata card with like 12 players that they recommended not get over 100 at bats to avoid skewing the game.
So how they play in the game depends entirely on their real life stats?
Statis-Pro Football was my game. We had a league at the local game store/club when I was in jr high and high school. We would hold a draft for new players a couple weeks after the cards came out each season. We did a Strat-o-matic Baseball league my senior year, but then I was off to college and the Army so I don’t know how long that went on.
Battlefield wasn’t created by EA, so it wouldn’t have been affected. Matter of fact, it’d probably be better aince it wouldn’t have lost the original developers.