by JAMESOSSWALD » Fri Sep 16, 2011 3:44 am
[quote:fe38fa7958="PotKettleBlack"][quote:fe38fa7958="trimhunter"]Good deal on the Negro cards. I was not aware that they made a Negro set and if they did it would not of interested me so I may of overlooked it, I was only interested in complete seasons.
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I don't buy that SOM sent them the info of seasons they did not recreate because SOM for years prided themselves on doing all the research for a season before they releasing the season. They painstakingly when through all the box scores and even found mistakes and sent them to major league baseball.[/quote:fe38fa7958]
I'm not sure why you don't believe that SOM generated the cards for TSN. It is a factual statement, just as the ones about the NeL cards was factual, doubted by you, and proven correct.
Not every card has been super advanced researched. But they are still published by SOM.[/quote:fe38fa7958]
I will give you the whole story(maybe it will bore you) why I don't believe SOM made the cards and you can judge for yourself. Just because I was unaware that SOM made Nel cards does not make everything else I said false.. I don't know when NEL were made but basic sets and novelty sets never interested me, so if Nel were made I would of quickly dismissed them and never given them another thought.
I have been playing SOM for about 30 years. I had been playing SOM for 10+ years before even 1 card went live on a computer(my first computer had a 640k hard drive and the salesmen said that's all I would ever need). I started playing around 1978 when SOM had 2 versions, basic, and advanced. I immediately started playing advanced and I played in leagues with others who played advanced. I started collecting every season made in advance, and I followed the news of Strat-O-Matic via U.S. mail.
I have 1 other close friend who played Strat-O-Matic. When Strat-0-Matic started recreating old seasons in advanced like 1956, 1930, and 1961 my friend and I started buying those seasons. We started the idea of taking the best players from all these seasons and play a all time greats league. We did a 12 team league where I controlled 6 teams and he controlled 6 teams and we would play 162 game schedule. The most exciting day for us was draft day.
About a year after we finished the first season we started a second all time greats and we would add in the best players from the new(and old recreated) seasons that were created by Strato. Then we eventually did a 3rd season, which after we played the 3rd season I started a baseball encyclopedia(which I did by hand) of all the players that played in our 3 seasons, I totaled the stats just like a encyclopedia, in the back of the encyclopedia I compiled the all time leaders in each category. Considering it was hand written it looked great, and it inspired us to play 10(we would add new cards every season) complete seasons over a 20ish year period. As technology came into play we eventually upgraded to excel and we now have a complete 10 season encyclopedia on excel.
I pointed out we bought every season created in advance, and we eventually came across a problem, SOM upgraded to Super advanced, I can't remember what year it was but it was about 1985-1987. We had all these great players (and history of seasons completed) in advance that were not compatible with super advanced, but the super advanced could be converted to advanced, so we chose to continue playing in advanced.
We owned every single season that SOM made except 1976, 1974, 1973, 1972, and 1971.
As the internet came to be I began to have greater access to finding cards via ebay. We had so many great seasons that I only wanted certain cards(players that could make our league) from those seasons, those seasons were going for $300-700 a season on Ebay. I did not want to spend that much money to get just a few cards out of a season, so I only bid on individual team, I usually had to pay $15-30 for the teams I wanted, and the only 2 teams I did not get that I wanted was Steve Carltons great season, and the year the Braves had 3 fourty home run players. I wanted Dave Johnson, I did not think the other 2 players would make the league.
I also found other great sites like SOMworld which I was a member for about 2 years, they made some of their own cards and provided interesting information. I then found this site on Sporting News, I had been playing Diamond legends. The Sporting News had ATG2 at the time. At this point I owned every single player made except for a few I mentioned early that Strato ever been made in advanced or super advanced. Unlike now where I stopped collecting Strato cards about 5 years ago , at the time of ATG2 I was very active and I knew my Strato cards. Strato was my hobby, to preserve my cards I use to photo copy my cards, and then glue them on cut index cards that were cut to strato cards. I surfed the net trying to find teams from missing seasons, and I read sites like SOM world looking for tidbits of news.
I know I said a lot, but I wanted to stress how much I was into Strato at that time, and how well I knew the cards. When I saw the Sporting News Strat-O-Matic site I told my friend, who was as equally into Strato as I was. First thing I told him was there is a bunch of cards that Sporting News was using that SOM never created. I photo copied a bunch of the players on this site, and we were considering using them in our own league, but we saw some problems and we decided against using the cards.
One problem was the cards that Sporting News made looked like basic cards doubled. What I mean by that is all the cards looked basically the same against lefties and righties, that is not normal for SOM. Look at the cards of 1913 Walter Johnson, 1910 Ed Walsh, 1908 Three Finger Brown, 1908 Addie Joss, and many more cards used in SN, these cards were never made in advanced or super advanced, I don't know if they were made in basic because I avoided basic only players. That was a huge red flag. Second flag was the cards SOM actually did make were not the same as the ones Sporting News was using. I understood the advanced cards had to be altered for super advanced play, but these cards were never made by SOM. The other red flag, and the one that should make you say hmmm is when SOM finally did come out with the players that SN was using, it wasn't the same card. Why would SOM give SN a players card to use? and then later come out with a different card? Obviously SN has to pay a fee to use Strat-O-Matics name, but that does not mean every card was made by Strato. And I see a lot of cards that were never made by Strato.
If you choose to believe that all the cards were made by Strato that is your choice, but based on my 30 years of playing, and many of those years I was hardcore playing, I don't believe they were created by SOM and I tried to explain why. I believe SN wanted to increase the amount of playing cards beyond what was available from super advanced and they created their own cards. Some cards they created from the advanced version which was much easier to do, and others they created from basic players, and by doing that those players were close to equal against both lefties and righties.
Many of these current 40 cards introduced this week were probably created by SN and that is why you are seeing a few errors. I don't mind because I would prefer they make the players than the players not be made at all.