Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

Remember when you looked on a card and saw automatic hits and outs? In my humble opinion it was better back then.
Some of the advancements were good, but some not so good. The addition of clutch hitting and ball park effects were good, weather effects seems superfluous. You need a university degree now to sort through all the defensive exceptions, and situations.

Many will say, hey man the closer it comes to the accuracy of actual baseball the better it is, plus you can ignore the super advanced rules and play the advanced rules if you like. This is true, unless you are playing with strangers over the internet and the super advanced rules are the standard mode of play.

I can put aside the extra time it takes to play the super advanced rules, looking through charts to see what the right defensive outcome is, and the 7 rolls you need to do with a twenty-sided die each time you steal, or hit an x on the pitcher's card, which turns what was a 10-15 min game into a 30 min game. But what irks me is the ugliness of the cards themselves.

They used to be things of beauty, If a player was the best hitter on his team he had a 1-5 to 1-10 card, if he was the 2nd best hitter he had a 2-5 to 2-10 card, and so on. the only twenty-sided dice roll you needed to make was for either a a chance on an automatic hit to see if it was going to be an extra base hit, a homer, or a single, or a chance on a non-automatic hit to see whether it was a hit or an out. The latter was shown usually only once or twice on a card.

Meaning, all the hits were automatic until you reached one chance hit and it was done (with an exception here or there)
Even when strat moved to the super advanced cards, the chance hits were few with only the empty triangle and the ball bark home runs being of the chance variety to be added.

But now you look at a card and the thing is an ugly mess. It is now common to see cards where a whole column is full of chance hits, Single 1-4 or ground out, double 1-2 or flyout, triple 1-6 or flyout, HR 1-14 or flyout, then the ball park home run chances, the whole thing became a bloody mess.

An educated guess for the reason for this is that calculations are much easier to make for the statisticians that create the chances. When the super advanced rules first began the chance hit were still reasonable. But for some reason the newer cards have changed from it. The reason is easy to see.

Let me explain how...
lets say you are a major legue player and in 600 ABs you achieved 40 doubles 10 triples and 30 hr's.
If I put myself in the statistician's chair I can reflect those numbers in two ways. One is hard, and the other is easy.
Put aside what you did vs. lefties and righties for the moment, and lets just use one side of the card.
without going into too much detail the hard way is this...

1-try to combine all the hits so that they are reflected properly on the card with as little need for roles of dice as possible. So make a double chance turn into a single, a triple chance into a double a hr chance into a triple etc. If there is anything left to reflect, then make it a chance hit/out.

This is difficult to do as you have to calculate both the higher hit with the lesser hit, and make sure there are enough hits in total to reflect your batting avg, as a whole. This is why you saw some extra base hits turn into singles rather than doubles or triples.

now the easy way...

2-separate the extra base hits from the singles, reflect the singles properly on the card, and then use other space to calculate the extra base hits. So now that is much simpler, show a home run and if it is a chance make it an out rather than a double or triple, show a double and if it as chance make it an out rather than a single and so on.
By separating the extra base hits from the singles, calculations become much simpler. But it sure makes a card ugly to look at and makes looking at a a 20-sided die a lot more frequent.

But what is the worse of all is the greater frequency of luck playing a part in your winning and losing.
Everytime you involve a dice roll in a hit chance you increase luck as being a part of the game.

For example,

Say you have a card with a 1-5, HR 1-5 or Double 6-20. Then you have a 2nd card that has 1-5, HR 1-5 or flyout, and 2-5, Double 1-15 or flyout. The chances are the same, but one is an automtic hit and the other two are not.
That means that in many cases, in the 2nd card you will either miss both or get both, which means you are a .000 or a 1.000 hitter depending on your luck, in other cases you will get one and miss the other which means you are a .500 hitter. with the first card you will always be a .500 hitter if you roll a 1-5, and a 2-5 in two roles.
Now you may say it evens out over time, and that is most likely but never always true. the first card will be more consistent and reflect better over time. You either get a hit or get an out. The 2nd card will add more variety and ups and downs. The first card you will always hit .500 with variation a bit up and down. The 2nd card your variations will be much wider because there are 2 chances involed rather tha 0 chances.

And that is not the only problem. Because an automatic hit is always better than two chance hits when the game is decided over it. Or you have runners in scoring position at a crucial time in the game. And that is both for the defence and the offence. The reason for this is because the chance hits are all extra base hits or outs. They will score you runs when runners are on base. Which means that games will be decided more often on chance hits rather than automatic hits.

To explain a bit further. The wider variation on outs or extra base hits will decide on how many runs you score. If you have an automatic hit 50% of the time you will score 50% of the time with runners in scoring position. With chance hits, you could score 75% of the time or 25% of the time depending on whether you get your hit chance when runners are in scoring position or when you have no runners on. You could still hit exactly the same on the 2nd card as the first card, but if those hits come more often with runners in scoring position than when the bases are empty, you could have twice the amount of rbi's when compared to the first card.

Since most games are decided on 5 runs or less, a lucky hitter with the 2nd card when runners are in scoring position could turn a team into a 90 game winner rather than a 80 game winner, and if you miss the chances with runners in scoring position you could be a 70 game winner instead of an 80 game winner.

Overall, the more chance hits that turn into outs you have on a card the more luck becomes involved in the game and less skill is involved. Strat is already a game of dice rolls and luck will always will be a part of it because of that, but why would you want to increase the luck involved when a little more hard work to combine hits together to make them automatic can reduce luck to a more acceptable level. And make the cards more beautiful to look at in the process.
Thats all and thanks for reading.

Scottbdoug.

While I can appreciate what you are saying, I disagree completely. I think the game is the best it has ever been. One of the best examples of increased realism is the effect of holding runners on, where the first baseman and one of the middle infielders is "responsible" for holding the runner on at a cost to their range ratings. Pitchers hold, outfield throwing errors, catcher blocking the plate.....Strat just keeps getting better!

Tolstoy says that post was long.

I too appreciate what you are saying, but agree with STEVE that Strat is more realistic than ever. If I were a statistician, I might argue with the premise that more dice rolls means more luck involved; just the opposite it seems to this non-statistician.

The key comment to me was that you use to be able to play a game in 15 minutes and now it takes twice as long. I haven't played the card game sine the 80's and am fairly new to the on line version. But, it was great to play a 3 games series in 45 minutes add up some numbers and look at your stats. Turning an hour of STRAT into 2 hours does not sound like progress to me. Realism is great but, not at the cost of playability.
I doubt my 8 highschool buddies would have crammed ourselves into Ed's bedroom for our strat session if games were taking 30 minutes or more per game. Playing a 3 game series before hitting the homework was possible in the past. More realism fewer players?
I don't want to go Tolstoy so I'll close with is the card game dead or dying? Do you have to have a computer to play it now?

P.S. I enjoyed the original post.

Hello Everyone

Dcheney has issued a challenge to those who have read this post probably without even realizing it.

So lets take him up on his challenge.

His challenge was that an automatic hit is less reflective of luck or chance than 2 chance hits. So lets do an experiment for those who arent allergic to some dice rolling. Yes my fellow strat enthusiasts, Scottbdougis assigning some homework.

A player playing a 162 game season usually has approx. 700 ABs.

Imagine a card that has a 1-5 HR 1-5 or double 6-20 and another card with a 1-5 HR 1-5 or flyout and a 2-5 DO 1-15 or flyout.


All other rolls are strikeouts.

This includes all the rolls on the pitchers card.

Now I want you to roll 700 times. When u roll a 1-5 look at the 20 sided die and see what the number is. Make two colums on sheet of paper. On one side record whether it was a HR for both cards or a double for the first card or a flyout for the 2nd card.

When you roll a 2-5, record a flyout for the 1st card and look at the 20-sided die to record whether it was a double or flyout for the 2nd card.

After 700 roles add up the results for both cards.

If both cards reflect the same stats or very close to the same stats i will be surprised. But i could be wrong.

Let everyone know your results here in this post.

What i predict is that the first card will be varied from each of us less than the 2nd card.

To be more precise the batting avg and hrs and doubles will be more varied and wider in range for each of us when we look at the stats between each of us comparing our first card results to our 2nd. The 2nd will be wider between us.

Rubbish!

Player 1 has a 1-5 HR 6-20 DO. Player 2 has a 1-5 HR 6-20 flyout and and 1-15 DO and 16-20 flyout. This assumes they are all on the same chance roll, such as a 4 and 10 (or 5 and 9, etc.)

The odds are exactly the same for each player getting a HR or for getting a double. Expected variation between results (i.e., standard deviation) is also exactly the same.

To argue otherwise is like saying 1 + 3 does not equal 4. Sorry, but this is not opinion but rather mathematical fact.

Now as a player playing the board game, I admit I prefer Player 1. However, it's not because the odds are different--they are not. I simply hate rolling what may be a hit and end up getting an out (or vice versa when on defense). In the online game, it makes no difference to me since I just get the final result without the disappointment of missing a 20-sided die roll.

I did not intend to issue a challenge, nor do I intend to do homework

I am sure the luck would level out with more die rolls made (well not sure, sure; just sure). Whether this extends to multiple die rolls for the same event, I am not sure. But for the sake of argument I'll stick with my post.

Regarding PowellCrosleyJr's thoughts on whether or not the board game is dying; I think so, mainly due to a lack of opponents. Probably the same reason that most games have migrated online. Strat, I think is even more exposed to this problem, since it requires lots of individual games to be really enjoyable, and a large commitment of time. I recently found SOM Online and can say for sure it beats playing by myself!

P.S. I also enjoyed the original post.

I know that the two cards are the exact same chance wise but because they are different it will always cause a deviance. Until you roll the dice thousands of time they will not be exact. since you will only roll the dice 700 times and a 1-5, and a 2-5 will only be hit a fraction of those 700 roles, the deviation between the two cards will be much more pronounced. and the 2nd card will deviate from the first card in results as well.

But the first card will deviate less when compared to itself over say, 5 times rolling, than the 2nd card will deviate from itself over the same 5 times rolling.

In other words the chance increases with the 2nd card to do better or worse than the first card. That's not a wishful statement its just a fact. if we were to increase the rolling to 7000 instead of 700 the deviations would decrease. Its the small amount of times u will actually roll a 1-5 and 2-5 in 700 attempts that is the key.

I will do it 5 times on the weekend and post my results. Everyone else is invited to do it as well, if they are interested.

Scottbdoug.

Coyote is right. It makes no difference mathematically where the hits are located. I used to play a lot of tourneys where I knew a few guys who would actually draft players based on what they called "card pattern". I'd just smile and say "whatever floats your boat, but it doesn't mean anything"