Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

I was late to Strat-O-Matic. As a kid, we played a different tabletop baseball game, one called “Statis Pro Baseball.” It also used cards and dice and it was fun even if it wasn’t quite as vivid as Strat-O. One thing that was great about Statis Pro was that the creators often gave cards to players who had only played a handful of big-league games … and those players suddenly became larger than life.

For instance, one year we played with the 1981 set, and the big star was the marvelously named Mickey Klutts, who had played in 15 games for Oakland. He hit .370/.396/.696 with five home runs. In the 1990s and 2000s, we would see some players hit like that but in the early 1980s, those were mind-blowing numbers. It’s easy to forget this but from 1966 to 1989 — which covers my childhood, high school and college years — just one player (George Foster in 1977) hit 50 home runs.

Mickey Klutts hit 50 home runs in the full season we played. What a player.

But Klutts was not the greatest Statis Pro player. No. That would be Matt Alexander in 1979. “Matt the Scat” was a breathtakingly fast runner who was called up by Oakland in the mid-1970s when that team had grown fascinated by the idea of a designated pinch-runner. After his release, he went to Pittsburgh and, in ’79, played that role on the We Are Family championship Pirates. He only got 13 at-bats that season. But he got seven hits in those 13 at-bats.

Alexander’s numbers that year: .538/.538/.692 with 16 runs and 13 stolen bases.

And over a full season, well, Statis Pro Matt Alexander was the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Half of the fun of playing Statis Pro was trying to come up with trade offers to get Alexander from the lucky team owner.

“OK, I’ll give you Dave Winfield, Mike Schmidt, Goose Gossage and Reggie Jackson.”

“For Alexander? No way! Are you crazy?”