Strat-O-Matic and Dice Baseball

True Innovation

Strat-O-Matic and Dice Baseball

One thing that we tend to take for granted is just how revolutionary Strat-O-Matic baseball really is.

You might remember some of the earlier articles I wrote about the old dice baseball tradition, such as this one:

The truth, though, is that most of the old dice baseball games followed familiar patterns.

In the majority of those games, you rolled a few dice — 2 in some varieties, 3 in others. You then combined the dice results, usually putting the lowest number first.

Roll a 1, 1, and a 3, and you get a 113 — never a 311.

National Pastime, and later APBA, followed the same basic pattern. However, National Pastime used two dice of unequal sizes, which allowed for 36 total possible dice rolls. APBA turned the bigger die red, but otherwise kept the same 36 possible outcomes (with a few added when you get into double columns, of course).

But Strat? Strat was totally different.

If you aren’t familiar with them, Strat-O-Matic baseball cards look something like this:

You roll 3 dice. The white die gives you the column, which is represented by numbers 1 through 6 on the top.

You then add the two other dice together, which tells you which row to look at.

Now, if you add together all the possible outcomes — and ignore the split numbers — you’ll get 11 possible results per column, for 33 per card. And, since you’re always reading off both a hitter’s card and a pitcher’s card at the same time, you’re looking at a total of 66 possible results in each plate appearance, not counting the split results.

But that’s not the coolest part about Strat-O-Matic. No — the coolest part is the fact that not all outcomes are equally possible.

This is obvious if you look at your dice, of course. You’re always going to roll more 7s than 2s or 12s.

That’s what this chart I grabbed from another website shows:

You can also express this in terms of percentages:

The magic here is that it allows card designers to have a degree of control and accuracy that just wasn’t possible with the older dice baseball designs.

Plus — the most interesting part of the game is that cards simply don’t follow any predictable pattern. Every roll of the dice feels like a new adventure.

Roll a 66 in National Pastime or APBA and you know the hitter did something good. Roll a 6-6-6 in Strat-O-Matic, though, and you simply don’t know what will happen. Sometimes it winds up being something great for the pitcher — but sometimes it winds up being a home run.

And that, to put it simply, is how Hal Richman really shook up the baseball sim industry.