Strat-O-Matic's Biggest Problem

Why 80 players simply weren't enough

Strat-O-Matic's Biggest Problem

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been messing around a bit with Strat-O-Matic’s Founder’s Edition.

Glenn Guzzo’s excellent Strat-O-Matic Fanatics informs me that Hal Richman’s invention was a flop when it first came out.

Part of the reason is undoubtedly because the game was a bit unfinished. As I mentioned yesterday, the cards contained no specificity when it came to outs. There wasn’t an error system; in fact, you didn’t even know who committed the error. It was nothing but a pitcher vs batter game, with all the other players running around anonymously on the field.

But that’s really not the biggest problem. No — the biggest problem came from the player selection.

I know that Hal Richman wasn’t confident enough to put out enough money to make 20 players for each team. However, the system he went with is simply unfulfilling.

Here’s what the original roster sheet looked like, more or less:

Note, of course, that there was only a single hitting card for pitchers back in those days. It wasn’t until the 1964 season (1965 edition) that Richman created different hitting cards for pitchers of different hitting ability.

Now, the biggest problem here — aside from the player selection, which we’ll get into in a future post — is the type of players chosen.

You’ve got 2 pitchers and 3 position players per team.

If you wanted to make two 40 men rosters, you’d wind up with a whopping 16 pitchers. Each of these pitchers are starting pitchers, by the way. Almost half your team would be pitchers.

And, if you wanted to make four 20 men rosters, like I did, you’ll have 12 position players and 8 pitchers per team.

It really creates a messy problem. You’re pretty likely to get a good 7 or 8 innings from your starting pitcher. If you do go to the bullpen, you’ll probably use 3 pitchers at most in any given game.

It’s not awful to have an 8 man pitching staff. However, when you realize that there are only 3 catchers per league, you’ll see what the problem is.

Hal went a little bit overboard with the pitchers and didn’t quite understand that catchers need a break, too.