Was Strat-O-Matic's Old Formula Wrong?
Digging into the past
Was Strat-O-Matic's Old Formula Wrong?
Robert Henry was one of the great old geniuses of the sport sim world.
Henry had an amazing memory. He used his unsurpassed knowledge of old APBA and Strat cards to write numerous articles for fan publications.
Before his untimely passing in 2006, he wrote a number of message board posts on the APBA Between The Lines Delphi forum. As much as I despise Delphi Forums, I’m thankful that this forum still exists and still contains these posts from over 20 years ago.
I’m not an expert on Strat-O-Matic card creation. However, I suspect that some of my readers may be. As such, I want to present some of his claims to you unedited. I’m curious to know what you think; please let me know in the comments.
There’s also this claim, which I think is quite relevant when it comes to comparing how APBA and Strat were doing in the mid-1970s:
It’s hard to imagine one of these companies doing $300,000 sales in a year this year. But, then again, I might be mistaken.
"It’s hard to imagine one of these companies doing $300,000 sales in a year this year. But, then again, I might be mistaken."
Do you mean it's hard to imagine either Strat or APBA doing *only* $300K in sales? Or does that figure seem high to you? How many 'Strat Black' sets did they print? I think it was 300 sets at $200 each. That's $60K that sold out pretty quickly, and all Strat had to do was reprint an existing card set.
Based on just a sample of online folks, I'd bet that the "regular" 2023 season outsold the "Strat Black" version by at least 10-to-1. And historical seasons from the 70s/80s are much more popular than 2023. So I'd guess Strat's historical reprints are selling even better than the most recent season. That gets you well above $300K just from baseball. Add the other sports, computer games, 365 and Strat Max —and $300K starts looking like a REALLY low estimate.
As for APBA, I think Kurt Bergland said the asking price for the company was "astronomical". That would seem to support that idea that there's a revenue stream there. (Unless there isn't, and they aren't seriously trying to sell the company.)
I think this is something we lose sight of in our online communities: for every person talking about Strat or ABPA on Facebook or Delphi, there's probably 100 people out there just buying the cards and playing the games without participating in any sort of online forum.
Glen Guzzo stated several years ago that Strat-o-matic’s card formula did not quite compute walks correctly. I agree with this having played many replays over the years. Walks seem on average to be a little low. I still enjoy playing the game and overall think it is pretty accurate.