ABOUT THE FOUNTAIN CITY BASEBALL LEAGUE

ABOUT STRAT-O-MATIC

Strat-O-Matic was started in 1961 by then Bucknell University mathematics student Hal Richmond.  It is a baseball simulation game based on real life statistics and has been showcased in a Spike Lee movie as well as the Baseball Hall of Fame.  It is thought to be the most accurate baseball simulation there is. 

The Game is based off the probabiltiy of rolling dice, as the origional game was played in the FCBL.  It is still played by many this way though we have adopted the newer computer verision as our official simulator.  The computer game is still based off the cards.  We will go over the basic play as well as some key elements of the cards.

Each Player will have a card for the purposes of this article we wil use the following cards:

The first thing to notice is that on both the pitcher and hitter card there are blue and red colums.  These indicated VS Left and VS Right.  If you look top center of Glavines card you will see he throws Left and you can tell Juan Gonzalez is a Righty by looking in the upper left of the card.  The game is played by rolling 3 six-sided dice.  One of these dice are colured indicating the colum and the other two are the same color indicating the number.  If the colum dice is o 1 - 3 then you will look to the blue side of juan gonzalez card as those are columns 1 - 3 vs the lefty Glavine.  If it were 4 - 6 then you would look at the red columns on the Glavine card because your facing a Righty in Gonzalez.  Then the two remaining Dice indicate the item in that column.  So if you rolled a 2 - 8 you will notice that you have a HR 1-17 / DO 18-20  At this point you would take the 20 sided dice and roll it to get your finaly result.  Probably a Homerun for Gonzalez.   Notice the Diamond and Half diamonds listed next to some of the items in Gonzalez Lefty 2 column.  This is where the ballpark effect comes into play.  If your ballpark has 1-15 HR then you will roll the 20 sided dice each time you hit one of these symbols to determine the outcome.  The half diamond would indicated a chance forr a single and the full diamond would indicate the HR.

Lets take notice of some other ratings on the cards.  Looking at tom Glavines card you will se his hold is -4.  Now lets pretend that Yadier Molina is catching and he has a -4 arm.  Now lets say that Juan Gonzalez is on first and you would like to move him into scoring position by stealing.  You will notice that he is stealing E by looking at the top of his card.  Players are rated AAA - E for stealing.  So we can see Juan is not going anywhere.  Lets say Carl Crawford was on base however and he might have a 1-18 chance on a 20 sided dice of being safe due to his speed.  WAIT we have to take into account the hold of Glavine -4 and the arm of molina -4 therefor the combination of crawford on first and molina and glavine as the battery result in 1-10 on a 20 sided dice.  You can begin to see why a catchers arm or pitchers hold are important.  The next thing to look at if Juan is on first and the next guy up hits a single then he may advance to third with the option for home.  In this case you would look at his running as seen in the upper right  1-11 and then take into account the arm of the outfielder and then roll the 20 sided dice.  If manny is the outfielder and his arm is +2 then Juan just got a little faster 1-13 to score!

Ok on to Defense.  You will notice the defencesive rating of Juan Gonzalez  rf-3(0) e3  Well this would be his rating in RF  The first 3 indicated range, 1 is gold glove caliber and 5 is not going to get to it unless it is hit right at him.  Juan is middle of the pack or servicable.  the number in ( ) is his arm in this case juan will have no effect on the outcome of someone advancing.  An Outfielder like Ichiro Suzuki might have a -5 arm decreasing the odds of scoring on a 20 sided massively.  the final number or the enumber is the errors you can expect him to make in a given year.  This is suggested and not hard coded but in thatgeneral number.  So we can see that Juan is an average defender who wont make many errors. 

This is just a quick overview of some of the need to know points of the game and what goes into the makeup of a player.