Hal Richman, right, founder of Strat-O-Matic. On Monday, the company will unveil a new baseball simulation game. Heather Walsh for The New York Times
Before the World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Mets last fall, a small number of baseball experts were confident they knew what would happen. Two Royals players, Alcides Escobar and Alex Gordon, would hit home runs in Game 1. There would be a David Wright homer in Game 3, and Matt Harvey would dominate in Game 5, giving up just four hits and a walk in the first seven innings.
These soothsayers had no time-traveling DeLorean. They were testing a new digital simulation game, Strat-O-Matic Baseball Daily. The game, to be unveiled on Monday, is the latest step in the brand’s evolution from an old-school cards-and-dice board game into a modern digital one.
Traditionally, Strat-O-Matic — first as a board game and later in Windows and online formats — has been played using cards for each player based on statistics from the previous season. (The company, like its rival APBA, also sells cards representing bygone teams. Strat-O-Matic even created Negro League cards.) This meant gamers were always living in the past.
Not anymore.
Baseball Daily uses projections and proprietary algorithms to create a digital “card” for each 2016 player, which will be updated daily with actual statistics. Strat-O-Matic’s founder, Hal Richman, pointed to the Los Angeles Dodgers rookie Joc Pederson as a case study. He had 19 home runs and a .393 on-base percentage through the first 71 games, but hit just seven home runs over the final 91 games as his on-base percentage plummeted nearly 50 points.
In Baseball Daily, Mr. Richman said, “You would see the change in his card as the homers and walks disappear, and you would be in the same position as his manager, trying to decide whether to keep sending him out in the hopes that he’d snap out of it.”
John Dewan, a member of Strat-O-Matic’s board and a co-founder of Baseball Info Solutions, an analytics company that provides Strat-O-Matic with projections for the digital cards, praised the new approach. “They found a way into the future,” he said.
Mr. Richman and his board say the new format puts the company in a position to scoop up some daily gamers who have been flocking to the fantasy sports sites FanDuel and DraftKings, although Baseball Daily does not involve cash prizes and the play is structured differently. (In Strat-O-Matic, two players’ teams compete in a simulated nine-inning game; in fantasy games, statistics are used to accumulate points.)
But this stage of Strat-O-Matic’s transformation nearly did not happen. Mr. Richman, now 79, began developing the idea for the game as an 11-year-old. He started selling a basic version in 1961, when he was a college student, and gradually built Strat-O-Matic into a profitable company and a baseball institution. (The company, based on Long Island, also makes football, basketball and hockey games.)
In 2008, however, he was on the verge of selling the company. Then his son, Adam, persuaded him to reject the offers and enter the modern era. “I’m a 1950s and ’60s guy,” Hal Richman said.
Strat-O-Matic had already developed a computer game, and Adam Richman began providing strategic advice to further shift the emphasis. “Every year, we try to push forward digitally,” he said. “We need to rethink how we are doing everything.”
At a digital retreat three years ago, he suggested daily updates, “to play games in the present, using current data.”
“This is a natural evolution that will allow more engagement for our fans and expand our purview,” he added.
He learned that his father and Strat-O-Matic’s director of product development, Bob Winberry, had rejected that idea years earlier as too expensive and time-consuming. But the landscape had changed, and the opportunities on computers and in mobile apps now seemed worth the investment, Hal Richman said.
“It was as if they had read my mind,” said Larry Foster, 51, a financial analyst who lives in the Atlanta suburbs and has been playing Strat-O-Matic baseball since he was 10. Mr. Foster said his 7-year-old son started asking last year why the Atlanta Braves team he played in Strat-O-Matic lacked new players like Nick Markakis. In Baseball Daily, the updates will keep players rooted in the present. Mr. Foster was invited to participate in the game’s beta testing and praised it. “It worked really well,” he said.
Mr. Winberry called the new digital format “extremely important to our business, because we can potentially reach another audience,” a younger generation accustomed to instant updates. (Traditionalists can still play year-round with the annual card set.)
Hal Richman emphasized that this move was made from strength, not desperation. As a mail-order and then Internet company with a small staff that responds to demand, “We get money as we ship the product, so we never had a cash problem and we have been profitable for all these years,” he said. “We had our most profitable year ever in 2015.”
While he believes that Baseball Daily has great potential, he says the company will remain profitable even if the new game’s success is limited.
Adam Richman, who is also producing a documentary about Strat-O-Matic, said the company was spending more on marketing for the new version, while simultaneously redesigning its traditional computer and online game, which has been rebranded as Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365. “This is a year of change,” he said.
The company is also investing heavily in developing mobile apps, he said. Eventually, one app will allow fans to play a simulated game featuring updated statistics between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox while riding the subway to the Bronx to see the real thing. Adam Richman said he hoped the new apps would lead to partnerships with “big companies in this space.”
Preplaying an actual game would allow fans to set their own lineups and see if they could do better than real managers. Or they could simulate a game using real lineups.
Of course, as much as Strat-O-Matic strives for accuracy, reality always provides surprises. For instance, in the company’s projected 2015 World Series, Matt Harvey was relieved after seven innings in Game 5 and the Mets held on to win, on the way to capturing the crown in six games. In reality, the pitcher was sent out until the disastrous ninth inning when the Royals rallied to win Game 5 and the World Series.
Source:New York Times
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