sdelmonte | Dec. 28th, 2009

When I was in high school and college, I used to play something called Strat-O-Matic Baseball. It was a dice game where players' stats were boiled down to sets of probabilities. If you had a good hitter, you were likely to get a hit with a 6 or 7; if you have a dud, you'd have to roll snake eyes or boxcars. It was (and is) very low tech, very much a game for baseball fans who pore over the boxscores for every little stat. My brother and I played it every Shabbos for about five years, and I was in a league my freshman year. (This was my first encounter with any advanced form of gaming, as well. My first 20-sided die was something I bought so we could get rid of the 1-through-20 Split cards.)

Within the past few weeks, Strat-O-Matic released an expansion set. It features the players of the Negro Leagues, the baseball leagues formed during segregation that starred legends like Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. SI.com's Joe Posnanski writes about the origins of the set, about the Negro Leagues, about how baseball nuts like him and me grew up with this game, and how a lost world is brought back.

I haven't touched my Strat cards in ages. I don't know anyone who plays, and I can't imagine it would be the same. But just knowing that there are people who love baseball that much and who wanted to do right by the Negro Leaguers makes me want to run out and get the set and convince my brother to take a day off so we can try out these cards, the way we used to 25 years ago.