Strat-O-Matic Therapy

I was introduced to Strat-O-Matic Baseball at a young age, just like a lot of Gen X baseball dorks. My first purchase of the game in the summer of 1986 included cards from the 1982 season. I instantly pestered my folks into buying me the cards for the most recent season, 1985. If you’re familiar with Cardinals history, you know the significance of both of those seasons. Coupled with my mom using baseball box scores and game wrap-ups to teach me both reading and math when I was younger, I was on some sort of Calvinistic predestined path to play Strat-O-Matic. That’s John Calvin Schiraldi, of course, the French theologian and 80s World Series failure. I abandoned Strat-O-Matic for a long time after I went to college in the mid-90s. Drinking, partying, and intense learning doesn’t leave much time for baseball board games. There were daliances intermittently after college, long enough to own and replay up to the 2005 season. Then it all stopped, mostly because SOM doesn’t offer a Mac version of their game. The additional time at home nefariously granted by this year’s quarantine offered me a chance to rekindle my interest. In April, I purchased a rock-bottom cheap PC and the most recent version of Strat-O-Matic Baseball. It has been therapeutic in more ways than one.

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