Wheaties Wishes They Had This One Back

Okay, Golden Age, here but still quite funny:

Take a tip from me, Wheaties, and don't fall in love with 30-year-old ballplayers who have a big season in AAA.  I'm a big baseball fan, have been ever since I was 8 years old, and I never heard of Jerry Witte.  Probably because he had only 172 at-bats in the majors (in 1946 and 1947) and batted .163.  While playing first base.  Even on the old Browns, that was not enough to cut it, and one hopes he went into insurance or real estate in Toledo on the basis of his admittedly great season there.

Every now and then some guy will come up and the announcers will be yammering about what a terrific prospect he is, and I look him up and he's like 27 or 28.  No real prospect, just a guy who plugged and plugged and finally made it to the top, but don't expect him to be a star or to stick around long.  If you want to know how long a major-league career to expect, just subtract the guy's age as a rookie from 30 and multiply by two.  Somebody like Witte should have almost no major league career (as he did); guys like Mike Trout and Manny Machado should have very long careers in the majors, as should Bryce Harper (if he stops running into fences).  About the only exceptions to this rule are the former Negro League players like Minnie Minoso, who were banned from the game until they were in their mid-twenties, and pitchers, who can flame out young or suddenly develop a pitch (like Phil Niekro).

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Strat-O-Matic

Before there was fantasy baseball, there was Strat-O-Matic. Their ads were a fixture in the Silver Age. And, as it happens, their product was one of the very few that I ever bought based on the comics ads.

The game was relatively simple, and nine innings could be played in a half hour or so, making it a perfect little time-waster. You had cards for each individual player.

You rolled three dice, a small blue one which determined whether you read from the batters card (1-3) or the pitcher's card (4-6). The two white dice were combined and you read down on the applicable card to see the result.

Here are a batter's and pitcher's card from the 1969 set:

As you can see, a 3-7 there would be a single (read from Cleon Jones' card), while a 4-8 would be a popup to the first baseman (read from Tom Seaver's card). Some additional refinement came from results like 3-4, where you see the notation HOMERUN 1-12, DOUBLE 13-20. There was a deck of cards numbered 1-20 included with the game and you had to pull one when you got a result like that. Some of the results also relied on the defensive ratings of the players in the field. For even more realism, the backs of the cards could be used to play a game with platoon advantages, where left-handed hitters would hit better against righty pitchers and vice-versa.

I bought the 1978 season, and when the set of cards arrived my friend Bob and I sat down to replay the 163rd game of the American League, the playoff game between the Yankees and the Red Sox. The game was famed for Bucky Dent's improbable three-run homer into the left field screen as the Bronx Bombers went on to the World Series. But in the replay, it was Dwight Evans who went yard in the bottom of the ninth to bring the Bosox the AL East title.

It was a very cool game, and as it happens, the Strat-O-Matic company is still in business, celebrating its 50th anniversary. Obviously in the digital age, sales of the cards are down, but they have a computerized version of the game.

While we're on the topic of baseball simulations, I have two more memories to share. Back around 1964, my dad bought a similar game where you used spinners and had pieces of paper with the player's names and possible outcomes that you actually fit over the spinner. Anybody remember that game? I loved it. Update: Here it is:


Another baseball simulation I enjoyed was Micro League Baseball for the Commodore 64. It was another game where you solely controlled the management decisions--whether to steal, pull the infield in, issue an intentional walk, etc.,) and the players performed according to their statistics. The game included a lot of the famous teams of baseball history, including the Murderer's Row Yankees of 1927 and the Big Red Machine of 1976. But the team I enjoyed managing was the Washington Senators of 1955, a pathetic outfit that finished last in the American League that year. The thing was that you could actually put together a pretty decent lineup with that team. They had Mickey Vernon, a .300 hitter at first base, Eddie Yost who walked nearly 100 times that season, Roy Sievers to slug the ball out of the park, and a young Harmon Killebrew, who played a couple games at shortstop that year and so was able to replace the hopeless Jose Valdivielso. Mickey McDermott had a reasonable ERA and could actually hit, which meant that I selected non-DH games.

So no kidding, about ten years ago I'm listening to sports talk radio and one of the announcers was talking about Micro League Baseball and how he loved to play the 1955 Washington Senators. I just about drove off the road laughing.

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Take Me Out to the Ballgame...

This panel comes from Green Lantern #12 (April 1962). Of course, about 6 months earlier, Roger Maris (Ramis jumbled) had broken the record for homers in a season with 61, topping Babe Ruth's 1927 total of 60. Green Lantern's editor at the time was Julius Schwartz, who had grown up in the Bronx and was a die-hard fan of the NY Yankees.

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