Strat-o-matic cult meets the Negro Leagues

James “Red” Moore has never heard of Strat-O-Matic, the baseball simulation board game that’s maintained an astonishing cult following for nearly 50 years.

He certainly didn’t know the company recently released a card set replicating the skills and statistics of 103 Negro League ballplayers who performed, mostly in obscurity, from 1896 to 1950.

But Moore, 93, knows quite a bit about those days, “when only the ball was white.” He was a virtuoso first baseman for three teams in the Negro majors from 1936 to 1941, including two years in Baltimore (1939-1940) when he roomed with a teenaged catching prodigy named Roy Campanella.

Likely because his tenure was so brief and because many of his statistics don’t exist, Moore, who has lived in the same southwest Atlanta home for the last 62 years, isn’t included in the Strat-O-Matic set. But 12 of his ex-teammates are here, including five who are enshrined at Cooperstown, along with one manager and at least 44 others he played against.

For anyone who has played this game over an extended duration, the individual Strat-O-Matic player card is a masterpiece of minimalist poetry. That single 3 by 5 rectangle assimilates a major league player’s hitting, fielding, running and defensive statistics and what emerges, particularly to the imaginative gamer, is a palpable personality.

For Moore, however, many of these cards depict the actual flesh-and-blood men he knew, some quite well. For openers there’s Satchel Paige, perhaps the greatest of Negro League pitchers, blessed with such immaculate control he’d warm up throwing fastballs over sticks of chewing gum instead of a plate.

Glancing over Paige’s card Moore said, “Whoever did this got it right. Satch was right scarce [giving up] the walks and the home runs. People ask me all the time how I hit against Satch and I tell them, ‘Well, I sure enough hit against him plenty. But I never hit him.'"

The man who prides himself on “getting it right” is Hal Richman, now 74, who founded Strat-O-Matic out of his parents’ Long Island basement in 1961. Even in today’s graphics- and computer-drenched gaming culture, Richman’s deceptively simple dice-and-cards cardboard game, with its uncanny statistical results, wields considerable influence.

In "The Numbers Game," his definitive 2004 book on the history of baseball statistics, Alan Schwarz references Strat-O-Matic on 21 pages, pointing out that in a 2002 poll of 50 baseball executives, “exactly half had learned the game (and particularly the value of On Base Percentage) in the large part by playing Strat-O-Matic.”

All of which Richman finds humbling, considering, as he admitted in a recent phone interview, that “I had average math skills in high school. I knew enough to keep baseball statistics and that’s about it.”

For years Richman had vague notions about creating a Negro League set. But the task was daunting, he knew, since the Negro Leagues' entire history was plagued by shoddy record-keeping and slapdash organization.

Then about three years ago Richman, whose company and nine full-time employees are still located in Glen Head, N.Y., was contacted by Scott Simkus, a Chicago-area limousine dispatcher. Simkus told Richman he’d been collecting Negro League box scores since the mid-1990s, culling them from microfilm and digital versions of old black newspapers and even a few big-city white papers.

“By now I have close to 4,000 boxes,” Simkus said recently over the phone. “Our fundamental problem was that the Negro Leagues played an abbreviated schedule, only about 70 to 90 league games. Therefore we didn’t have enough data to reproduce any one entire season, which is what [Strat-O-Matic] usually does.

“So we decided to sample statistics from a player’s best five to seven seasons. We wanted to get a minimum 1,200 at-bats for each batter and 1,200 opposing at-bats against each pitcher. Once we got those numbers, we pro-rated them for a 154-game schedule. That way we came up with a standard statistical profile any baseball fan would be familiar with.”

Both Simkus and Richman acknowledge many pleasurable discoveries, like center fielder Oscar Charleston -- his pro-rated numbers are .391 batting average, .478 on-base percentage, 32 home runs, 125 RBI -- emerging as probably the set’s best all-around player. Perhaps for both, the biggest surprise was right fielder/second baseman Chino Smith (.388, .425, 20, 118), baseball’s version of Jimi Hendrix, who only played from 1925 to 1930 and died of yellow fever before his 30th birthday.

Red Moore, however, was particularly drawn to his Newark Eagles teammates, with whom he played in 1936 and 1937. He broke out his trademark grin when he saw the card representing right-handed Hall-of-Famer Leon Day (17-7, 2.78 ERA).

“I’ll never forget this one game Leon was pitching,” Moore said. “It was a league game and it was late innings and it was tight. The batter hit a foul pop and I go toward the stands and try to make a behind-the-back catch. Don’t ask me why. I would do those things, catch it between my legs and all that during exhibitions and warm-ups. I admit, I was known as a showman. But I’d never do it in a league game, except I did that day.