STRAT MADNESS

After a lengthy hiatus from this blog, I decided to return to it to document the results of a decades-long baseball project of mine, following some unsatisfactory efforts to do so in a Facebook group.  The recent stay-at-home health concerns have allowed me to return to this adventure after quite a while away from it.

This project is a Strat-0-matic cards and dice, basic side of the cards, single elimination madness tournament of every Strat team I own (which is pretty much all of them, over 400 teams have played so far).   Some background: I first obtained Strat cards as a 12-year old, getting the original 1967 American League teams when they were released in 1968, in the hopes of getting my White Sox to not collapse and actually win the pennant with me at the helm (result: failure; that team couldn't score to save its life). I bought the 1968 National League teams the following year, and, well, I've gotten pretty much every season since. Initially, I was able to find folks to play FTF games with, but I moved in 1980 and couldn't find any Strat players, so I decided to start a solitaire project consisting of a single-elimination tournament that included every team I owned (at that time, 1967 to 1980, the Old Timers sets, and a few past season releases). Of course, with new teams added to my collection every year, the tournament is indeed endless (and there have been gaps of years where it sat untouched), but here I am 40 years later, sheltering in place and making more progress than I have in decades.

I wrote a little program to randomly select and seed teams in 8-team "regionals".   On rare occasions, I will move further into the tournament, but the regionals are manageable chunks of games and allow me to explore a wide array of different teams from baseball history.  So, if you're curious about how some of your favorite teams might do, please follow along!  But remember--it's single elimination, do or die, losers go home.    As a result, the ultimate champion, if there ever were to be one, won't be the "best team" in baseball history, and they may not even have won their league or division.   However, that team WILL be one that simply refuses to lose!