SOM Negro Leagues the bomb

By Ed Piper

I pulled out my Strat-O-Matic Negro Leagues baseball cards this morning (Jan. 25) and played a three-inning exhibition, rolling the dice and seeing if big Josh Gibson, reputed to be possibly the greatest home run hitter ever, could bash a big one. It is presumed that Gibson hit 800 homers to top Babe Ruth's 714, but official statistics for the Negro Leagues c. 1910-1947 are hard to come by.

The site was PNC Park (I bought a PNC paper backdrop to roll the dice on), which makes a little bit of sense for Gibson, whose Strat-O-Matic hitting card pro-rates him at a whopping .381 batting average, 34 home runs, and 119 RBI's. "Gibby" played for the Homestead Grays, with his career spanning the years 1930-1946. Guess where the Homestead Grays, a powerhouse in their day, played their home games? Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, the Pirates' home field in the National League.

Nope, Josh didn't hit a dinger, or anything else. The only run scored in my "Big Names I" vs. "Big Names II" game--I selected Negro Leaguers whose names I knew before I bought their Strat-O-Matic cards back in 2009, then I filled in the rest of the lineups--was speedy Bill Monroe's scoring on Bullet Joe Rogan's triple in the bottom of the third. (Monroe is rated "1-17" in running, which means super fleet.) At that point, I laid the cards down, and went and got a haircut and toasted whole wheat sourdough (yummy) topped with crunchy peanut butter and sugarless jam for a 9:30 a.m. breakfast at home.

My old game scoresheets (I designed my own on computer, with slots for nine batters plus two pinch-hitters/relief pitchers at the bottom of the order) show I played SOM in 2009, then only half an inning in 2015 "while watching ALDS Texas @ Toronto" (a note in the upper right corner says).

Things I re-learned/was reminded of this morning:

--Rubber bands melt in warm temperatures over time. (One of the "Pitcher's Hitting Cards" had rubber band melted into it--I had to tear it off, with a little bit of damage to the small-Pica printed words on part of the card.) Remind self to consider storing my cards not in the warmest room in our abode.

--Things can be very peaceful while one plays Strat-O-Matic. It was totally quiet upstairs, except for my roll of the three dice (one for column, two added up for result on the hitter's card, 1-3, or pitcher's card, 4-6), and occasionally picking up the "Basic Fielding Chart" if a batter hit the ball and the roll of the dice allowed the particular position player's fielding rating to influence the outcome.

I think I started playing SOM as a younger teenager with Dave Larimer, a neighbor and classmate who has a birthdate two days after mine. He grew up in the Bay Area and loved the Giants. I grew up in greater L.A. and am a Dodger fan (after a hiatus with the Padres when I got married and I introduced my wife to Major League Baseball games at Qualcomm). With Dave, things were active, conversational, punctuated by exclamations if Tom Haller of his Giants got a hit (an average left-handed hitter, though righty thrower as a catcher), or Maury Wills stole a base for the Dodgers and kicked the butts of the hated rival Giants.

--Playing Strat-O-Matic was a major way I learned about players back in 1965, at age 11, memorizing their statistics from their baseball cards but then ingraining their Strat-O-Matic ratings from repeated games rolling the dice on the game board: Dal Maxvill of the Cardinals was a "2" as a fielding shortstop, not great but very good; Wills was a "2", good not great (I grabbed his "30" uniform number when Larry Ramos quit freshman baseball in the middle of the season, and wore it the remainder of the season while starting at shortstop--an extremely tall shortstop a la Cal Ripken, though he came much later). Willie Mays was a "1" in fielding in centerfield until he became an old guy who became unsteady at age 40, dropping flyballs while playing for the Mets following his career with the Giants. Sad to watch him go out that way.

Using their SOM cards this morning, I became re-acquainted a little with some of the Negro League stars I used in my three-inning mini-exhibition. I batted Cool Papa Bell, regarded one of the fastest runners ever, in the eighth slot for the "Big Names II" team, despite his outstanding .332 batting average on his SOM card, because I already had both teams' centerfield slots filled when I came to him. I moved him to right field, where I had an opening. Don't tell him--he wouldn't be pleased, considering he is a Hall-of-Famer at his favorite position.