Baseball Simulation Produces Win for the Brewers

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We didn’t hear the crack of the bat last week but, if you listened closely, you might have heard the click of the mouse.

While the 2020 Major League Baseball schedule is on hold indefinitely, a team of baseball fans at Strat-O-Matic is simulating the season one day at a time and posting the results on their website for all to see. Strat-O-Matic is the original baseball simulation board game, first released in 1961 and updated continuously over the years with new players and strategies.

Their first day of simulations produced what would have been a win for the ages for the Brewers: Keston Hiura’s three hits included a home run and Brock Holt had a three-run pinch hit walk-off homer in the eleventh inning as the Brewers beat the Cubs 7-4.

Before that game we talked to John Garcia, Strat-O-Matic’s research director and cardmaking master, about the game’s evolution over time, the simulation itself and what he sees in the future for the 2020 Brewers.

KL: Strat-O-Matic Baseball has been around for a long time, but obviously it’s changed a fair amount over the years. How is the 2020 product different from what it was in its inception?

JG: That’s kind of one of the beauties about Strat-O-Matic, is that we started off with just the basic board game. That particular, basic board game is really the same as it is today. Then we’ve added different features and advancements, and we’ve also gone into digital. We have a Windows game, a Windows platform, an online, mobile platform, and also just mobile apps. So it’s really expanded since then.

And Strat-O-Matic as a company, we’ve always been retrospective. So we create our card set at the end of the season. In February we came out with the 2019 season. This product that we’re using to simulate the 2020 season is something called “Baseball Daily.” We came out with it in 2016, and what that does is it allows you to make projections of a player, which we would use to create a card for the 2020 year, and carry it along as the MLB season goes. It’s a brand new card every single day depending on how they’re playing in real life.

Now, again for Strat-O-Matic in general, the basic game is really the same, the game play is the same, but you can get as easy or as complex as you want.

KL: Are you excited to get this project going?

JG: Yeah! Of course I’d like to see real baseball on the field, but in the meantime I’m definitely happy to be able to do this and it should be a lot of fun. We’re all going to miss baseball, but hopefully this will fill the void a little bit.

KL: What’s the response been like as people have learned about this project?

JG: It’s been fantastic. So many people are looking forward to seeing Strat-O-Matic play out these games. It’s really been fantastic for us.

KL: As a longtime baseball fan and a stats guy I have to admit, when I saw that the job of “Research director for Strat-O-Matic baseball” exists I was incredibly jealous. How did you become what would be a dream role for so many fans?

JG: A little bit of luck, I think. Also, this is a game that I’ve played since I was ten years old, and I keep my old box scores just like everybody else would. Yeah, I just got a little bit lucky in that people who have been there for 50 years just happened to be retiring at the same time that I started there.

But the actual job is a lot of reading, a lot of watching games. Obviously the offensive stats just are the offensive stats, but Strat-O-Matic’s strength is the research behind the defensive ratings, the running ratings, all the little details that make up the real baseball game. We don’t just take one statistic and plug it in and, “here’s the outcome,” we take months to come up with the perfect reading and the perfect picture of where a player is and how he’s performed.

KL: Over the lifetime of Strat-O-Matic the game of baseball has changed a fair amount, especially as it comes to pitcher usage. How does the game itself adapt to things like the opener, defensive shifts, changes in the game that wouldn’t have been thought of even 20 years ago?

JG: We’ve had to evolve. In the beginning, in the 70’s and 80’s, we got starting pitcher endurance ratings. You’d have guys with nines, which means they can basically go a complete game without being fatigued. Today we don’t see that at all. We hardly see any eights or even any sevens anymore. I don’t think there are any eights in the 2019 set and just maybe four or five sevens.

We had to add a four endurance rating for starting pitchers, and now a one for openers, specifically. So we do have an opener rating in the game now, and we also added a shift component that you can play as well in the board game and on the Windows side. So we’ve evolved as baseball has.

KL: So of course I can’t let you go without putting you on the spot about the Brewers. Having done all the research to create this set, do you have any predictions for either the virtual or the real 2020 Milwaukee Brewers?

JG: (laughs) Oh, the Brewers. Let’s see. We haven’t run any games yet, so it’s not based on the Strat-O-Matic results yet, but we do have big Brewers fans on our staff. Christian Yelich is a top five player in the game, though, and he’ll take them to the playoffs, I think, if the season resumes and certainly in our simulation.