August 28th, 2012
Blogging will probably be light this week as I’m off doing other work.
However, my gift to you is this unbelievably beautiful Jody Bottum / Alan Davison essay on Strat-o-Matic. Sample majesty:
Despite its enthusiasts’ claims, Strat-O-Matic’s influence on Major League diamonds is indirect, at best, flowing through the interest in statistical analysis that the board game awakened.
But awaken that interest the game did—and something more as well. Deep in the psyche of boys lies a hunger for order and a world that makes sense, an intelligible universe of rankings and meaning. Deep in the psyche of girls too, maybe, although girls were alien creatures, at best, and we didn’t know any who played Strat-O-Matic when we were young. Besides, the inner lives of adolescent males hold other things—monsters and nightmares—that need to be starved even while the blessèd rage for order is fed on numbers. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of boys? But some of it, surely, wasted away from inattention during the hours spent deciding the best way to set the batting lineup of the 1961 Tigers.
Print it and read it outside sitting with a cup of coffee and all will be right with the world.
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I’d have Norm Cash bat third, not clean-up.
Oh, what was the larger question?
Steve Sailer August 29, 2012 at 4:28 am
1. Al Kaline
2. Steve Boros
3. Norm Cash
4. Rocky Colavito
5. Dick Brown
6. Bill Bruton
7. Jake Wood
8. Chico Fernandez
9. Pitcher
Using Kaline (.393 OBP, 14 out of 15 stolen bases) instead of Bruton (.327 OBP, 22 out of 28 stolen bases) as the leadoff hitter and moving Boros (.382 OBP) out of the bottom of the lineup and who knows how many RBIs Cash and Colavito would have had? 300? They had 272 with 35-year-old Bruton making a ton of outs in front of them.