Paul's Strat blog

On 9/14/54 the White Sox shot a big hole in their collective foot in a Strat-O-Matic ’54 replay game I just played. The Sox lost to the Philadelphia A's 4-3 even though their ace, Virgil Trucks, was on the mound. They are now 5 ½ out. HAL managed the Sox, while I managed the usually-sorry A's.

In real life that day Paul Richards had held a press conference and announced his resignation as manager of the Sox, accepting an offer to become both GM and field manager of the Orioles. This confirmed rumors that had been circulating in the press in the previous two weeks.

Just as in the real-life 9/14/54 game, which they lost 1-0, the Strat-O-Matic Sox played in a funk after hearing the news and could not even muster enough energy to beat the cellar dwelling A's, who had lost nine of their previous ten.

The Indians’ magic number is down to four after they edged the Senators 3-2 (see below). The Sox have eight games remaining, the Indians nine. They have three against each other but I’m afraid the series may be anticlimactic.

I have been using the ’54 Pitcher-as Hitter cards that L. Durrant recently created, and they are actually fun to use even though you have to switch to Manual Entry when the pitcher comes to bat, roll the dice, read the result off the cards, enter the result into the computer, then switch back to Pre-Swing Play by Play after the pitcher bats. You of course only have to do this a few times each game, and it's actually fun to roll the dice and momentarily bring back the old-fashioned way of playing Strat.

By the way an interesting little problem can develop when using these PAH cards in a "human vs. HAL" computer game. When you switch to manual entry, HAL's decision-making capacity is temporarily neutered. Let's say HAL is in a situation where pinch hitting for his pitcher is a reasonable option. You refrain from switching to Manual Entry so he can decide whether to pinch hit. He chooses to let the pitcher hit for himself. It is too late then to switch back to Manual Entry and roll the dice. This happened today when I thought HAL would choose a pinch hitter for Virgil Trucks, so I didn't switch to Manual Entry mode. But HAL let Trucks hit for himself and the computer "rolled" the dice using Truck's generic "2" pitcher-hitting "card", instead of me being able to roll dice and read the result off the PAH card. Wouldn't you know it .. he got a hit. Should I temporarily have taken over as my opponent's manager, just so I could continue using the unique PAH card if I'd decided to let his pitcher hit ? I don't think so.