There is a piece in the Times today about the continuing popularity of the Strat-O-Matic baseball board game. I never played it as a kid. I have a vague memory of maybe having it once, or possibly I saw it at a friends house, but it never interested me. Too many numbers, too much abstraction. I was a much more tactile kid. Dungeons and Dragons never appealed to me either–it required a leap of faith, of imagination that was too remote for me to identify with.

I was usually playing baseball instead–hard ball with a team or whiffle ball in the back yard. If I played any baseball games they were usually on the computer. My brother and I used to go at it on the Commodore 64, and I remember buying Intellivision from a classmate when I was in junior high just so we could play the sports games. I used to keep boxscores of these games–not long ago I was leafing through an old Roger Angell book and found a boxscore I had kept around 1984-85, the Mets (my brother) vs. the Angels (me, cause of Reggie)–but that was about as far into the numbers as I went. Still, I now know a lot of baseball heads who were ardent Strat-O-Matic fans. Were you one of them?