Vol. VI, Issue #2 - April 2018
  
 ** Baseball Series in Heaven
the Greatest Cubs vs. the Greatest Yankees **

      ( The beginning of an unusual book (a combo of a novel with a real fantasy baseball story
tentatively entitled "How Baseball is Played in Heaven" written by the
Wolfman -- this report includes the background and story linked to a key 3 games
series of baseball games that were played in Heaven of which the novel's
main character, Joseph Schwartz plays a key role.)

Notes from the Wolfman: - This report is a continuation of our initial announcement that was made when we released the first part of the April 2018 edition of our newsletter and appeared on our page entitled "SOM and MLB Baseball World News" about a new book I intend to write this year.  It actually is linked to a trilogy of novels I am already writing with my friend Karen in England of which my intention is to take out one of the chapters in Book #2, which is going to feature a 3 game baseball series played in Heaven between the Greatest MLB players who played for the Chicago Cubs to face the same for the New York Yankees.  This series was actually played between myself and my friend Larry Braus (an old friend I know from Chicago and at times, a contributing writer for our newsletter) on Saturday, April 7th and Sunday, April 8th.  I am sharing the strat-o-matic aspects of this series with our members which will also give you a sneak preview into this amazing book (a combination of a short baseball story with a real life accounting of being a fantasy baseball gamer) that I hope will be out before the end of 2018. As far as I know, there has never ever been written such a baseball book before the way I plan to write this book.  So dear members, strat familly, you are getting a peek!

There are several goals I have for this new book, of which I will just briefly summarize here.  First, who is Joseph Schwartz and why does he play a key role in this series?  Joseph is the main character in the trilogy we are writing.  At the time of this story he is 60 years old and known throughout the world, working with his wife, as an author, investigator, speaker and teacher of the world's greatest mysteries discovered throughout our world including the studies of the paranormal and the afterlife (or are we all truly immortal and is there really a heaven?)  Through a sequence of unplanned and synchronistic events over a 3 month period of time at the end of 2018, he is invited to go through a dimensional door that manifests into our physical reality, high up in the Andes Mountains in the very far northern part of Peru, near the border with Ecuador.  He is being invited to pass through this door to travel to another realm of reality -- of which some call the "other-side" or another dimension of existence where we all go when we complete our work in this life here on Earth.  It is not my intention to go deep into these mystical type of subjects here, but merely to indicate and explain how Joseph finds himself in the place we call "Heaven".

Let us consider "Heaven" as the reality where any person's dream can come true of which they can imagine. Therefore, for the purpose of this story - one of Joseph's greatest dreams is about to happen - for all of his life he has wanted to do two things linked with baseball - but as he got older, it seemed these dreams went farther and farther away from him and would never happen:

#1 - he wanted to pitch in a game for the Chicago Cubs, as he was born in Chicago and all his life he has been a Cubs fan.  When he was in grammar school and high school he was a pretty good pitcher playing baseball in little league and high school but an injury to his left knee while chasing a baseball in the outfield ended his promising career.  It was his grandfather who would take him to a number of Cub's games at Wrigley Field -- and that at the time of this story, had already passed away. However, for Joseph, being able to go to those Cub games with his grandfather were forever burned in his memory and filled with great childhood joy. The second wish was;

#2 - Joseph wanted to be the manager of the Chicago Cubs for one or more games.  He believed he could do a tremendous job due to all the experiences he has involved with the game of baseball over his entire life. This includes not only his personal knowledge of the game of baseball from playing it himself but when he was a teen and even still to the present time, when he has free time, he plays various form of fantasy baseball including one special table game since 1967 (remind you of one?) so that he is totally aware of the capability and skills of all the MLB players who have played throughout the history of baseball.

Therefore, what would be the ultimate test for a baseball team comprised of past MLB players who had played for the Chicago Cubs and now were in Heaven (which means they all had passed on?)?  Why to challenge, of course, a similar team of past MLB players who played for the New York Yankees, the team which has won far more league (world) champions than any other.  Now I am talking about a team with the likes of Ruth, Gehrig, Dimaggio, Mantle, Maris, Berra ... etc ....  And then what would happen during such series of 3 games between these teams to be played in Wrigley Field (as in Heaven we can pick any baseball park we want and of any time era too), the way it use to look like in 1961?  This was the year when Joseph was taken to his first Cub's baseball game by his grand-dad -- as he calls his grandfather.  So I had to contact the Strat-o-matic game company to find out how I could obtain the ballpark settings and the weather conditions for this stadium and fortunately they had on-line a copy of this document as a pdf file which I was able to download.

But who would I find to play against me and manager the Greatest Yanks?  Well, my good friend Larry Braus agreed to help me. I have known Larry since the 1970's when I lived in Chicago (also attended our National Conventions at the U of I in the '70s) and has also become my co-manager in my keeper league I am in, a computer league called the CBA. Therefore, over the 1st weekend of April we played the three games.  To get the rules for our series setup though, we played in late March an exhibition game to test everything out for the series.  Larry won this game 9-6 as the Yanks 2B, Joe Gordon, had 3 homers for the Yanks.  How we played the games for this series was as followed:

First, we went into the All Time Great Card Set that SOM offers for Baseball 365 for which I have an account, and I went through all the cards of any NY Yankee or Chicago Cubs (with a few exceptions) and picked out their best season.  So for example for Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig we used their 1927 Season, 1941 for Dimaggio, 1956 for Mantle and and 1961 for Maris.  On the Cubs' side we used 1930 for Hack Wilson, 1903 for Frank Chance, 1959 Ernie Banks, 1964 Ron Santo and 1929 for Rogers Hornsby. The idea was, a player's very best season would show their greatest potential and capability as a baseball player.

There were a few cards we excepted against this rule that were on the Cubs.  #1 these legendary players all played one time  for the Cubs but I had to use their greatest seasons from other teams.  Dizzy Dean did play for the Cubs but we used his 1934 season with the Cardinals as his best year where he was 30-7. Grover Cleveland "Pete" Alexander also pitched for the Cubs but we had to use his best season of 1916 with the Philadelphia Phillies.  Roger Bresnahan also caught for the Cubs but we used his card for 1905 with the New York Giants as his best season.  Then I had to select a great Cub's pitcher to represent our main character, Joe Schwartz, so I picked a pitcher who is still alive and took Greg Maddux's best pitching card from the Cubs in 1992. 

Lastly, as I indicated in my first announcement of this series, within the story itself, we are going to link it somehow to the story that was began in the book, "Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella, which turned into the movie, "Field of Dreams" and continue it in "Heaven".  So, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson of the WhiteSox was put on loan to the other Chicago city for this series.  We selected the 1920 season of "Shoeless Joe" as his best.  For the rosters of each team, Larry and I both selected 35 players, 20 positional players and 15 pitchers.  The list of these players was announced on our SOM News page but we didn't indicate which year of their card representation we selected along with their major league stats for that year. This information will be shown on a separate page linked to this report so each of you to get a better feel for the high quality of the players we were using on our teams.

How we made the card for each player is we took the image of the players from 365 Baseball, and printed them out on to a harder stock of paper in color.  Since at the time we were doing this series my wife and I were struggling financially and our computer printer didn't have color ink, I went to the library and printed 3 players on a page, cut them out and then taped to the back a hard stock of paper.  So we had our own make shift cards to use - I was able to see the All Time Great Players as I had played in two paid leagues (which I reported in earlier issues of the newsletter, another great way to play SOM Baseball on-line and in a league with any player who has a card SOM has issued) in this version of Strat.

Next to play this series, since Larry was in Chicago and I was in Seattle, we used Skype - which is another way to play live strat baseball games on-line and for which the Strat Tournament Players Club first came up for one type of tournament they offer during the year.  Dice and cards are used in this system of play.  So, you and can see and hear your opponent while you play through skype and the dice feature is emulated by an on-line service created by the SOM Forum found at http://www.strat-o-matic.net - it is called the Baseball Dice Roller and simulates - the role of 3 or 2 dice and the twenty-sided.  So when you use this system you both can see the dice rolls at the same time so it truly is like playing face-to-face.  We have interviewed the owner of this forum before in the newsletter who talks about the dice system (Alex Redovian, August 2013 USBN issue).

For the rules to govern our play and usage, here is what we decided.  We wanted to try to use as many players on our teams for each game as we could and for the most part we did, but each team had several players who were unused. Any positional player could be used in whatever way the manager wished and for how long.  For the pitchers however, we went with various rules as we had more pitchers we picked who were starters then pure relievers, since we could only start 3 pitchers for the 3 games.

Any starting pitcher who did not show relief innings on the card, could be used for a total amount of relief innings in the series as follows, depending on their point of weakness shown on their card. A rating of (9) would be 5 innings of relieve; a rating of (8) would be 4 innings of relief and a rating of (7) would be 3 innings of relief in total. For a pitcher who showed a point of weakness in innings in relief on the card, this was the number of innings they could pitch during the 3 games (the lowest was (3)).  Page of the Yankees had a true closer rating but we could also specify one pitcher for each game to be our closer who would be ranked as a closer (3).

As stated, we each picked our 3 starting pitchers for each of the games.  If you used a pitcher to start, he would need one game of rest before he could be used in relief.  Game 1 saw Chesbro of the Yankees start against J. Schwartz of the Cubs.  Game 2 saw Pennock of the Yanks start against Three Finger Brown of the Cubs.  And in Game 3 it was Lopat of the Yankees against Jack Taylor of the Cubs and Schwartz came back to relieve in Game 3.  A starter had to pitch the first 3 innings of the game unless they gave up 4 runs and then could be taken out at any time.

We followed all the super advance rules of the game and some special rules followed by the Strat Tournament Players Club they use for their tournament including using their special two sided Fielding and Strategy Chart (the X chart and special strategies for bunting and placement of the infield) that the club created and printed out which has all the charts on this two sided document.  We also had the pitchers bat and used the SOM pitcher's hitting cards.

So this describes to you all aspects of this so-called 3 game series in Heaven and why I had sought out to play it.  So please find below the beginning of the report of this series in Heaven - I am breaking the report down into three sections.  This page is our introduction page.  The second part will contain the box scores of each game and a game summary.  The third and final part of this report will share the team summary of their performance and an analyst of the series and key moments.  As with all replays and fantasy games played that we can do via SOM Baseball, each game had its moments.  Both Larry and I used our skills as SOM Gamers for many years, to do our best to win each game using the strengths of our teams.  Hope you enjoy this report ....

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BASEBALL SERIES IN HEAVEN
The Greatest Chicago Cubs
vs.
The Greatest New York Yankees

(Introduction)
 

Played at Wrigley Field, 1961 Stadium
(Game #1 - Good Weather,
Game #2 - Average Weather,
Game #3 - Poor Weather,
Chicago Cubs Home Team)