Statis Pro Baseball

As a kid/adult I had what was called a Statis Pro Baseball game. It came in a box and you could recreate games with actual player statistics. It has since gone out of business, but some addicts still make the player cards and put them on-line. I'm reminded of this game because I recently saw sets for the 55 World Series (Yankees vs. Mets) and the 1919 World Series (Reds vs. White Sox (a.k.a. the Black Sox)) You just take the players' statistics and convert them to numbers the game uses. It used the numbers 11 to 88. I'm not certain why those numbers specifically, but that is what they did.

This is a fun (for fans of this kind of thing) math application involving ratios. So for example, say you have a batter, Johnny Baseball, that was up to bat 428 times and he had 101 singles. Of the 78 numbers used in the game (11 to 88), how many would be used to represent the singles?

The proportion 101/428 = x/78 gives a value of x = 18.4. So we round that off to 18 and for the Statis Pro game that is represented by the first 18 numbers - 11 to 28.

Suppose Johnny had 13 doubles. So, use the proportion 18/428 = x/78. This gives x = 3.3. So another three units is represented by the next three numbers, which would be 29, 30, and 31. Continuing in that manner, you could keep going and compute the numbers for triples, home runs, strike outs, walks, being hit by a pitch, or making an out. All that info would be on his player card.

You could divide things differently, of course. The "hit by pitch" category could be combined with walks. The game actually divides singles by singles to left, center, or right field. Depending on where the ball is hit helps to determine how far base runners can advance. (If you don't get that, don't worry about it.)

So how were those numbers used anyway? Besides the player cards there was another groups of cards marked randomly 11 to 88. Suppose Johnny Baseball is up to bat and his number drawn is a 17. Since 17 is between 11 and 28, he hit a single. If he was up and drew a 31, he hits a double.

It gets a little more complicated than than, but not too bad. You have to figure in not just the batter's card, but the pitcher his is facing has a card that describe how well he pitches. That has to be taken into account as well. Despite all this complexity, a 9 inning game can be played in an hour. So individual at-bats take well under a minute. That is much better than the eternity they take in real games.

So, I've probably done enough reminiscing right now, but I think the idea behind this is pretty valuable. Computer games today depend on this kind of randomness. We'll check that out next time.