Unique Online Game Puts Stars on the Field and in the Dugouts

Schilling, Glanville, “Baba Booey,” Others to Guide

Clemens, Schmidt, Strawberry and other Stars of 1986

By Glenn Guzzo

Surely you’ve heard that Curt Schilling will be managing the Red Sox. And that Doug Glanville will be running the Phillies.

Did you do a double-take? Good. Because with that announcement, Strat-O-Matic and The Sporting News introduce Take Two – an online replay of the 1986 season with celebrity managers.

Schilling, who starred as the pitching ace for the history-changing 2004 Red Sox world champions, will try to change the tragic history of Boston’s ill-fated 1986 World Series team. A veteran of four real World Series, Schilling also is a veteran of Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online hosted on The Sporting News web site.

“He wrote to us,” recalled Bernie Hou, the creator of Strat-O-Matic Online Baseball and manager of the 1986 Montreal Expos. “He really enjoyed the game; he just wished his card didn’t have so many homers on it.”

Hou said only a few of the managers have played SOM online, but most are Strat veterans.

That includes Glanville, who spent most of his nine Major League seasons with Philadelphia, including 1999, when he hit .325 with 204 hits. Glanville is a Strat player since 1976.

The league is scheduled to launch Nov. 5 with 26 managers who will set the lineups, pitching rotations and managerial strategy options for the stock teams in a 162-game replay of the actual 1986 schedule. The league will be updated daily at www.sportingnews.com for all fans to follow and to add their comments via blogs.

The replay will include many of the standard features of Strat-O-Matic Online, including detailed standings, box scores and statistical reports. But it will be enhanced with photos and stories from The Sporting News archives, personal journals written by many of the managers and special write-ups tracking the season.

Fans already can begin keeping pace with the league at:

http://sportingnews.com/baseball/1986/

Unlike the typical SOM online games on The Sporting News site, this will not be a draft league. But Hou said he will permit his celebrity managers to make trades.

The online promotion promises that “history will be re-written with each swing of the bat.” So, Hou reasoned, “since things will have different outcomes, we will allow trades and not impose the actual mid-season trades. It doesn’t make sense to enforce a trade that actually happened in 1986 but makes no sense for the replay.”

And, since the TSN Strat leagues are trading environments, we didn’t want to prohibit all trades,” Hou said.

Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online has involved thousands of leagues and tens of thousands of players for years. The elaborate project will set the stage for the release of the 1986 online leagues that everyone can play.

The public league will involve the TSN staples – draft, salary cap, trading and more. Schilling, Glanville and Hou will do battle with the likes of MSG Network broadcaster and die-hard Strat player Bill Daughtry (Yankees), Baseball-reference.com founder Sean Forman (Tigers), former Kansas City Royals announcer Brooks Melchior (Royals, of course) and Gary Dell’Abate, better known as “Baba Booey,” the producer of The Howard Stern Show (Mets).

A variety of broadcast, print and online sports personalities will manage the other teams. They are unpaid, but as all experienced Strat-O-Matic gamers know, you need not play for money to have all the fun you can stand playing Strat-O-Matic.

“I accepted the opportunity to run the Mariners before I took a real thorough look at the roster,” writes Jeff Sullivan in his blog, Lookout Landing. “But if you yearn for the days of Danny Tartabull, Lee Guetterman, and having three managers in one summer, then this should be a lot of fun to watch progress. Being in charge of arguably the worst roster in baseball only means that it'll be that much sweeter when we take the pennant. Or win 70 games. Whichever comes first.”

Bill Janssen, a veteran of both the Strat-O-Matic board game and the online version, has created a fictional back story for his startling ascension to manage Oakland.

“Vice President of Baseball Operations Sandy Alderson told how he worked throughout the winter in convincing the Athletics ownership that Bill Janssen was the right manager for the 1986 (Take Two) A’s. Alderson noted, `Bill Janssen has proved again and again during a 24-year career that he can successfully manage Strat-O-Matic teams, and in 1986 the A’s WILL BE a Strat-O-Matic team.’ ”

(Janssen certainly had one advantage over other potential successors to real A’s Manager Jackie Moore. A Strat player since 1983, he has managed the ’86 A’s before.)

The celebrity managers and their followers will relive a Major League season that included stellar performances by rookies Jose Canseco and Wally Joyner; young stars Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden; and veterans Mike Schmidt, Mike Scott and Fernando Valenzuela, among many others.

The league championship series were as dramatic as any in history. The Red Sox overcame a 3-games-to-1 deficit to the star-laden Angels, first winning Game 5 in 11 innings. The Mets had three last-at-bat victories to eliminate Houston. One of them ended on Lenny Dykstra’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the Strat-O-Matic World.” He told throngs of reporters afterwards that he hadn’t hit a walk-off homer since he played Strat-O-Matic with his brother as kids.

Then, of course, the Mets won the World Series in unforgettable fashion – a two-out rally in Game Six ended on Bill Buckner’s infamous error, permitting New York to win it all in Game Seven.