Strat-O-Matic baseball, invented on Long Island, thrives among avid fans and local leagues

Baseball fever was running high on a Tuesday evening in late September, as it was the opening game of the American League Wild Card series between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Most fans were at home, or at a local watering hole, watching the game on TV.

But one group of baseball fanatics, the “Strat Pack,” of the Long Island Strat Club, was instead holed up in a meeting room at the Long Island Welcome Center off the Long Island Expressway in Dix Hills.

The eight teams in the club’s Northern Division (there are another 10 teams in its Southern Division) are there to draft players for their upcoming season of Strat-O-Matic baseball. 

“It’s one of my favorite nights of the year,” said Jon Meyers, 65, one of the Northern Division’s three commissioners, who shares a table with his teammate Rich Prestano, 64, of Greenlawn, an insurance broker for the trucking industry.

Strat-O-Matic, created here on Long Island, is a baseball dice-and-board game that traces its roots to 1948. The company issues a new set of cards every year for each Major League player based on the player’s statistics from the previous season. A roll of the dice determines the outcome of each at bat.

The 11 team owners in the division, except for one who calls in his picks by phone, are seated at tables, sitting alone or huddled in teams of two, whispering so the other teams don’t hear whom they’re planning to select.

Armed with laptops or legal pads of handwritten notes, they have amassed all the relevant statistics they could possibly need on the hundreds of major leaguers they’ll be choosing from.

Before Meyers and Prestano is an array of tchotchkes: a tiny Mr. Incredible figurine, a miniature Speed Racer motorcycle and a bobblehead of Yankees broadcasters Suzyn Waldman and John Sterling, now retired.

“I vary my good luck trophies depending on how well they’re doing,” said Meyers, a retired elementary school teacher from Commack.

Players love the game’s authenticity. Yankee slugger Aaron Judge’s card, for example, has more chances for him to hit a home run than the card for a shortstop who batted .220.

THE DRAFT BEGINS

It’s fitting that these Long Islanders share a love for Strat-O-Matic because the game was invented by fellow Long Islander Hal Richman. Richman, launched it as a company in 1961 predating modern fantasy baseball leagues. It is based in Glen Head and has since branched into other sports, including football, basketball and hockey.

At 6:39 p.m., Mark Rosenman, 65, of Melville, one of the league’s commissioners (who also founded and runs the KinersKorner.com New York Mets website and is an author, youth baseball coach and former sports talk radio host) announced “we’re on the clock,” and the draft began.

Through 26 rounds over the next several hours, each of the Strat Pack’s eight teams filled its roster, starting with defending champion Scott Hilbrandt’s first pick (Yankees slugger Aaron Judge) and ending with Kansas City Royals relief pitcher Lucas Erceg, the 208th and final pick.

Most of the Strat-O-Matic players in this group are older than 50. Many played Strat-O-Matic as kids. All love the game of baseball.

“I’m a huge baseball fan, always have been,” said Arnold Carter, 74, of Commack, a former longtime Newsday editor and Huntington Town public information officer. Carter’s team is the Suffolk Suns, named after a Long Island newspaper that printed its last edition in 1969.

EAST MEADOW LEAGUE

About 25 miles west of the Long Island Welcome Center, what is possibly the longest running Strat-O-Matic league on Long Island meets weekly at Jeff Weintraub’s apartment in Hicksville.

The East Meadow Strat-O-Matic Baseball League has six teams and seven players, including a lawyer, a college administrator, an accountant and a financial adviser. They range in age from the mid-50s to late 70s. Each team plays 60 games over the course of the season.

“Some guys play poker,” said Steve Tessler, of Wantagh. “We get together to play Strat-O-Matic.”

Tessler, 65, who grew up in East Meadow, has been playing in the league for 20 years.

Weintraub, 77, an administrator at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, has been the league’s commissioner since 1979.

“It’s frightening how much a part of my life this game has become,” said Weintraub, a baseball fanatic whose bookshelf includes classics like Lawrence Ritter’s “The Glory of Their Times.”

One of Weintraub’s prize possessions is a baseball card of Gary Geiger, an outfielder who played from 1958 to 1970. The card is displayed in a frame in his apartment.

When Weintraub was a kid, he was able to collect the baseball cards of every Major League player for the 1958 season except for Geiger. Weintraub’s friend and fellow Strat-O-Matic player Jim Drucker bought him the Geiger baseball card as a present for his 70th birthday.

The East Meadow Strat-O-Matic Baseball League was started by people who were friends while growing up there.

“It [the league] was more for bragging rights than anything else,” said Weintraub, who joined in 1975, three years after it was founded.

The current crop of players returns to East Meadow every winter to hold its annual player draft at Borrelli’s Italian restaurant on Hempstead Turnpike.

INTENSE PLAY

The early teams were named after the occupations of the players’ fathers, like the Weintraub Pearls (his father was in the pearl import business) and the Drucker Whistles, a tribute to Jim Drucker’s father, Norm, who was a longtime NBA referee. (These days, the teams are mostly named after the players’ occupations.)

Jim Drucker was the East Meadow league’s first commissioner. He went on to have a career in professional sports, serving as commissioner of the Continental Basketball Association and the Arena Football League.

Drucker, 73, is a multiyear league champion. He lives in lives in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia and makes the 5 1⁄2-hour round trip drive to Long Island six or seven times a season to play. Another player comes from New Jersey and another travels from Westchester.

On a recent Wednesday night, Drucker was among the players seated around the kitchen table in Weintraub’s apartment playing Strat-O-Matic. They play with the intensity of blackjack players at a Las Vegas casino.

The group, which is evenly divided between Yankees and Mets fans, doesn’t play for money, but for “just good old fun and some trash talking,” said Mark Levine, 58, who lives in Hartsdale in Westchester County.

They are not without a sense of humor. The championship trophy is named after Horace Clarke, a light-hitting second baseman, who had just 27 home runs in his career with the Yankees and San Diego Padres from 1965 to 1974.

“As you might imagine, all the guys are baseball fans to a strong degree,” Weintraub said.

That includes Drucker, who’s wearing a Washington Nationals baseball cap and a T-shirt saying his Strat-O-Matic team is a 10-time champion. The T-shirt is out of date. Drucker’s team has actually won 11 times.

“I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night, but I remember games from five or six years ago,” he said.

YOU’RE THE MANAGER

Levine said he learned about Strat-O-Matic when he saw an ad for the game in a sports magazine when he was a kid. He’s been playing since 1979.

He said he loves the strategy of the game and that the players perform in the game as they do in real life.

Weintraub, the league’s commissioner, echoes that sentiment.

He likes being able to choose the lineup and make decisions like whether to try to steal a base.

“It’s a constant set of strategies,” he added. “When do I do this? When do I do that?”

Back at the Long Island Welcome Center, the Strat Pack draft meant they missed watching the Red Sox defeat the Yankees in the opening game of the AL Wild Card Series.

In the end, neither team made it to the World Series.

But the Strat Pack plays on. Its new season of Strat-O-Matic started Oct. 7.