Dice is nice: Santa Rosa club on a roll playing legendary baseball board game

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March 26

Lance Lantow and the San Francisco Giants both are three-time World Series champions. But Lantow has experienced something the Giants have not – a title clinching at Oracle Park.

The Giants still have him beat on parades.

Lantow isn't a major league manager, he's a member of the Santa Rosa Strat Club. In an age of baseball video games can pass for the real thing and fantasy leagues keep score in real time, the group is a throwback.

They gather at Ausiello's Fifth Street Bar and Grill in downtown Santa Rosa once a week to play a dice-based baseball board game that debuted in 1961 known as Strat-O-Matic. Or simply Strat.

Heidi Hartman throws the dices during a Strat-o-Matic tabletop dice baseball game at Ausiello's 5th Street Bar and Grill in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

Last August, however, the group lived out a Strat player's wildest dream: playing at an actual big league ballpark.

While the REAL Giants were wrapping up a three-game series against the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, a handful of club members settled into a suite at San Francisco's waterfront ballpark for the final round of their league's playoffs.

That's where Lantow guided, appropriately enough, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and the 1966 Giants to a series sweep of the Hank Aaron-led 1966 Braves.

"It was really cool," said Lantow, who didn't get a parade, but had a victory walk that included a trip onto the field while holding the league's championship trophy. "It was so much fun."

Lance Lantow holds s trophy while posing for a group photo with his Santa Rosa buddies competing in the Strat-O-Matic World Series, Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023, at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

Kyle Ferguson, the Braves' manager also was blown away by the experience. "I lost, but it was a blast. To actually play a baseball game at Oracle Park. You couldn't ask for a venue better than that."

The club as well as the epic field trip to Oracle Park are largely the result of club founder and commissioner Joe Beland's perseverance.

In 2000, Beland spent two weeks in the hospital with COVID-related complications. He lost 80 percent of his lung capacity. He flatlined once.

This being in the heart of the pandemic, nobody could visit him, including wife, Monica. To help pass the time as he recovered, Beland started ordering sets of Strat player cards from his hospital bed to add to his already sizable collection.

When Monica started to see boxes show up on their doorstep, she knew Joe was on the mend.

"I shouldn't have had the credit card with me in the hospital," joked Joe, who now owns a copy of every Strat season ever produced – going back to the 1900s.

Before COVID hit, Beland and three others had started to play the game of their childhood a few nights a month at a local comic book shop. When he got out of the hospital, the games moved outside to Beland's backyard, and soon the field of teams expanded to six.

"I've collected cards forever, but I wanted to get other people to play," Beland said. "With all the bad news that was going on in the world at the time, we needed something to do together.

Joe Beland holds the Strat-O-Matic World Series trophy up for grabs on Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023, at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

Beland has been a Strat pied-piper ever since.

Much of the club has connections to the Home Depot where Beland has worked for 37 years. There are also friends of friends. One member joined up after stumbling across the group's game night. The league currently is 10 managers strong – three former champs are taking a season off – and Beland is ALWAYS looking for more players to expand the club. The club, mostly Giants fans, has even taken a Dodgers fan into the fold.

Beland's only request is that players wear a baseball jersey to each league night, bring their own scorebooks and, most importantly, have a good time.

"I didn't know anything about it until Joe. It was all Joe," said Laura Baker, who grew up rooting for the Padres but wasn't familiar with Strat until she joined the league. "He's a good salesman."

Beland put his persuasive skills to the test when he asked the Giants if they'd allow a handful of the league members to spend a couple hours at the ballpark late last summer to complete their season. The request caught the Giants by surprise, but piqued their interest. Eventually they were cleared for a Thursday afternoon visit.

"I told them we'd play in a closet," Beland said. "We just wanted the feel of going down to the ballpark, and wouldn't it be great to play the World Series in a place where they played the World Series."

There's also a big league feel about how the club's champions are recognized.

Lance Lantow celebrates his win against Kyle Ferguson in a Strat-O-Matic World Series match held on Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023, at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

The league plays two 10-week seasons per calendar year (spring and summer), and the winner of each season gets their name placed on an one-of-a-kind trophy Beland built just for the league. It has a wooden base that's about a foot and a half wide, with figurines of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle on either side of a silver candlestick that has a crystal baseball attached to the top.

If that's not enough, he also orders replica World Series rings for each champion that have as much bling as the real thing.

Strat-O-Matic has a computer version which is now more popular than the board game. But the Santa Rosa club members aren't the only ones out there who prefer a roll of the dice to a mouse click.

Every February, hundreds of Strat players line up outside the company's Glen Head, New York headquarters – often in the snow or rain – to personally receive the new set of player cards instead of waiting a few days for them to arrive in the mail. It's been dubbed "opening day" and is a reason to celebrate across Strat nation.

While the Santa Rosa club is just establishing itself, about 3,000 miles east of the Bay Area the East Meadow Strat-O-Matic league is about to begin its 53rd consecutive season.

The league was started in 1972 by a group of Long Island, New York, friends and is, by all accounts, the longest continuously running Strat baseball league in the world.

"It started with us arguing about who do you think is the best player in baseball," said Jim Drucker, the founder of the league. "We wanted to see who knew the most about baseball. That was 52 years ago."

For a long time, Drucker and his group kept their activity under wraps.

"We hid this from our friends, wives, girlfriends and family for 20 years," Drucker said. "We were all pretty much kind of embarrassed we were playing a game pretty much made for 10-year-olds."

Some of those 10-year-olds not only are still playing, but there are countless stories about people who went on to all sorts of roles in baseball crediting Strat with helping them learn the inner workings of the game.

Strat is the creation of Hal Richman, who was a recent Bucknell University mathematics student who wanted to make the most realistic baseball game ever made. Electronic Arts/EA Sports founder Trip Hawkins has said Strat was one of his inspirations because of the depth and accuracy of its statistics.

The game also is credited with helping spawn baseball's sabermetrics movement because of the way statistics on Strat player cards can be evaluated. The cards, essentially 3×5 index cards, consist of three columns and 11 possible outcomes in each. The outcomes are based on each player's actual stats.

Tom Kwiatkowski has also won three championships in the Santa Rosa club. He's considered the club's expert number cruncher, analyzing each player card for any possible advantage. Others manage in the moment – Morgan Dabbs' decision to attempt a game-winning steal of home is the most ill-advised AND memorable play in league history.

"Maybe I had a couple of beers," Dabbs said with a laugh. "That was my first season, I think. I came out bold"

Strat-o-Matic tabletop dice baseball champion, Tome Kwiatkowski shows off his championship rings during the league's Opening Day at Ausiello's 5th Street Bar and Grill in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

Kwiatkowski will take the odds and cold, hard stats every time.

"They're a lot more fun than me, but …," Kwiatkowski said, flashing a huge smile and his three replica championship rings. "Imagine if Billy Beane knew what your stats were going to be, what your chances were of getting a home run in this game. He would make the same decisions."

Beane probably did.

The longtime A's executive who in the "Moneyball" film and book by the same name famously is credited with helping usher in the sabermetrics era in the early 2000s, is among the most famous Strat alums. But despite the best analysis and preparation, the dice didn't always go Beane's way, either. He was known to throw the dice down the street after really bad rolls and even destroy player cards for poor performances, according to Alan Schwarz's book "The Numbers Game."

Another Strat success story is Giants Hall of Fame Giants broadcaster Jon Miller. In a Q&A with Strat-O-Matic.com, Miller shared that as a kid, he was the ultimate Strat multi-tasker. In addition to calling out the play-by-play as he rolled the dice for both teams, young Miller supplied all the ballpark background sounds – crowd noise, organists, vendors – as well as handling the P.A. duties.

"With all of that going on as I rolled the dice for each play, it created some uncomfortable moments if someone happened to walk in on me at an exciting moment in the game," Miller said. "When a friend of my mom, looking horrified, exclaimed, "What's he doing, for God's sake?!" My mom ad-libbed, "Oh, it's, uh, you know, uh…Asthma! Yes, that's it, asthma. He'll be fine."

Mike Charpiot, left, keeps track of his plays as Jennifer North, second from left, and Heidi Hartman, right, react during their Opening Day of the Strat-o-Matic tabletop dice baseball league at Ausiello's 5th Street Bar and Grill in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

Santa Rosa's league likely will not produce the next whiz GM or broadcast superstar. All are baseball fans, but mostly of the casual variety.

"I enjoy baseball, but it's more for the camaraderie and hanging out with everybody," said Heidi Hartman, in her second year with the club.

Ausiello's on a Tuesday night might not be Oracle Park, but the Santa Rosa club enjoys the home-field advantage. The drive is shorter, there's food, beer and plenty of room to enjoy each other's company – and take a step toward next season's World Series – one dice roll at a time.

"There's a lot of smiles going on here," said Ferguson, surveying the scene at the league's opening night in January. "You don't get to see that on a computer screen."