Reporting from Cedar Rapids, Iowa — Art Pennington hasn't faced Satchel Paige in nearly 60 years, but he's at the plate now, batting from the left side here in the water-damaged basement of a 50-year-old clapboard house.
"Oh boy," Pennington says, shaking his head. "I didn't hit him then. I won't hit him now."
With that, the former Negro League All-Star rolls red dice across a rickety card table. When they come to a stop, the man sitting next to him consults a color-coded rectangular card: Pennington has hit a soft grounder back to the mound. He's an easy out at first.
"Sounds about right," Pennington, 86, says with a chuckle. After all, the player they called "Superman" had more wives -- five -- than hits against Paige in a 22-year baseball career in which he batted well over .300.
That's the main attraction of Strat-O-Matic, the card-and-dice tabletop baseball simulation game. Authenticity.
Nearly 50 years after it was devised by a college math student, Strat-O-Matic has been far overtaken by computer video games in style, but not in substance. Thanks to a complex and painstaking mathematical formula, the game is nothing if not accurate.
Now, thanks to a former limousine driver and accidental baseball historian, there's a new version that provides a glimpse into an era of baseball unknown by some and largely romanticized by others.
His name is Scott Simkus, and about a dozen years ago he commandeered a microfilm reader at the offices of a suburban Chicago newspaper searching for the results of a long-ago game his late grandfather, a semipro outfielder, played against the Negro Leagues' Cuban Stars.
Simkus, 39, never found exactly what he was looking for, but in the archives of the Chicago Tribune and newspapers such as the Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier, he found more than 3,000 other box scores, which he parsed and cataloged into what may be the most detailed collection of Negro League statistics ever compiled.
Those numbers allowed Simkus and Hal Richman, founder of Strat-O-Matic, to put together a Negro League version of the game -- no small, or unimportant, feat.
For decades, baseball's color line kept the game segregated, with African American stars playing in the Negro Leagues and winter circuits in Latin America while their white counterparts played in the major leagues. Statistics in the black leagues were kept so haphazardly -- if at all -- that it was hard to tell exactly how many games the likes of Paige and Pennington played each year, much less how they did or how they would have fared against white big leaguers.
