Benefield: Never heard of Strat-O-Matic baseball? Santa Rosa fans make pitch to pull in players

In 2020, Joe Beland was in the hospital, suffering acutely from COVID-19.

He had collapsed at home and flatlined at the hospital.

He recalls being told he’d lost 80% of his lung capacity.

He spent two weeks recovering in the hospital.

And all the while he lay there, trying to regain some strength, Beland’s wife, Monica Udell, struggled to keep up with his condition and mental state because of restrictions on visitation.

But she soon figured out he was on the mend because she knew what he was doing.

She saw his credit card bills.

As a way to bring some sunshine into life and alleviate worries about his medical predicament, Beland was buying roster cards for his Strat-O-Matic set, a decades-old dice game meant to replicate the on-field decisions of baseball managers.

“I had flatlined, the whole thing,” he said. “But during that time, I was ordering Strat-O-Matic cards and my wife was going to kill me. She was like, ‘You are ordering all these cards and you are in the hospital? I’m going to kill you again.’”

He laughs when he tells it. Monica does too. Such is the pull that Strat-O-Matic has on Beland.

“It makes him happy,” Monica said.

Beland calls the game “magical.”

He’s not alone.

Strat-O-Matic, invented in 1961 and dubbed “the original fantasy baseball game,” is so popular in some (mostly East Coast) cities that leagues are commonplace.

Every year on “opening day,” fans line up at Strat-O-Matic headquarters in Glen Head, New York, to buy the latest roster cards.

Card sets issued decades ago can sell for a small fortune online.

Just ask Monica.

Beland has the cards for every year since 1904.

“Some people can’t physically play baseball. Me? I’m too fat. I can’t play baseball. But I can become a manager,” he said.

Beland’s devotion goes way back. His older brothers taught him the game, and at different times in his life he’s taught anyone who will give him a chance.

He’s a Strat-O-Matic evangelist.

So much so that he’s the brains behind a local league that now has a devoted gaggle of players. It’s called the Santa Rosa Strat-O-Matic League, and Beland is, you guessed it, the commissioner.

“It all pretty much started with Joe,” said Jaime Jovel, who met Beland when they both worked at Home Depot. “He’s one of the most charismatic guys I know.”

“In season,” players meet Tuesday nights at Ausiello’s Bar and Grill in downtown Santa Rosa.

They take over tables in the side room, order beer and food, and get to rolling the dice.

On a typical game night, players will get three contests in, meaning they face off with — and catch up with — three friends over the course of a total of 27 innings.

Jovel has been at it about a year. He’s hooked.

“He said, ‘It’s like Dungeons and Dragons but with baseball,’” he said. “It’s how he kind of introduced it to me.”

He now plays every Tuesday night in two “seasons” per year. He’ll also try his hand in the “mini-leagues” Beland sets up between the regular seasons just so Strat addicts don’t have to go cold turkey.

It’s a simple game of dice and probability.

Players act as manager of their squads, using cards listing real statistics from real teams. The element of competition, and the dash of the unknown, comes with the roll of the dice.

Like in real baseball, weird things can happen. And like in real baseball, the managers (or Strat-O-Matic players in this case) craft lineups taking into account their squad’s strengths and weaknesses, and mid-contest, have to think and manage their way out of jams.

“We don’t all play baseball. We don’t run like Mickey Mantle, we don’t hit like Barry Bonds,” Beland said. “But we all decided, ‘Let’s play a game where we can be interactive as coaches.’”

And like real baseball, there are winners and losers.

To recognize that, Beland created playoffs for his leagues and also a World Series trophy.

It is a thing of beauty.

Set atop a planed piece of wood with the bark still attached, is an upside down candlestick Beland snagged at Lowe’s (no offense to his employer, Home Depot).

Atop that, Beland glued a crystal baseball he found online.

On the base are figures of Mickey Mantle on one side, Babe Ruth on the other.

But the topper are the small plaques bearing the names of league winners.

Tom Kwiatkowski’s name appears three times.

Kwiatkowski loves baseball but he might love math — probability, more accurately — even more.

He’s been playing with Beland from nearly the beginning.

“I’m a nerd,” he said. “You had me at ‘Baseball and dice.’”

But Kwiatkowski has never played baseball.

Born to Polish immigrants who were working on their English when he was young, Kwiatkowski was never signed up for T-ball or Little League growing up in Rohnert Park.

But his apartment balcony overlooked John Reed Elementary School. More specifically, it overlooked the ball field at John Reed Elementary School.

So he watched other kids play baseball. And he took note.

“That’s how I learned baseball,” he said. “It was that and nothing else. There was not the entertainment there is now.”

Kwiatkowski takes the game seriously. On this night, he’s brought along his three World Series Rings.

Real rings. Real, huge rings.

Beland got them online and no those aren’t real diamonds, and the rings themselves aren’t silver or platinum, but what they lack in genuine filigree, they make up for in girth.

Lea Davis doesn’t own a ring — yet — but she plays with an enthusiasm that makes one think she’ll get one soon enough.

On this night she wears a Strat-O-Matic jersey with her nickname emblazoned on the back: Cinderellea.

Her start was purely pragmatic.

“I was getting ready to get my knee replaced so I wanted something to do when I was laid up,” she said between rolls of the dice.

She’s now played six straight seasons.

Like Kwiatkowski, Lance Lantow’s name appears on the World Series trophy three times.

Lantow is less of a numbers guy, more of a baseball guy.

That said, he had never heard of Strat-O-Matic until Beland, a longtime buddy, introduced him.

“I had no idea. I just love baseball,” he said. “You are using real players, real teams, real stats.”

Clearly Lantow picked up the nuances of the game pretty quickly.

But to a player, league members say, sure, it’s about the game, but it’s mostly about the community Beland has built.

“All of this is Joe,” Davis said.

Kwiatkowski is taking this season off. He’s got kids and their schedules sometimes bump up against the Strat-O-Matic league games.

But tonight he’s watching a game unfold between Davis and Beland.

He groans or chuckles with almost every roll of the dice. He provides an expert’s running commentary that frankly makes the game a little bit more understandable to a newcomer.

Kwiatkowski laughed when asked if he ever follows his gut when in the heat of battle.

Never, he said.

It’s pure math. And it’s a big reason why he wins a lot.

“I have a big advantage,” he said. “I’ll look at their lineup and I feel bad. I’m like, ‘OK, you have a chance to win. Just not a good chance.’”

That chance, however slim, is part of the magic of baseball. And Strat-O-Matic, Beland said.

And maybe life.

You don’t need a guarantee. You just need a shot.

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.