Strat-o-Matic is a baseball fantasy game in which you use cards based on the actual statistics of real baseball players. You can play it on a game board or on a computer and you can mix-and-match your teams so that Babe Ruth and Derek Jeter are teammates or so the ’27 Yankees can play the ’99 Yankees.
Or, if you have the creativity of a Tom Swank, you can really mix it up, and create leagues and tournaments that only the truly obsessed can understand. Like the under .400 league, composed only of players from teams with lousy records, or the A-Z league, in which no team roster could contain more than one player whose name started with the same letter.
When my son Noah and I met Tom, at the Yogi Berra Museum a couple of years ago, Tom had a tumor the size of a large egg protruding from his cheek. The tumor disappeared, but he’s been battling cancer ever since. And the word is that he’s going to lose the battle and lose it soon.
Last year, Noah and I dragged Tom to Glen Head, NY to Opening Day of the Strat-o-Matic season. That’s the day when scores of grown men go to the Strat-o-Matic headquarters, a little nothing building in a Long Island parking lot, and wait in line for hours – no matter the weather – to pick up the new cards with the statistics from the previous season. They could get the cards in the mail. But they prefer to make an adventure out of it, and bond with their fellow fanatics. To get a mental picture of it, you sort of have to imagine the kind of lines that form to see Santa in shopping malls at Christmas, and then imagine that all the kids are middle-aged men with beer guts and sloppy clothes.
But they’re great, these guys. They’re great because they have passion. I met two lawyers who’d flown in from Toronto, skipping court, and a guy who’d flown in from L.A, and was planning to fly right back as soon as he picked up his cards. Tom, who is a well-known figure in Strat-o-Matic circles, had made the trek many times before, but he really had no business schlepping out to Long Island in the cold with his health as bad as it was. He went as a favor to me. I wanted to do the story for public radio. And he went for my son Noah, who he drafted into the Strat-o-Matic world that day at the Yogi Berra Museum and who came to win a very special place in Tom’s heart.
Next Friday is opening day in Glen Head. It will be the same as always, the same boisterous crowd - but for the absence of the most passionate fan of them all. I’m glad Noah and I dragged him there last year.
Last February, Tom entered a Valentines Day essay contest at the Star Ledger. He wrote an essay about having cancer when his grandson Justin was born and how he bargained with God for just five more years so he could get to know Justin. He was one of the finalists in the contest too, but when the paper called him about running the essay, he was in the hospital. Whoever answered the phone - and it was probably his mother-in-law, who doesn't speak English - didn't understand what the paper wanted, and so the essay about Justin never got published. It really burned Tom that it worked out that way, that he was cheated of his chance to win that essay contest.
He got his five years though. Plus some extra innings.
Tomorrow night, if Tom says it’s okay, Noah and I are going to visit him at the hospice. I hear a bunch of the guys are going to come, and someone’s going to smuggle in a six-pack, and if it’s at all possible, there’s going to be some Strat.
