The Strat Notebook

Number 2

Five Triple Plays!

All ten teams have played thirty five games, meaning I've rolled 175 games of strat this season, and in this short time we have recorded five triple plays! For reference, MLB saw four triple plays in all of 1951. Yikes!

I play the advanced version of the game, and the triple play works like this: No out and at least two runners on (I know what you're thinking, "Duh!" Just bear with me)...the result on the card will have something that says, for example, "lo(3b)max." According to the strat rule book for both basic and advanced (rule 17.2), this means "lineout into as many outs as possible." Okay- got it. Listen, I'm not alarmed aboout this. Outliers happen all the time in dice baseball. Wait 'till you hear about the year Jackie Robinson is having, but it did have me considering using the super-advanced rule, which says that if this comes up, instead of making it an automatic triple play, roll the twenty sided dice. A roll from 1 to 7 is a triple play, anything else is a double play, lead runner doubled off. For those of you keeping score, I have decided to let things ride with the advanced play rules, and see how many triple plays we can rack up this year. The MLB record is 19 set in 1890, but I don't think we can hit that one, though we are certainly on a pace to knock that record flat on it's "esss!" The modern era record is 11 set in 1924, 1929 and 1979.

Here is a list of the guys who have hit into a triple play this year, along with the game number in which it occurred:

A20 - Gil Hodges (B's), 11th inning v. Arsenals
B22 - Red Schoendienst (Mut), 6th inning v. Bitters
A29 - Ferris Fain (Ars), 3rd inning v. Bitters
C29 - Stan Musial (Tri), 1st inning v. B's

A24 - Hank Edwards (RK), 4th inning v. Sun Kings