Simulation Package

By night Scott Simkus, 39, is a dispatcher for a Chicago limousine company. By day he's a baseball historian, and in the mid-1990s he started collecting box scores of Negro leagues games. Digging through microfilm and digital archives of the Chicago Tribune and African-American papers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, Simkus gathered more than 3,000 of them, dating from 1909 to the late '40s.

It might be the country's largest trove of raw Negro leagues data, and Simkus decided to combine it with another of his passions: Strat-O-Matic Baseball, the dice-and-card simulation game that was hugely popular in the days before fantasy leagues and video games. With Negro leagues stats so scattershot, Strat-O-Matic had never incorporated players like the young Satchel Paige (below), Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson. But with Simkus's help the company reconstructed thousands of games and calculated stats that lend Strat its realistic feel: righty-lefty splits, fielding data, catchers' caught-stealing numbers. Last week Strat-O-Matic released its first Negro leagues edition, playable with 103 black stars. Stratheads can simulate Negro leagues games or drop players onto big league rosters of yesteryear to see what might have happened if baseball hadn't waited until 1947 to integrate. "I was surprised how much information on these players is out there," says Simkus. "The game has a nice feel. It just feels right."