A Virtual Season: BC Turns to Strat-O-Matic to Fill Void
The Eagles' Twitter account has been following the team's original schedule with time-lapse videos of the beloved dice game.
When Boston College baseball’s season came to a swift and startling end ahead of its conference weekend series with North Carolina State, the team’s sports information director—Brendan Flynn—began brainstorming ways to help alleviate the uncertainty of the weeks to come.
Flynn, who joined the Eagles’ staff back in April 2018 after five years at Oklahoma, turned to something that his dad had shown him on a summer vacation when he was a kid: Strat-O-Matic baseball. Strat-O-Matic uses player sheets which are printed with various ratings and result tables for dice rolls that you cross-reference with. Flynn realized it was a good way to bring the games that people were missing back into their day-to-day lives, so he took to Twitter.
On March 20, BC’s twitter account released its first game—a time-lapse video of an 18-14 slugfest victory over Virginia Tech on what would have been the Eagles’ ACC home opener. It featured a view of dice being rolled, a scoresheet being filled out, and ended with a sheet showing the final score. The feedback was tremendous, racking up nearly 4,000 views and 76 likes as people enjoyed seeing a virtual Sal Frelick and Brian Dempsey hit back-to-back home runs not once, but twice.
“I wanted to make the videos because it's something different that other teams haven't tried, and given the current climate without games it feels like there's no bad ideas worth trying,” Flynn said. “Running the BCBirdBall account, one of my main goals is to provide a varying amount of content and this falls in line with that plan.”
To do them, Flynn created a modified sheet—broken up by hitters in the batting order—and set up a mini-home studio in his apartment with his phone propped up on a GoPro extension. Playing against his wife, Emily, the duo take about a half-hour in the afternoon to get through a game.
“Emily is a big sports fan, who also used to work in collegiate athletics at UConn and Oklahoma, and enjoys being involved,” Flynn said. “She wants to win, but isn't upset if BC ends up on the winning end.”
So far, the games have tended toward explosive displays of offense. For kicks, I pulled the hitting stats from the 10 games the Eagles have played—they’ve gone 7-3 with series wins over Virginia Tech and Louisville—and they boast a .390 batting average with 43 home runs. Notable contributors have been the names you might expect, as Joe Suozzi is hitting .521 with 26 RBIs and Cody Morissette is hitting .400 with a cool 16 runs scored, but others have stepped up. Ramon Jimenez has simply thrived, slugging seven home runs and driving in 20 runs with a .447 batting average.
“The batter results definitely gear the game toward high scores, which is fun to see the batter's statistics,” Flynn said before adding, “Hopefully the pitchers don't take much stock in the results.”
Winning games by margins of 19-15 or 17-16 doesn’t lend to positive pitching statistics—BC has a 11.63 ERA—but the entertaining games have been worth a watch. Flynn has made sure to try and keep up with head coach Mike Gambino’s bullpen management, as 18 pitchers have appeared in the first 10 games. He cited that as one of the hardest parts, as it’s much different than the lineup which was virtually unchanged through the first 15 real games of the year.
“I've been around for just two years of BC baseball, but I have a pretty good sense of when the coaching staff will make a move,” Flynn said. “Knowing that the game is only a simulation and no pitches are actually being thrown, I like to give a pitcher a chance to get out of trouble.”
For now, Flynn plans to keep it up. The latest video—a narrow one-run loss to Florida State on Saturday—drew 3.1 thousand views, a recent peak. The challenge for the third-year associate director moving forward is to “add a new wrinkle to try and make the videos a little more engaging.”
Images courtesy of Brendan Flynn, Boston College Athletics