Baseball is a game about numbers, about history, about legacy. Accordingly, all sorts of people know the numbers. All sorts of people - including Fox Mulder, posternerd - are able to read the numbers of yesterday's games like tea leaves. The more dedicated read the numbers of the past and imagine the world as it was, using the numbers Jurassic Park- style as DNA preserved in the petrified sap of yellowed box scores to recreate a large and vanished world.

As such I am not alone thinking about Lou Gehrig, about how he spoke, about how he toiled in the long months of the summer of 1927. I am not alone imagining what radio announcers had to say about him off air, when they could use expletives.

I am not special.

Except that I am. The numbers I obsess about weren't piled up while Lou Gehrig was a member of the New York Yankees. Technically, the numbers I obsess about weren't piled up at all.

I am a member a Strat-O-Matic based league that is in the business of re-creating baseball seasons based on luck, strategy, and - of course - statistical probability. While my Gehrig stats have a foot in the real world, based on his performance during the aforementioned hot and buggy summer, my numbers were produced by a computer program. In my imaginings, Gehrig plays for a team called The Dagobah Bog. His teammates include Chick Hafey, Max Bishop, Travis Jackson, and Lefty Grove.

In this world, Lou Gehrig is more famous than Babe Ruth. In our league, Babe Ruth is the best player on a mediocre team; Lou Gehrig is the best player on a team that has won five consecutive rings.

Strat-O-Matic (or Strato or Strat) is a dice game that uses cards and charts. It is genius. It starts (duh) with statistics that have been turned by the Strato gods into cards that (with the help of the dice) to re-play at bats, games, or even seasons. Unlike other similar games, Strato is not simply about probability. According to the official Strato website, the goal is not to re-do seasons but to re-play seasons. This means that the cards are built in such a way that any hitter can, if things go right, get a hit off of any pitcher. The key to this is the Strato card: other recreation games use clumsy season averages (a .316 hitter always has a 31.6% chance of getting a hit, no matter who he's facing) while strato uses a far more complicated formula that includes lefty/righty match-ups and a slew of other variables. According to the Strat-o-Matic homepage, the process of creating a full season's worth of Strato cards, one per player, takes about 1000 man-hours. As a side note, I once e-mailed Strato, disagreeing about how they had rated an outfielder's throwing arm; they wrote me back (how often does an oracle write back?) and gave us "permission" to change the rating.

Anyway, the Strato card is composed of three, numbered columns. Columns numbered 1-3 are on a hitter's card. Columns 4-6 are on the pitcher's. Each column contains the numbers 2-12. Next to each number is a result: single, double, a ball hit to the shortstop, etc. When a batter comes to the plate, three dice (one red, two white) are rolled. The red die determines which column is used; the total of the white dice (2-12) determines which result. Each player has numbers that are good for them and numbers that are bad for them. While probability is the motor, Strato lives and dies by the specific event, doing its best to create individual moments where one player has to face one pitcher with a specific defense in a specific ballpark, the wind blowing left to right.

Just like baseball.

Strato takes into account clutch hitting, defense, weather, ballpark, and fatigue. Part of what Strato offers, then, is a world where nerds can be baseball managers without having to deal with egos and the fact that nerds rarely get the chance to be managers. It's possible that this last fact is changing: nerds like Billy Beane, the entire non-Curt Schilling part of the Boston Red Sox, and a few other general managers of the real game have started to let statistics dominate their personnel decisions. However, they will never call me. With strato, I am Billy Beane. I pull the strings.

The most important thing I did as an actual player was to be hit by a pitch in an important little league game; in my fake baseball career, I have guided two of the most storied franchises we have. However, there is more to Strato than control and roll reversal; nerds have gotten those things from video games for a few decades now. Strato alters the fabric of time. We all have moments that we wish we could re-live and Strato makes that sort of thing possible. Many people who play the game do so simply to "correct" a disappointing season for their favorite team; I once replayed the stretch run of 1987 so that my Toronto Blue Jays would neither lose Tony Fernandez to injury nor go into one of the worst tailspins in the history of the American League. In my alternate version of the season, they didn't choke. They beat the Detroit Tigers to the finish line and then swept the Minnesota Twins in the playoffs before, finally, beating the Cardinals in six games.

Fernandez was the playoff MVP. He hit .375 with 8 stolen bases and 19 RBI. Strato allows for second chances.

But for me, like most Strato fanatics, the real fun is drafting teams and playing an alternate season. My friends and I did this with dice and paper. Each game took bout 30 minutes. We kept our own statistics for a full 162 game season - 81 hours per person of game play alone, let alone tabulation and obsession time - kept players from year to year, making trades, giving out MVP awards and so on.

We took it incredibly seriously.

Once, we kicked one of our best friends out of the league. We said it was because he took too long to play his games. Really, we just wanted his players. We let him back in, but he never forgave us. He has admitted, as an adult, that in his time away, he used his cards to set up his own league.

Eventually, though, we discovered the things that geeks discover and moved on to the (slightly) less nerdy world of girls and roll-playing games.

But then, after graduate school, my friend (the one we kicked out) discovered that Strato had released a computerized version of the game, one capable of playing the games in micro-seconds. This would make it possible to do all of the things we loved to do without having
to be in the same city with hours and hours to devote to it.

And so (after a failed experiment with the years we first played as kids) our league was born. We have 12 teams. We started with 1920 and have now just completed off-season transactions before starting 1933. We have a website, an encyclopedia, and a hall of fame. Rogers Hornsby is a god. Eppa Rixey is much, much cooler than he was in the real world.

Our league is by no means the only one of its kind. There are over 100 continuing replay leagues that I know of. There are tournaments and communities all over the web. Strato has games for other sports too, hockey, basketball, football.

In Strato - regardless of the league or sport - what happened happens again but differently, creating a new world as fraught with numbers and legacy as the one that is argued about on American sports radio. By replaying year after year, patterns develop. We have our versions of the Cubs and Red Sox. We have our teams that never win and our teams that should have won but didn't. We have our unbreakable records (Ruth hit 66 dingers in 1920; Hornsby hit 68 in 1925) and unthinkable accomplishments: my United Nations Peacekeepers won 127 games in 1924. We have a history. A new history. A different history. A history that only we (and whoever stumbles onto our website) knows about.

In 1924, Harry Hooper, at the end of his career, was traded from the then-struggling Bog to the Peacekeepers. He had the best year of his career and outdid himself in the postseason. He was clearly trying to win the one thing that had eluded him his entire life. Though the team came up short, the victims of the biggest upset in our league's history, it was no fault of Hooper's.

Our history can be read, just like any other history. And we do so, investing our players with motives, personality, and feeling. The computer generates fake newspaper articles, interviews, and recaps.

But, for me, it is not just about the dorky solidarity that comes from building this world together. It is not just about newness of the world created by our league, or getting closer to the history of the real world that makes ours possible. Though all of that is fun (I had never heard of Max Bishop whom I now love madly and unreasonably) Strato is part of a larger project for me. The replay league is a way of asking what is perhaps the mother of all fundamental questions: why the hell do things happen the way that they do?

Strato provides no answers, but for this agnostic who has a hard time understanding the world, our fake history - piling up a three or fours seasons every year - at least allows me a different, less helpless vantage point. I would replay elections or conversations I had with my father if only Strato would make the cards.