A short while back, I received an e-mail from my friend Brent, where he mentioned that his wife Simona was having a hard time grasping the concept of my Statis Pro 1978 Replay season. 
Trust me, Simona, you’re not the only one; over the years I’ve had many friends, co- workers, and even complete strangers question me about the game, only to walk away more perplexed than they were before. Most thought I was taking part in a fantasy league, a few assumed I was playing a video game, while others actually understood that Statis Pro was a board game, but couldn’t quite fathom that I was replaying an entire season, and the length of time it would take for me to do so.
For example, when I first began distributing All-Star Game ballots to my friends at work, two months before the game was to be played (mind you, those would be ‘SP78 baseball season’ months, not actual ‘current-day’ months), these friends would approach me just a few days after they’d returned their ballots and ask who’d won the game. I’d try to explain how it was going to take years for me to reach the All-Star Game, but to no avail: they’d be back, a few weeks later, asking again if I’d yet played the event in question. Apparently, the concept of playing a board game over 2,000 times was too far beyond the norm for their minds to accept. And this was in 1989…imagine their delirium if they’d found out I wouldn’t play the All-Star Game ’til 2004!
So after reading Brent’s e-mail, and realizing that there might be a few people out there besides Simona who might benefit from an SP78 primer, I decided to create a collection of tutorial articles that would discuss the various aspects of Statis Pro Baseball—the game, my season, the board, the cards, the charts, and such fringe topics as Pitcher Reduction and the dreaded Z-Play—and take you step-by-step through the playing of an actual SP78 game, from filling out the scoresheet to updating all post-game stats.
Check back in the coming weeks and months for more Statis Pro 101 posts; next time, I’ll discuss the game’s origins and how a game is played.
Statis Pro 1978 Replay 