As a kid, I was never much of a fan of organized sports. I was, however, a huge fan of sports simulation board games, and the granddaddy of all sports simulation games — Strat-O-Matic Baseball — turns 50 this year.
Maybe I was a weird kid, but the statistics driven gameplay of Strat-O-Matic and its various imitators were always far more captivating to me than the real thing. Even today, you couldn’t pay me to watch an entire Major League Baseball game, but I’ll gladly play baseball sims like Out of the Park for hours.