code, github

After a late-night conversation with my brother about the Strat-O-Matic baseball game, I wondered if there was a way to generate realistic looking cards using real-world data. I remembered seeing a website by Bruce Bundy, which detailed a series of formulas he derived after years of trial-and-error. I spent a couple of days sifting through his website which was seemingly generated by scanning newspaper articles he’d written, OCRing them into Microsoft Word, then saving as HTML. I finally pieced together what I believed to be the secret formulas almost lost to time. I wrote a quick node.js application which reads in baseball stats from a website created by an Iowa alum, translates them into Strat distributions using Bruce’s formulae, and generates PDF cards that closely mimic real Strat-o-Matic cards. You can try it yourself by downloading the project on GitHub.