We interrupt this lackluster Yankee season to bring you tales of yesteryear…and a game that baseball enthusiasts played day and night on their back porches and kitchen tables before the computer came along and changed things forever.

Welcome to the wonderful world of STRAT-O-MATIC baseball, a game that defined my youth.

Since the early 1960s, STRAT-O-MATIC has been THE board game that allows you to play out entire major league baseball seasons. The combination of cards and dice lets you manage a game and get results statistically consistent with each player's normal on-field performance. It's this accuracy that remains STRAT-O-MATIC's most redeeming quality.

I was reintroduced to STRAT-O-MATIC when I read Glenn Guzzo's book STRAT-O-MATIC FANATICS. It's a study of the game and its founder, Hal Richman. Once I began reading Guzzo's book, I was hooked on the first page. I read through the night and into the next day. I didn't cancel my plans as much as simply forget about them.

Hal Richman was a dreamy Long Island kid who forged an imaginative escape route into his self-created reality. His is a David-and-Goliath story about transcending a brutally abusive and sometimes sadistic father, and living the life he dreamed on his own terms.

STRAT-O-MATIC became Hal Richman's redemption and his vision. Richman says: "The black athlete has dominated basketball. For him, it wasn't a game, it was a way of life - a way out of the ghetto. For me, [STRAT-O-MATIC] was also a way out of my psychological ghetto."

STRAT-O-MATIC became the premier baseball board game because Richman willed it to be. Upon graduating from college, young Hal Richman borrowed $5,000 from his father and promised that if the game did not succeed he would follow his father into the insurance business. The threat of becoming an insurance salesman drove Richman to overcome monumental obstacles.

In addition to providing examples of sound business principles in action, Guzzo illustrates how the statistical framework of STRAT-O-MATIC paved the way for the current baseball love affair with fantasy baseball and sabermetrics.

Guzzo writes: "With its individual player cards that allowed gamers to create their own teams, STRAT-O-MATIC was an ancestor of fantasy sports. Its hold on the people who played it inspired the founders of Rotisserie Baseball, STATS, Inc., Electronic Arts, and Baseball Info Solutions to follow their passions and led to the nation's infatuation with statistics and computer sports games."

In fact, people way back in the '60s who played STRAT-O-MATIC discovered firsthand what happened when you built a team solely on high batting average - or worse - RBIs. When Richman built teams on those stats, he would lose more than win over a full season. A STRAT-O-MATIC player realized the importance of On-Base Percentage and walks well before Bill James made his work public. (Somewhere Eric Walker is smiling.)

Readers learn about dozens of major league ballplayers who were hooked on the game, including Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dykstra, Curt Schilling, and Ken Singleton. Many of these major leaguers eagerly anticipated the arrival of their new STRAT-O-MATIC ratings each year, as player's reputations can literally be affected by them.

Guzzo even recounts the story of Ivy league scholar Doug Glanville, who didn't receive the coveted '1' for his defensive play in 2002, a year in which he patrolled center field regularly for the Philadelphia Phillies without making a single error. Glanville's outrage led to a sit-down with Hal in which Doug made his case with statistics. Hal explained how he arrived at his findings, and Glanville's threat to boycott the game he loved didn't sway Hal, but it left him with a personal taste about how seriously some athletes take his point-of-view.

Former Braves pitcher Rick Mahler said his STRAT-O-MATIC experience even helped him as a pitcher. Mahler told Guzzo: "This guy's in there for his defense. You know that when he comes up, it's because he's a '1' fielder, not a hitter. Or this guy's a '4' fielder, he's in there because he can hit. I remember facing Andre Dawson and remembering that he was a guy who never walks. So you didn't have to throw him as many strikes."

The spine lists the book as both a sports and a business book. This is an apt description as the book describes many of the obstacles that Hal Richman overcame in order to survive and thrive-including the trauma of a law suit against STRAT-O-MATIC threatened by the new Labor union head Marvin Miller in 1966. Richman also survived competition from Sports Illustrated, Electronic Arts and other prominent companies.

The book is also filled with interesting anecdotes, such as how a game of STRAT-O-MATIC was played at home plate in Cleveland in place of the postponed 1981 All-Star game and broadcast live on the Today Show. (The real All-Star game was played later that year when the strike ended.)

In Boston, games of STRAT-O-MATIC were actually broadcast over the radio with such realistic gusto that folks just tuning in thought the baseball strike just ended.

Guzzo includes accounts of tournament actions, observations from various members of the sabermetric community, and verbatims from "STRAT-O-MATIC widows." Some of these poor women found that when they delivered "It's either STRAT or me" ultimatums to their husbands or boyfriends, their men dove headfirst into their cards, dice, and baseball stats.

STRAT-O-MATIC FANATICS is a fun read for all baseball fans, and for anyone who likes to see a good guy win out. And if you ever wiled away a rainy afternoon playing STRAT-O-MATIC with your buddies in your basement or bedroom, this book will rekindle those fond memories.

Perhaps Hal's daughter, Annie Richman, said it best: "There are men my age, some I've dated, who have told me, 'Your father changed my life.'"