The company released Statis Pro Baseball in 1978, and continued to release new editions each year, featuring the previous season’s player cards, through 1992, when a licensing dispute with the greedy bastards at Major League Baseball forced AH to cease operations of their excellent baseball game. The Avalon Hill Game Company, based in Baltimore, Maryland, who began production of simulation war games in 1954. Unlike fantasy baseball, Statis Pro is a simulation of an actual game, and not a gathering of points based on real-time player stats. A person managing a team is also given free reign to make decisions not covered by a card draw: substituting players and changing pitchers, issuing intentional walks, playing the infield in or back, and when and where to have a baserunner make a steal attempt. Statis Pro Baseball is a strategic baseball board game, similar to APBA and Strat-O-Matic, that is played with cards representing each player from a particular baseball season, and which feature numbers that-through formulas using that player’s actual statistics from that season-represent how well a player will likely perform in any given game. Instead of dice, a deck of ‘Fast Action Cards’ is used to determine game results, such as at-bats, putouts, baserunning, scoring, and even such fringe situations as injuries, rainouts, and freak plays (ejections, triple plays, inside-the-park home runs, etc).
