About Baseball Strategy, from BoardGameGeek:
Welcome to the best FTF fantasy baseball board game ever created. This baseball game is for people who like meat and potatoes with a side of greens. It is the whole enchilada. When playing it you will use your intuition or feel to pick up patterns leading to decisions to outwit your opponent. If you can deal with, "Take that!", you will like this game. Baseball Strategy is not meant for the shy, but the hearty. Great baseball action. Thrilling too! Never a dull moment and you will actually feel like a batter or a pitcher, manager or a base coach, etc. when you play this game. Then you can live out your fantasies of being a big-league ball player! At least that's the idea is promoting here and what's wrong with that? Let's face it. Even if you just played wiffle ball in your backyard, haven't you fantasied hitting one into the upper deck at Tiger Stadium, especially having seen a slugger do that many times in your life? It would be nice to hear the cheers as you formally rounded the bases with alacrity to score. Baseball Strategy seems to capture the psychological battle between pitcher and batter quite well. Experience the excitement of getting a bases loaded, bases clearing double when you anticipated the pitch correctly, but you will also experience the agony when you don't! This game is unlike any other baseball game this author has ever played. There are rules for series play in order to give proper rest to pitchers where the entire pitching staff is used and not just the "Aces". Series play is highly recommended to have a full "baseball fantasy" playing experience. The game now even has variant injury possibilities, video replay challenges, robs of hit opportunities, MLB Defensive "Leather Larceny" Highlight Plays, setting the infield at DP depth and more.
This fantasy is a cat and mouse game (and vice versa) hiding in plain sight where the two gamers enter a complex matrix of double blind decisions that lead to the inevitable think and counter-think, out witting duel. Gamers begin by first selecting their lineups from imaginary players or actual players by converting their stats to the game's parameters. (This is easily done from mlb.com on the net or baseball-reference.com.). If you don't like agony, this game isn't for you!
Enter The Matrix: The Defensive team is the manager and catcher, selecting pitch types (Fast Ball, Off Speed, Pitch out, etc.) to send batters fuming back to the dugout, sometimes with specific outs in a certain situation. Batters attempt to get a hit, get on base or at the least make an out that moves runners into scoring position/ or of course, scoring. (that's the idea, right?) Each tries to anticipate the other's tendencies throughout the game in order to "exploit" them.
After a pitch card is played by the pitcher, the batter must then select a type of offense/ball in play strategy (Steal, Bunt, Hit and Run, Long Ball, etc.)The results of the two choices are found by cross indexing them on a result matrix table. Players can decide on the size of ballpark before the game.
