Who runs SOMWORLD, and what to expect next
About SOMWORLD
What's coming
The whole archive is here. Over 2,200 articles going back to 2008, every one of them recovered from the old site, and it stays current through this season. You can search it by title, browse it by season, and save the ones you want to come back to.
League management tools are in development. They are not finished and they are not pretending to be, but they are being built in the open on this site rather than promised for some later version.
SOMWORLD now runs on new servers with a completely rebuilt system behind it, and we have kept adding to it since. Every player now has a page with full batting and pitching lines for every season from 1969 through this past one, platoon splits included. The Reference section holds the card errata and our first app, Tournament Bracket, a free download for replaying real tournaments head to head. Both need only a free account.
Next up is Projector, next season's projected Strat cards, and Necromancer, our trade evaluator, is being rebuilt and is coming back.
A quick introduction
I'm Jasper Cattin, and I run the SOMWORLD site.
I got my start over Christmas break in 1998, in middle school, when my friend Robb Schreiber lent me his 1995 set. That was all it took, and I've been hooked ever since. I started playing tournaments in 1999 and won my first one in 2001. Over the years I've played in a handful of leagues and was commissioner of two of them, until health problems made it impossible to keep them going.
Away from the board I'm a professional poker player, and I dealt poker before that. Twenty years of working out what a spot is actually worth turns out to be decent preparation for a site built on run creation models and card values.
Will and Laurie own SOMWORLD and will continue to. They write it and they handle customer service, and the bylines throughout this archive are theirs and their contributors'. My job is the site itself: the software, the archive, and keeping the whole thing running and improving. I may put up an article now and then, but that isn't what I'm here for.
One thing I'm hoping to run once the league tools are ready is a proper in-depth league with a genuinely neutral commissioner, one who holds no team at all. The software already allows it, and I've never had the chance to play in a league run that way.
Thanks
The player statistics on this site stand on the work of two volunteer projects, and they deserve more than a line at the bottom of a page.
Retrosheet has spent decades collecting and checking play-by-play accounts of major league games, and gives the results away. Every batting line, pitching line and platoon split on SOMWORLD is built from their event files. The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at "www.retrosheet.org". Retrosheet.
The Chadwick Baseball Bureau keeps the register that ties each player's identity together across every source, and publishes the tools that read Retrosheet's files. Player-identity data is sourced from the Chadwick Baseball Bureau Register. Licence.
From Will and Laurie
Hello. When Gary Altman and I started SOMWORLD we had no idea of what would happen with the project. Yet here we are, 28 years later, still going strong, and hopefully we continue to help everyone with our Strat card analysis methods. The team has added two members to the staff. First is my wife Laurie Berry. We knew each other in high school 44 years ago. Little did I know at the time that her Dad was a Strat hobbyist or that she loved the Replacements. Any fan of Paul Westerberg and the ’Mats is first class in my book. Jasper Cattin is responsible for the new, improved website. We probably wouldn’t be around without him. Trying to keep prices low means we subjected our customers to an out-of-date model. Upgrading the site should have been done 5 to 10 years ago. The sky is the limit on what we can do to make SOMWORLD into a better, more comprehensive and unique experience.
We still have plans for turning SOMWORLD into a fundamental part of your daily Strat activity. Whether in draft leagues or solo replays, we hope that we continue to serve our customers with unique takes on Strat-O-Matic baseball. Gary and I have been playing Strat for 49 and 48 years respectively. It’s been a wild ride complete with numerous events and outcomes that are still happening even now. Super-Advanced hockey is my favorite Strat game. Someday I hope to have enough free time to finish my Phil Esposito career replay. Laurie is all about Strat basketball. Like her father, she’s 100 percent a Lakers fan and she’s still working on replaying Kobe Bryant’s MVP seasons.
Thanks for being a part of the SOMWORLD family. Hopefully we can keep this project going for another 20 years. Laurie and I have new emails that we’re using. You can reach us at [email protected] and [email protected]. The previous customer support email kolodzie@currently.com is no longer working for us.