From the Atlanta Journal & Constitution:
James “Red” Moore has never heard of Strat-O-Matic, the baseball simulation board game that’s maintained an astonishing cult following for nearly 50 years.
He certainly didn’t know the company recently released a card set replicating the skills and statistics of 103 Negro League ballplayers who performed, mostly in obscurity, from 1896 to 1950.
But Moore, 93, knows quite a bit about those days, “when only the ball was white.” He was a virtuoso first baseman for three teams in the Negro majors from 1936 to 1941, including two years in Baltimore (1939-1940) when he roomed with a teenaged catching prodigy named Roy Campanella.
Likely because his tenure was so brief and because many of his statistics don’t exist, Moore, who has lived in the same southwest Atlanta home for the last 62 years, isn’t included in the Strat-O-Matic set. But 12 of his ex-teammates are here, including five who are enshrined at Cooperstown, along with one manager and at least 44 others he played against.
