Behind the Dice: Jim Zafian the Inspiration For Franchise Fridays

If you’ve ever fallen down the Strat-O-Matic rabbit hole—and if you’re reading this, the odds are dangerously high—you understand that the game is less a hobby and more a lifelong affliction. Those dice don’t just “roll”; they call to you. And for some of us, like the faithful members of the Long Island Strat Club (where the first rule of Strat Club is you constantly talk about Strat Club), Strat isn’t just baseball. It’s religion. With charts.

So imagine the kind of mind it takes not just to play Strat but to look at the entire history of Major League Baseball and think: Yeah, I can build 40-man all-time rosters for every franchise. All 30 of them. Piece of cake. That mind belongs to Jim Zafian, part historian, part data scientist, part mad scientist, and a fully committed member of the Church of Strat.

Jim’s obsession started young, around the time some kids were learning multiplication tables, he and his father were reverse-engineering Strat formulas in the early ’80s. While other families bonded over board games like Monopoly, the Zafians were building All-Time Dodgers and All-Time Orioles teams using hand-calculated numbers. This wasn’t a project; it was destiny. Years later, when books like Baseball Dynasties, Now Taking the Field, and Neyer’s Book of Lineups fueled his appetite, Jim found himself staring at the modern baseball universe and deciding it needed something bigger, more complete, and—of course—Stratified.

What began as a small project quickly mutated into a full-scale statistical odyssey. Each team’s roster needed the perfect balance: three catchers, five corner infielders, five middle infielders, eight outfielders, sixteen pitchers, and a few wild cards. But players had to earn their way in using a strict rule—their best four consecutive seasons, neutralized for era and ballpark, weighted for both sabermetrics and sanity. Not one great year, not a cherry-picked prime—four straight years of legitimate value. That single guideline instantly separated the “pretty good” from the “legends,” and it put Jim in the position no fan actually wants: deciding whether Ron Darling stays or goes, whether Rusty Staub becomes an Astro instead of a Met, and whether someone like Kingman deserves a seat in the room (he didn’t make it—rules are rules).

The process was exhaustive. Jim dove into Baseball-Reference like Jacques Cousteau exploring the ocean floor, pulling neutralized stats, WAR, Win Shares, ERA+, OPS+, Runs Created per 27 outs, WHIP, save totals, and defensive measures. He built spreadsheets that would make NASA jealous. Each Strat card took roughly an hour to research and design. A full 40-man roster? Weeks. A full league of 30 teams? Years. Throw in the “mixed players,” the guys who qualify for multiple franchises, and you’ve got a project that would frighten most normal human beings. But Jim isn’t normal. Jim is one of us.

And yet, for all the science, there’s art in his work. Jim readily admits to sprinkling in a little personal bias ,Wally Backman is in, period, no matter what WAR has to say about it. He bumped Frank Robinson to the Orioles instead of the Reds because, well, it felt right. He refused to let his beloved deadball pitchers overwhelm the rosters unless they were truly elite. And when Strat’s defensive ratings disagreed with his eyes (Ripken vs. Jeter, anyone?), he swallowed hard and honored the game’s long-standing quirks.

The result? A universe of all-time teams that feel both meticulously researched and undeniably fun. The Yankees ended up with five catchers, not because Jim wanted them, but because statistically they earned their way in. Nolan Ryan landed on the Angels because his best four-year stretch there was simply untouchable. And the Mets ,your Mets, my Mets, the Mets we’d roll into battle with any day, came alive in a way that gives even seasoned Strat veterans goosebumps. Seaver, Gooden, and deGrom anchoring a rotation? That’s not a baseball team; that’s an insurance policy.

And here’s the irony of it all: for someone who’s built the Strat equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, Jim hasn’t yet had the time to actually play many of the matchups. Life and work keep barging in like bad middle relief. The dice wait. The games wait. It’s all starting to feel a little like that old Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last— the one where Burgess Meredith's character a book worm named Henry Bemis finally has all the time in the world to read every book ever written… and then his glasses shatter. That’s Jim: standing atop a mountain of Strat greatness, the cards pristine, the matchups endless, the possibilities infinite — if only the universe would stop conspiring to keep him away from the tabletop.

Maybe that’s why this project feels so alive. Because Jim didn’t build these rosters just for himself. He built them for all of us — the daydreamers who always wanted to know what would happen if the All-Time Mets faced the All-Time Orioles, or whether the Dodgers’ bottomless rotation could silence the Murderers’ Row Yankees, or whether a Giants–Dodgers showdown in card form would still raise the hair on your arms the way it does on a real field. His cards make those worlds possible. All they need is a clean roll.

His hope is simple: that fans pick up the cards, relive memories, argue with his choices, send him feedback, and watch the sets evolve as new stars earn their place. Every roster is a living document. Every cutoff line is a conversation. Every roll of the dice keeps baseball history breathing.

And starting this Friday on Kiner’s Korner, we’ll bring Jim’s masterpiece to life with our new Strat-O-Matic Franchise Greats Simulation Series—weekly matchups, box scores, play-by-play, and game stories powered by the cards Jim created through decades of passion, spreadsheets, and probably more than a few headaches.

Seaver, Gooden, and deGrom are warming up. The dice are warming up.

History is warming up.

The first roll is coming.

And trust me…

Strat Club is about to get very loud.