Hello again dear Strat Baseball Family. This last newsletter has taken me about a week to put together so I happy it is finally done. I've taken a little bit of an extra time to make sure all the pages are working properly and that its perhaps a little better edited. And when I know its finished, I always get this warm feeling of accomplishment, know our readers are going to read some new great stuff. 

I have been a writer since the 1980s you see, whether writing books or articles on the internet, and I think this is one of the things I came here to do on this earth. Even in my younger crazy days with Strat, I was writing for the SOM Review.  But there is one thing I know as a writer and I really would like to encourage all of our members to consider this and that is that each of you has your own special stories or experiences linked to your playing of Strat-o-matic, and your family here would sure love to hear about it. So please feel free to send it in :-)!!  We try our best to come up with the most interesting and informative stories with strategies we can find for each issue by interviewing highly knowledgeable and successful Strat Baseball Gamers. Our challenge then is to see if I can pry lose some of their closely guarded secrets to help all of our members improve their own game play. And the other aspect of our newsletter is to speak to ex-players to here what it is like to be a part of MLB. But ultimately, the success of this newsletter is through a co-creation by all of us.  I have never been part of any project in my almost 60 years of life (me 60 yikes?) that was so successful because of the work of one person.

We always welcome any of your suggestions or ideas you might have for new areas to cover as well as your contributions so together we can make this one of the best on-line resources for Strat-o-matic Baseball.  So I think, as we come to the close of our second year, and especially with who you are about to meet in this issue, we have achieved our goal to provide a viable and successful platform of information to enhance you playing pleasure.  Plus, we are so delighted (we can't express this in words) how many of the key individuals in the SOM Community including the Game Company itself, have accepted this publication and lent us their support by letting us tell their stories and share with you their insights. If you were to go through the 12 issues we have put out since January of 2013, you would see an amazing group of individuals.

So we thank our over 1100 members for your great support and especially to those of you who have personally written to us and told how much you have enjoyed our newsletter (this means a lot since basically this publication is a labor of love). Now as we approach the holidays and a new year, we also wish, that is the publishing team here, to extend our greetings to you and your family for a great holiday season. And although I tend to be a pacifist and a peace negotiation in real life, my New Year's wish is that in 2015, our world will see more peace and that for our Strat Play, the year of 2015 will bring more amazing stories and reports of exciting Strat-based experiences along with new friendships plus some new creative projects presenting other ways to play the game we love which are unique and unbelievable (in the memory of Tom Swank who would come up with all kinds of ways to organize leagues and tournaments - thanks Bryan for your help with the next interesting project for the newsletter which you all will hear about soon).  Well enough gibitzing - let's move on to a quick overview of the cool stuff we have for you in the last issue of 2014!!

I have wanted, even prayed to the Strat Gods, to interview an ex-Major League ballplayer who did or still is playing SOM in real life. Finally, via information contained in Guzzo's book, and a bit of luck using Google on the net, I found a Strat brother, who is a new friend and great great guy as well. Plus, he is a very good astute Strat GM in his own right. I wish to introduce to our members Tony Brizzolara, ex-pitcher for the Atlanta Braves. Read his amazing interview and better yet, see what happens in what Tony called "The Wolfman's Challenge" when we played each other via netplay - a great great series - check it out. Another personal thank you to Chris Rosen for helping us with a copy of Tony's 1979 Strat card to show in his interview.

Next we are very very honored to be able to interview perhaps one of the best SOM gamer and strategists in the world, Mr. Matt Beagle. Matt has produced strategy video blogs for SOM on baseball and is a contributing writer for Baseball HQ. This guy knows his stuff and we are so grateful he agreed to speak to us with a promise of more insights to come next month linked to the new cards.  Also we were fortunate (and if you read our October issue you knew this was coming) to do our interview with Willie Aikens, another ex-baseball player with the Angels, Royals (was in the 1980 World Series where he set a record) and the Blue Jays briefly. We also do a short review of the book about Mr. Aikens, his bio called "Safe at Home". He was very polite and full of good wishes in his communiqués via email plus he has a very compelling story. It was not only an honor to meet him but I think he was very courageous to share his experiences linked to Baseball in his book.

Continuing, again using Guzzo's book as an aid, I saw that Daniel Okrent, the creator of Rotisserie League Baseball (a version of fantasty baseball where you draft a team using the players performances during the current season) also played SOM when he was younger. So I found him on the net and he agreed to speak to us as well giving us his most interesting story. This is the first issue ever we have had four such amazing individuals linked to Strat and MLB at the same time, such a great way to end our 2nd year.  Finally, Marc Wasserman, the "Commish" takes us inside his league the CBA and talks about the activities he has to do after the season ends. This is his 12th article in his column and if you read through them all, you would have a great understand what it takes to be a great commissioner who is dedicated to keeping his/her league functioning smoothly and seeing one great season after another.

One last thing we added to this issue is a few miscellanous items - how to get the SOM Baseball Fielding Rating files let out on December 11th. Plus if your league allows you to go after future star prospects, who haven't received a strat card yet how this could be of tremendous assistance to help you build your team so we offer three on-line resources to review the best new prospects going into 2015.  And as usual we did a bit of updating our book resource page and SOM/MLB resource page.  We will be reviewing Bill James 2015 Handbook next month but we listed it so you can get your discounted copy now plus how to get a copy of Mr. Aikens book if you are so interested.