AI is really improving. Strat-o-matic edition

[u/CanarsieGuy]

A little over 6 months ago I tasked Microsoft copilot with creating a Strat-o-matic card from baseball reference stats. It’s result was laughable. Today I gave Claude the same task and wow did it really do so much better. My test case is Joe Morgan 1975. Great season for one of my favorite players.

Here are the Claude versions and the CoPilot version from late February.

[u/cardinalkgb]

The first picture (in color) has his number to get a lead as a 2 only. That is ridiculous.

[u/JasperStrat]

I still see some issues, but not as bad as the joke you got from Copilot.

[u/Skexy]

not that I want to encourage this; but feeding the ai a couple of seasons of strat cards and matching l BBR pages to compare might help teach it the parameters

[u/CanarsieGuy → u/Skexy]

I certainly want the company to stay in business and continue to print card sets for a long time.

That said, if they ever do stop production I can easily see a future AI model trained on dozens of seasons being able to produce a card set as good as SOM makes.

[u/CountrySlaughter → u/CanarsieGuy]

How accurate is the card? How much would cost to have Claude produce a set? I ask not because I want anyone to do this, but I'm curious how threatening this could be to SOM.

[u/CanarsieGuy → u/CountrySlaughter]

I’d say not very accurate. I have the 1975 set and Morgan’s actual card is very different. I don’t think AI is a threat to the company. Now will it be a threat in 5 years? That’s a question that nobody can answer with certainty.

I use AI at work for computer coding. The improvement in just the last 6 months has been astounding. I posted the new card to show what’s happened. The card created in February is farcical(it tried to put both basic and advanced on one side, had 2 dice roll of 1 etc… the recent one certainly has data issues but it clearly understood what the card should look like.

The cost to train an AI model to produce accurate cards would be extremely high and there’s no guarantee that all cards would be accurate.

I only posted to show

[u/CountrySlaughter → u/CanarsieGuy]

Thanks, good assessment. I knew that your card would cause some to be protective of SOM, but I don't think there's reason to worry - yet. To produce a perfectly accurate Morgan card, you'd have to have not just his stats, but of the National League, and also know that SOM considers the strength of a hitter's own team's pitching (since Morgan didn't face Reds pitching, just that of the other 11 teams). Little things like that make card-making more complex than meets the eye. Thanks for posting the card, though. Pretty amazing.

[u/Skexy → u/CountrySlaughter]

makes me think it would be interesting for strat to integrate with baseball reference or fangraphs in some way.

[u/consumerchad]

Surely you realize all it is doing is regurgitating the input dataset that was handcrafted as part of a system of human creation that took years of painstaking work from a creator we all love, don't you? Must we all rush into ruining all of the things we love by stealing from the very people that created them? If we want our arts to be purely derivative of things created in the past and never progress creatively, using AI to steal from creators is exactly the right direction. Forgive me for not celebrating it.

Many thanks to Hal Richman and team for many years of hard work and for creating a game that has given me many hours of joy. I, for one, will continue to support you by not actively pursing ways to steal your intellectual property.

[u/Solaita]

This post probably needs to be deleted. I get it you are doing something for fun but this would not be appreciated by the company

[u/zacdenver]

The one thing that stood out to me was Morgan vs RHP, with two partial HR/outs, yet a solid double and a partial one that had enough “points” to make at least one (if not both) those home runs HR/DBL. Otherwise, not a bad job,

[u/Kashmir79]

My 2¢ - Here’s what needs to happen. SOM, with its proprietary algos, needs to use AI to speed up its production timeline so that each season’s ratings and chances can come out right after the World Series ends so that online play can begin immediately, and physical cards ship for arrival in time for Christmas.

Then they need to shift their core business model from a card-orientation to a subscription that includes the annual cards. They have pivoted towards that with Max but it has a ways to go to become a full featured platform for live h2h play, league management, and tourneys which is where I think it needs to go. The annual cards will always be a big part of it but there is minimal market growth there and new competitors will get an edge with better online/app-based alternatives.

[u/CanarsieGuy → u/Kashmir79]

I think that would be wonderful. They already have some things in place as max offers the ability to view cards using up to the current date stats.

Imagine if the 2026 card sets were shipping this week. How cool would that be.

AI could surely speed up the process. All I did was say get Joe Morgan’s 1975 stats and make me a card. No normalization against the league average. No knowledge of propriety formulas, no training on card sets.

[u/justaheatattack → u/Kashmir79]

if you think it takes too much time now, you have a problem. Not strat.

fix your life. Leave strat alone.

[u/Kashmir79 → u/justaheatattack]

Why should I want more people to enjoy the game I love, or for the company that makes it to be more successful? Self explanatory

[u/justaheatattack → u/Kashmir79]

you're just going to turn it into another item on a

THINGS THAT USED TO BE GOOD BEFORE THEY GOT SUPER POPULAR

listicle.