This week we asked our writers to make some Yankees or baseball themed holiday gift recommendations.
Here are their responses:
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Paul Semendinger – Strat-o-Matic Baseball. It is the best baseball tabletop game ever made. For me, there is not and has never been a better gift for a baseball fan.
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Ed Botti – Rawlings makes a very nice leather home plate shaped mouse pad. Would look great on my desk!!
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Cary Greene – Baseball gifts are often age appropriate. As a kid, a subscription to baseball digest was always a fun present and I received it more than once as my mom and dad really did put on a fantastic Christmas for my sister and I. Another phenomenal present was a complete set of Topps baseball cards. That would keep a kid like me occupied for days.
However the one gift that got me most stoked up was a a game called Strat-o-Matic baseball and as a kid I probably played five or six complete seasons for my favorite teams, including the Yankees, the Pirates and the A’s.
Each year I would hope for a new complete MLB set featuring each Major League Baseball team. Of course we wound up inventing cards for rookies who didn’t have a card but a strategy game teaches all kinds of advanced statistics and allows a baseball fan to become a manager of their own team and go up against other teams.
Strat-O-Matic baseball is still played today and it’s an awesome way to bring groups of fans together, in fact, a gift like this might even create a new hobby for that special baseball fan on your list. Today, the game is even played on line and it’s widely recognized as a very accurate baseball simulator.
A gift like this is a fantastic way to teach a baseball fan all sorts of advanced statistics and it is absolutely a gift that would make any baseball fan happy. It’s also a way to bond with a son or daughter, so I would rate it as one of the best presents a father could give to a middle school or high school aged child who is interested in baseball. That said, it’s a fun game for baseball fans of any age.
I actually played on line during the pandemic shortened season and it was a lot of fun.
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Tim Kabel – The best baseball themed gift that I can recommend is tickets to a future game. I used to give them or at least a hand-written voucher for them to my kids in their stockings. The promise and prospect of going to a game in the summer warms the soul and the heart on Christmas. It also strengthens the bond between parent and child, husband and wife or whatever the relationship might be.
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Mike Whiteman – Forty years ago I was given perhaps my favorite Christmas gift – Strat-O-Matic baseball. The game has provided me with many hours of enjoyment, helped cultivate friendships, honed my math skills, and taught me so much about baseball history.
The great thing is that the game is still going strong:
It’s old-school fun. If you have a baseball fan child who you want to pull away from the screens, give them Strat this Christmas!
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Andy Singer – I’m an avid reader, so I pretty much always think a good book is a great gift. I listed a bunch of my favorite recent books about baseball in last week’s SSTN Mailbag. There are also a ton of cool gifts if you look around the internet. A few years back, I gave my brother a custom wallet with his initials made with Rawlings glove leather. Two years ago, my wife gave me an entirely different wallet made with glove leather and baseball stitches. Both my brother and I use nothing but our baseball-related wallets.
Beyond that, giving a special someone a trip to either Cooperstown or the Negro League Baseball Hall of Fame in Kansas City are really great gifts. I concur with others who say that tickets or vouchers for tickets to a future game at any level is a perfect gift. At the end of the day, baseball fans appreciate anything that helps connect them to the game they love, so it’s hard to go wrong with anything you choose.
