SherCo GRAND SLAM Baseball
The SherCo Team
Steve LeShay, Designer, SherCo Grand Slam Baseball
Inspired by the Robert Coover novel, "The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.", Steve invented the original incarnation of SherCo shortly after the book's release in 1968. The original game had just three pitching grades, as in the book, but also included the novel concept of "stop-action" in which the players of the game would plot the landing point of the ball, then move fielders to get and throw in the ball, move runners base-to-base, and resolve the play "on the field" and not in the windmills of the mind.
LeShay devised ballpark charts that supplemented the game's basic field, allowing game players to "overlay" the stadium chart on the 28x28-square grid so that you could play a game in Crosley Field, or Yankee Stadium. As a result, SherCo was the first game to let you play in the actual stadiums, and is still the only board game that allows you to resolve the play on the field.
When he's not designing games, or running SherCo (as he did from 1968 through the mid-1990s), Steve has spent his time teaching abroad, at universities in the USA, and has earned his Ph.D. Steve has retired from the classroom and now spends his free time enjoying life and has decided to re-enter the SherCo universe with his partnership with Hot Stove Games.
Brien Martin, Publisher of SherCo
Brien purchased his first copy of SherCo in April of 1980 as a 17th birthday gift to himself, starting him on the path to becoming a tabletop sports gamer, which eventually led to him tackling game design and starting his own game company, Hot Stove Games. He played three seasons of the United States Baseball League, using SherCo and real-life players, like most SherCo players at the time.
But in 1981, SherCo offered the SLOBS Rules Set, which set forth guidelines for creating fictional leagues and players, and seeing them through season-after-season, creating player careers. He moved the USBL over to the SLOBS system, and then played 64 short-season replays of the USBL, during which time he was able to reverse-engineer the charts and ratings to make better sense of the way the game worked. It was this work that inspired him to design games of his own.
When he's not designing games, or bringing SherCo back to life, Brien works in the Budget Office at Northern Illinois University, his alma mater, where he provides budgetary oversight for two of the university's thirteen divisions, monitors the university's reserve accounts for auxiliary enterprises, and provides data and reports for special projects. He earned his BS in Accountancy from NIU in 1995, his MPA from NIU in 2020 and lives in Illinois with his wife, Donna, and dog, Toby.