25
January

Chicago Champions Reach Century Mark

I have been playing APBA baseball since 1970, more than forty years, and have never reached the 100 win plateau in any format.  I’ve managed the Chicago Champions in the Illowa APBA League since the 2nd season of the league, more than 35 years, and have never gotten 100 wins, until now.  Two years ago the Champions finished in 1st place with 98 wins, last year we again finished in 1st place & won the World Series (our 11th title), but missed out on 100 wins, finishing with 99 victories.

This year with nine games to play, the Champs again had a strong hold on 1st place, but needed four wins to reach the century mark.  Prince Fielder hit a walkoff homer with 2-outs in the bottom of the 9th of the 1st contest turning a victory for Tim Lincecum into defeat in the opener.

The Champions beat the Gamblers the next three games, and it was The Freak’s turn once again to toe the rubber for Chicago.  Although he walked six men in the game, Three Rivers hadn’t a hit with 2-outs in the 9th, then the unthinkable happened, on the brink of 100 wins.  Lincecum only had 8 2/3 innings left, so reliever Sergio Romo was called on to get the final out, and we finally had our 100th win.  The Champs won two more games to finish the season with 102 victories, now it’s on to the postseason, and hopefully title twelve.

1 comment

15
December

New Illowa APBA League website

Last week, I holed myself up in a coffee house for a few days and reworked our league’s website. 

Here is the result.

It’s been a few years since I’ve paid any serious attention to it so this was definitely overdue.  I decided to use WordPress (which is what I use for The APBA Blog) as the web content management system.  WordPress is typically used a blogging platform but certainly can be used as a basis for a conventional web site as well. 

The advantage for using WordPress is its interactive features which I hope to use both internally and externally.  Internally, all league managers are now able to easily post articles and team updates if they wish via the WordPress web interface. 

Also, pretty much all the content on the site can receive feedback from anyone in the form of comments similar to The APBA Blog.  I’m hoping this gets utilized a lot both by IAL managers and other APBA players who come to the site. 

The site is not done and probably never will be.  I think we’re going to re-work our “About” page since the text is about 5 years old.  Also, I’m going to be in the process of migrating some of our old “news” items from the old site bit by bit. 

But it’s a good start. 

I encourage everyone to stop by and check out the site (and say hello).  Check out our History page which has links to our All-time leader pages and our Hall of Fame page.  To me, that’s one of my favorite parts. 

And most certainly, feedback is definitely welcome. 

My next step is to get Steve Stein to teach me how he does his stats on his web page. :-)

 

Postscript (12/16): As I was importing some of our old news stories, I ran across this rather incredible story from 2004 about Brandon Webb which I had almost forgotten about. 

Not only did Webb pitch back-to-back no-hitters but the first one was a perfect game. 

Webb did this as a rookie for the Todd Ventresca’s Aurora Gamblers.  It was made even sweeter for Todd because he did this against his brother.

No comments yet