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Mascots in APBA league play?

The Baseball Zealot — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:17:22 +0000

To some, playing in APBA leagues is a purely academic exercise. It’s an effort to win as many games as possible or perhaps to maintain some realism or accuracy in the process. To many others, we see our assembly of cards as a team and ourselves as the general manager and field manager.

Sometimes we take on affects. Call it embellishment or even superstition but such one manifestation is faux mascots. Here are a few of the mascots I’ve encountered in our league throughout our history.

Brando, our manager of the Rising Bamm! Beanos has always been a Ken Griffey fan. So much so that he collected Griffey memorabilia.

That included this Griffey Beanie Baby. Renamed ‘Beano’ (Beanie…Beano, get it?), he traveled with the Bamm! Beanos and even helped ‘roll’ the dice when Brando needed that extra run.

My turn. This is Chuck the Chicken who was the mascot of my Twin City Thunderchickens.

Given to me by Brando (see above), Chuck was a seedy type perhaps fueled by his lack of acceptance in the league. See, if he was squeezed just right, he would play the Chicken Dance song which he would sometimes do after a Albert Pujols homerun.

He has never forgiven the manager of the Three Rivers Gamblers for kicking him across the room.

This figurine of John Smoltz is not so much a mascot of Chuck’s Northside Hitmen but maybe an alter-ego.

Don’t get him (Chuck?) mad or he’ll go off on you. His Beavis-like voice goes through your head.

Back in the late 80s, we had a manager named Rob who had a team called the Chicago Mercenaries. He religiously brought a 1965 Al Lopez baseball card like the one to the left when he played.

As you see, card has Lopez pretend posing as if calling to his players. Or perhaps he’s calling to his field manager, “Hey Rob! Doncha’ think you better get someone up in pen!”.

Does any other face-to-face APBA league have similar silliness or is the IAL certified crazy? Let us know!

UTABL Top Ten Fun

The Baseball Zealot — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:29:26 +0000

The UTABL, a league based in Lancaster, had a little fun on their blog in anticipation of their upcoming weekend get-together held presumably at a cabin .

They posted a “Top Ten Cabin Predictions”. Take number 1 for example:

1) Someone will attempt to destroy a set of dice. (Dice take the most abuse at the cabin, although most of it is verbal. But a few dice have been thrown, batted, or mutilated in some form. We still hope to find a previously lost pair of dice on the bank heading down to the creek.)

Reminds me of a convention the IAL had at our commissioner’s house probably 25 years ago. He lived near a creek. I don’t remember the exact game situation but he got REALLY mad at his team and his dice.

So mad that he took his dice and went outside (yeah, you can see where this is going). He went over to creek and threw his dice into the water.

Those dice were never seen again.

Satirical piece on dice baseball

The Baseball Zealot — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:31:36 +0000

This satirical piece on The Sportsman’s Daily about a boy finding a dice baseball game in his dad’s attic is a somewhat funny in a bittersweet way for us APBA fans.

“It was kind of cute for a while,” said Jose. “It brought back some terrific memories like trading Jimmy “Toy Cannon” Wynn over to Buddy Muldoon’s team for Lee May, Joe Rudi and a pitcher to be named later. It was nice seeing the old double fours being rolled for a homer again, but now Pedro’s got his friends here all damn day long. I hear the comments. ‘Pedro, your father was around when Vic Davalillo was playing? Wow, he’s old.’ The little f—-rs. I’ll show them who’s old.”

Funny or no?

From the archives: a 1979 IAL article

The Baseball Zealot — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:50:16 +0000

I ran across this charming piece of Illowa APBA League history and couldn’t pass up the chance to share it. It’s an article written in 1979 for our monthly newsletter. Tedd Mallasch wrote it after winning the league championship that year.

Charming because it’s a handwritten note, something we rarely see in these digital days. Also charming because it’s not full of analysis and stats but rather of humor and emotion.

It’s essentially a thank you note to his Chicago Champions team for winning it all. And he certainly found something nice to say about everybody (“to Doug Rau for winning 2 of 3 decisions”).

It brought a smile to my face.

Illowa APBA League LLC

The Baseball Zealot — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:10:31 +0000

Even now, I’m surprised by the stuff I find when I search Google.

I was searching on the keywords of our league name, “Illowa APBA League”. Apparently, there’s a Internet startup company called List Company that simply lists corporations and companies throughout the world and categorizes them and gives a quick synopsis of them. They do this by crawling the web with “spiders” or programs that mine data from websites.

They obviously don’t do any follow-up research because the Illowa APBA League showed up in their database as a “Sports Teams company”. They gleaned text from our “About” page to put in their summary of us.

Here is their entry for the Illowa APBA League.

I joked with our league managers that we need to discuss whether we need to go public. Any takers who want buy our stock? :-)

The APBA Blog » humor

Mascots in APBA league play?

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