It’s sounds fun..

It concludes:

We cap off our Convention on Sunday @the Blue Oyster Diner in Oxford Valley Mall area and our league Commissioner(Jerry) leaves to preach at his church !!!

I’m sure managing an APBA team gives him plenty of material for his sermon about the Book of Job. 

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Mighty congratulations to my blogging cohort, Teddy Ballgame whose Chicago Champions won 99 games.  That not only  clinched first place but was eleven games over the second place team. 

Our playoff/draft weekend is set for March 12-14.  The month of February is the closest we get to an off-season only that it’s full of trade talk and speculation of draft order. 

Congrats again, Teddy!

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With the closing of the Geocities web hosting service, YABL has had to relocate their fine website.  You can now find them at http://webspace.webring.com/people/fb/burgda/.  Important not only to find out about their league but for another reason.  League member and webmaster Doug Burg maintains the APBA Baseball Card 12 List and Publication Data web page.  So many times APBA fans ask me if there is a way to identify their APBA cards… to find out what year they are.  I always point them to Doug’s APBA Card 12 List page.  Very handy.

***

Not many times can you say that one player remains with the same APBA league team for 19 seasons.  Such is the case with Tom Glavine who has played for my Twin Cities Thunderchickens since 1991.  Glavine pitched his last game for the  Illowa APBA League last Saturday. 

He retires with an Illowa win-loss record of 241-195.  I posted a tearful farewell to Glavine over at the Illowa APBA League’s web site.

***

Marc Rinaldi wants us to pass the word about APBA Games’ Facebook page.  Be a fan or something.

***

It might be asking the world but Kindle Nation Daily would like to see some Kindle apps based on APBA, Strat-o-matic etc.  I’m not holding my breath.

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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.

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You can access their new web site here.

Well done, Rod!

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Tom -

 As a long-time fan of the both the cards and dice game and BBW, I have enjoyed the hobby through solo play, replays, and league play.

 

I am assembling a roster of current APBA leagues. I have opened a survey that asks 30 questions; the answers should fairly well define each league.  I will publish it on certain APBA-related yahoo or Delphi sites, including this blog!

 

I think it will be interesting to see all the variations of leagues that exist.  It may also encourage interested new members who could pick a specific format, or league size, for example.

 

If any of your blog readers are interested in providing information about a league that they run or participate in, I invite them to open the survey and fill it out:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2293XLKNYUY

In the first five days of the survey, more than thirty leagues have reported in.  I suspect there are at least that many more!  Comments and questions are invited.

 

Thanks for your attention and support!

 

Dave Walker

I’d encourage all leagues to fill out Dave’s survey.  From what I hear, he’s already got quite a response. 

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Chris Kash’s web site is dedicated to the River Cities Renegades, his APBA hockey team in the CCHL.  It’s a pretty realistic web site… so much so that it took me a while to realize that it was actually an APBA league he was talking about. 

APBA Hockey fans, check it out!

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Accumulating the Data

Documenting your APBA league’s history of stats, transactions, standings and anything your league deems important and worth remembering can be a tedious task in the short run.  However, I’ve found that once the process is in place, it’s well worth it.  Our league, the Illowa APBA League, has kept lifetime stats for every player and pitcher in our 33 year history.  We keep them in an Excel spreadsheet that updated every year.  

We didn’t always do this though.  Sometime in the 80′s, (The APBA co-Blogger) Tedd spent hours/days inputting years of our data from newsletters into digital format.  At the time, the best format available was Norton Textra, a DOS-based text editor.  But the important thing was that it was being documented.  Each year, the data was updated with new stats.

Taking Stats to a new level:  Sortable Data

Along came the 90′s and Microsoft Excel.  Our commish, Mike Bunch took the existing text files and with a lot of tough love, he converted it to the Excel format.  The difference of having our lifetime league stats in a sortable, filterable format was quite dramatic. 

Oh, the things that we could do!

• Sorting All-time leaders for all stat categories
• All-time single season leaders
• Leaderboards for a particular season
• (my favorite) all time worst "leaders"
• single season leaders by a particular team
• (for those who want to reminisce) filter by team and year and you have the roster and stats of any team for that year

The possibilities are endless.

Sharing the info

Of course, having this data is one thing.  Sharing it is another.  Among our league, we are content to pass around the Excel spreadsheet for managers to play around with.  But what if we wanted to share our wealth of info with other APBA fans and especially other leagues.  Of course, the Web is the obvious answer.  I’m not a database programmer but if you’re not too concerned about how it looks, Microsoft Excel will save a worksheet to web format.

So I cleaned up the database fields a bit (only the stuff everyone would be interested in) and put the Illowa APBA League Register on the web.  Thanks to the team effort of Mike and Tedd, it’s been updated every year and you can see it here. 

There are some side products of our league register that give it more meaning.  For example, our All-Time Leaderboard (both career and single season).  Also, our league Hall of Fame which we vote for annually.  Finally, I put up a manager register which included won-loss records plus all-time records for pretty much every skipper who has rolled dice in our league (caveat:  this hasn’t been updated in a couple years). 

Another project I undertook was something I called Season Spotlight.  Starting with our initial season, 1975, I would do a quick page on that season.  Each page would have the standings, leaderboard, and maybe a short writeup.  Here is the entry point for the IAL Season Spotlights.  A lotta fun for us old guard who like to reminisce about the old times.  The project is still in the works… I’m up to 1986. 

Collaboration

Enter Dom Provisiero, from the O.Z. League.  Now I’ve known Dom via email since the early 90s.  He and I have been seem to correspond with each other say, every three or four years.  The last time I heard from him, he asked about our league database and was asking how we did though he said their league wasn’t QUITE ready to go through with it. 

Well, two weeks ago, I heard from Dom again and it seems his league was ready to document their league stats.  So I emailed him our league spreadsheet in case it might give him some ideas.  We also set up a phone call. 

After all these years talking to Dom via email, it was nice to put a New York voice to the name.  It was indeed a pleasure to talk to him.  He had a chance to peruse the spreadsheet and passed it on to a friend with some Excel and database skills. 

In his research, Dom did find a web site which belongs to the Mid-West Baseball League that does a pretty incredible job of displaying stats, transactions, draft history.  If I knew anything about web programming, I’d want our leagues’ page to look a little like theirs.  Take a look at the MWBL’s page.  It might give your league some ideas. 

Summary

One piece of advice for any league… it’s never too early to begin documenting the stats and data for your league.  Even if you don’t make it look all pretty, at least make sure you collect it into one repository.  Down the road, you’ll be grateful.  While, we at the IAL have been pretty good about it, there are still some holes in our history.  There are years where we don’t know who won our MVP or Cy Young awards.  While we could probably obtain transactions and draft picks via most recent years via newsletters, those during our early years are gone.  There’s a lot of work that goes into it but if you have an APBA league with a rich history, it’s well worth it to document it. 

I’d love to hear how other groups have documented their leagues stats and/or history.  Let us know in the comment section.  If you have it on the web, leave a link… I’ll post it. 

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Let us know about your league.  Whether it be baseball, football, hockey or basketball.  Whether it be basic game, advanced or computer.  Face-to-face or mail… we want to hear all the details!

Take a few minutes and type in a few details about the APBA league you are in and The APBA Blog will write up a profile on your league and post it on our site.

As the numbers grow, we’ll create a directory of APBA Leagues accessible to all APBA fans everywhere.

Interested?  You can start here at the League entry form.

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