Number 20     June 10, 2024

Milestones

Since around 2000 I've focused a lot of my gaming energy on playing full seasons.
In the late 1990s I finished a replay of the 1908 NL season. This one took years to
complete, but I loved that I was able to get it done. In 2000 I did an eight team 154
draft league which took two years to complete. My 5Y League concept had two
divisions, one of which played more games than the other (140 to 102). This was a
keeper draft league that ran for a total of ten seasons and last year saw the
completion of yet another eight team, 154 game draft league which was the first one
I have ever been able to complete during the course of an actual major league season.
During the course of playing these longer seasons, I reach certain milestones as far
as the number of games played. These milestones remind me of my early years with
this hobby.

My first serious project was a mini-replay of the 1977 AL season. I divided the
league into three divisions and tossed out Seattle and Toronto. It was a fifty game
season and in order to complete it I had to roll 300 games. Shortly after starting this
one, I began a collaboration with my buddy The Veet, creating teams made up of
players from EIs top 400. We had  five teams each, and each team played 48 games.
In late 1978/early 1979 I dove into a play by mail league ran by a gentleman who
happened to be the official scorekeeper for the Tampa minor league club. Apparently
not having enough projects already, I began a mini-replay of the 1977 NL using the
same fifty games per team format as the AL project, then topped it all off by starting
a sixteen team tournament using teams from the great teams of the past which EI
included in their fifth edition. In the mid-80s, The Veet and I joined a couple of
Statis-Pro face to face leagues, each of them playing out a sixty game season. Which
brings me to the reason behind writing this article, and it all has to do with Kelly
Gruber of the 1990 Toronto Blue Jays...

Gruber leads the league in HR in my current Top 8 1990 league. He got off to a fast
start thanks to a couple of multi-home run games. By game 45 he had 17 home runs.
This is a significant number to me because it reminded me of that first 48 game season
I played with The Veet. That season, Roger Maris and Jimmie Foxx tied for the league
lead in home runs with 18 each. Could Gruber match or break this over his next three
games? I had a similar situation with last year's Hot Air League, when Willie McCovey
came close with 16 jacks at the 48 game mark. Well, as it turns out, Gruber didn't hit
any out of the park in his next three games. In fact, as of this writing (game 52), he is
still at 17. So, as you can see, the 48 game mark of the season has meaning for me, as
it represents the first milestone. The rest of the milestones are significant only in that
they are reminders of when those early projects of mine would come to an end. I look
forward each year when each team hits the 50 game mark. Then the 60 game mark.
The 100 game mark reminds me of the old play by mail leagues I ran in the mid to late
90s, and the 102 game mark reminds me of division two in the 5Y League. 140 games
played is a reminder of how many games division one played in the 5Y League. I think
you get the picture.

Out of all of this craziness, one milestone needs to be mentioned, because I made a
point of writing about it in one of my very early newsletters. In my first two years of
playing EI, I found it an interesting task to track how many games I had played. When
I had played my 500th game with Extra Innings, I put the boxscore along with a short
blurb about the contest in my newsletter. Isn't it funny the things we
remember over the course of decades in the hobby?