25,000

Thanks to everyone for dropping in from time to time to check out my blog. I love Baseball, I love APBA & I love to write about both. I have (through APBA Facebook Group) been blessed to share my love for the game, and meet many wonderful friends in the Facebook group that share the same passions for the game as I do. I'm real thankful for their friendships, in fact I would consider a small handful of these friendships, to be close friends of mine -- My APBA brothers.

I have been fortunate to meet these friends in person during the APBA Chicagoland Tournament in Woodstock, IL & hope to eventually meet some of the other friends in person one day.

25,000 have now visited this site that truly started in March 2013. My biggest month was July 2013 (1,643 people visited that month). I am also closing on 400 published posts. It was my time on the APBA Facebook Group that made this blog possible, and it's the people that happen to love reading my stuff -- that made this a success. Success is not about numbers, overall numbers don't matter to me, if it was just 5 people tuning in, I would be cool with that, because there is no containing my love for baseball, and I definitely needed an outlet to do so. I live, breathe, talk APBA & Baseball, so for it me it's all natural.

For some people, it's a morning jog, or working on the car, or painting -- an outlet that they do everyday. For me, it was that, plus a whole lot more, more than I could have ever dreamed of.

Thanks,
Shawn

Reflecting Back

So I was on Facebook today, and my dad's old trophy was displayed on the APBA Facebook Group, the Dice part of it at least, the original one took a fate with as John Grabb (a league member) put it, a fate met with Mr. Gravity & it has been refurbished since -- I want to say the original had a batter in between the two dice on it.

I definitely have planned on doing a trophy for our Boys of Summer Online APBA Baseball League that I am running as Commissioner. I'm hoping to add dice to the mix when it comes to the trophy, with a sturdy center to it, with the year / owner & team name plated. Each year the winner of the BoS World Championship would hold on to the trophy until the next eventual winner. Each opening day that follows the World Championships of owners, they will be rewarded with a championship plaque.

It's safe to say, I will be looking around at the local trophy shops to get an idea of what I'm thinking about, the cool thing is that I am an artist, and can draw up these ideas as well.

But it was truly amazing to see this trophy displayed on the APBA Facebook Group, and go down Memories Lane, and my earliest APBA memories coming back to life. I mentioned that Robert Breher, Ed Coates & Jeff Laity are like uncles to me, they were always at the house -- John Grabb replied for the league "They were our founding fathers..."

APBA Stories Straight to the Heart

I was on the APBA Baseball Group on Facebook, when one of the guys Scott posted a wonderful story of him & his cousin at a Dodgers/Cubs game in 1973, it triggered other wonderful stories that I felt had to be shared on this blog -- Documented for other APBA fans to carry on.

Below is Scott's story and others that have contributed via Facebook...

• "One of my favorite APBA stories. My cousin (big Cubs fan) and I (big Dodgers fan) were in Dodger Stadium watching a Cubs-Dodgers game in 1973. Early in the game Randy Hundley stole second prompting my cousin to laugh and say, "That's great -- next year Hundley could have a 10." I laughed too and a few seconds later the two guys sitting in the row behind us tapped us on the shoulder and said, "Hey, do you guys play APBA?"

• "Similar event happen to me...I join a new softball team and I was on the bench and a pop up to the catcher and I spoke out 65 and my teammate turned to me and said 35 and we both laughed and became great friends and formed a league together and we had 5 other friends we taught them the game and we played for 5 years ,sad to say Dan passed away in 97 RIP Dan Werner and we have not played the league anymore. Dan's favorite player was Joe Morgan in the game,so we put it in dan's pocket, its his forever..."

• "This is as close to that as I can come. I was a cook at my Dads restaurant and I had a 1972 card of Reggie Jackson's and was going to take it to the printer to make blank cards and a waitress saw it and told me her boyfriend played APBA and he came to the rest. the next day and were friends for 30 years. He even got me on his slow pitch softball team where I played for 18 years."

• "Back in 86 I was at Memorial Stadium watching the final game of the season between the O's and Tigers. After the game, as the Tigers were boarding their team bus, I handed Darrell Evans his APBA card to sign and he said "Oh wow, I have 1s at 11 and 66, how many home runs have I hit in your replay?" I couldn't believe, not only that he'd heard of the game, but he recognized the significance of the numbers!"

• "I had Lance Parrish & Dave Winfield both sign their APBA Cards in 1991 and neither one knew what they were!! LOL"

• "In Detroit during batting practice. Dave Parker playing for the Oakland A's and was off to a bad start of the season. I talked to him early in BP and said to him "Your killing my APBA teams chances next year". He looked directly at me and said "Your APBA team, what about my next years salary"... I was afraid. LOL"

• "I was on night watch when I was in the military, by myself. To pass the 12 hours of nothingness, I would sometimes bring some APBA cards with me and play a couple of games. Once, the supervisor came in (he had never done that before), and I figured he would be mad. But.......he turned out to be an APBA fan, and we sat there and compared stats and different seasons we played. After that, he showed up all the time and we would play a few games."

Francisco the Great

Ahhh... APBA memories, everyone has them, even the absurd ones when we were younger and still learning about he dynamics of the game.

For those that know me from the APBA Baseball Group on Facebook or my blog, it may not come as no secret that I am a fan of two teams, my local Detroit Tigers and the Atlanta Braves. I always enjoyed the lovable loser Braves from watching them on TBS when a Tigers game may not be on. I also loved that TBS called them "America's Team", when it should have been "America's Losers" or something on those lines. They had Dale Murphy of course, with Bob Horner, Ken Oberkfell, Glenn Hubbard & Bruce Benedict, among others.

So when my parents sold our house, my folks went house-hunting as my mom stayed with us... bouncing around from campground to campground all summer long in up-north Michigan. My dad wanted to move us out of the Detroit Metro area to give us a better life, if that actually meant sacrificing pay. In fact I would have went to high school at Waterford Kettering High School, the same high school that my father graduated at, with World Series hero Kirk Gibson. I'll have to do talk more about that story in the future, but anyways... here we are bouncing around from campground to campground, which means no television, so I was keeping myself updated in the baseball season with my USA Today Baseball Weekly (which is now unfortunately known as Sports Weekly), we had occasional radio, but when it's summer and you're approaching 15, the last thing you want to do is sit there in front of a radio when you could be scouting the beach looking at pretty girls laying out in the sun.

So much to my surprise was the emergence of Tom Glavine and the Atlanta Braves, here's a guy who went 7-17 in 1988 with a 4.56 ERA (Which back then was like a 6.00 ERA is today) -- Glavine wins again, and again... I remember my dad even reading the stats leaders, "What's up with this Glavine guy for Atlanta? wow!" -- Glavine of course would go onto win 20 games and the N.L. Cy Young, with a 2.55 ERA. 1991 will be the first of 5 seasons he would win 20 games, and the first of three straight seasons of 20-plus. We eventually found a place in a small town outside of Traverse City to call home, and for the rest of the summer into my freshman year that fall, I would watch the Braves and their crazy fans (at the time) go tomahawk crazy, with their Native American chant & their run to catch the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was like watching a real-life version of "Major League" the movie, it was simply amazing and I they have been one of my two loves in baseball ever since. Especially a good substitute for my Tigers who would continue to go as far down as any franchise could possibly go.

So when it came to the fall of 1991, my birthday was approaching on October 28th, and I knew what I wanted, I wanted to purchase my first-ever set of APBA Baseball Cards. My dad and his friends played for years, in fact my Dad would go to three consecutive World Series, winning the middle one in 1987, in which he happened to have all the Who's Who's? of 1987, he happened to have both Andre Dawson & George Bell with Alan Trammell (who should have been A.L. MVP), and others who happened to have huge years, even Ozzie Virgil's surprise season of 27 HR's. Virgil would even do better for my dad who popped like 20 HR's in their 72 or 76-game season, pacing for at least 40 HR's in a full season.

My brother and I would purchase a couple more sets in our high school years, even getting some school mates together for a league. My brother had his own league for inside the house, with my dad and me involved, we each had something like two teams, and did something whacky like when a guy got traded in real-life, you lost that guy or whatever. 

During my brother's 1992 season, in which we never ended... of course -- Being kids, when did you ever finish something? I was the Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Royals (not sure why, looking back at it), and as a kid we didn't really set rules for At-Bat & Innings limits, so we played the tear-outs as starters even, which leads to Mr. Francisco Cabrera.

Cabrera's game-winning pinch-hit against the Pirates during Game 7 of the NLCS, of course will go down as one of the greatest moments in postseason history; for me, there is only a few that tops it (Gibson's HR off Eckersley & Bobby Thomson's shot heard around the world, are two of them). Not to mention the crazy fact that Sid Bream, dubbed bread mold for his great base-running (LOL!) actually made it in safely! Cabrera only had 10 at-bats in 1992, in which he happened to get 3 hits & 3 RBI with 2 HR's.

So you can imagine the fun I had with Francisco Cabrera's card, let's put it this way -- We might see this on Monster Card Mondays on the APBA Blog. I know for sure it was a J-4, single column tear-off XB card, and my memory might be a bit rusty, but I do want to say he had 1's under 11,22,33,44,55 & 66, but the more and more I think about it, it was probably 4 1's and 2 5's. So we started playing my brother's season, and in like our first 33 games, I believe I had 26 HR's with Cabrera (hahaha) and my Braves were like 28-5! Terry Pendleton was batting like .345 (He actually won the batting title in 1991 with a .319 avg, and the N.L. MVP as well). In that same season, I would pitch David Cone for K.C. into extra innings to get 25 strikeouts & he would follow-up that performance with a no-hitter! Young, whacky fun with APBA when there are no limits.

For Cabrera's career the pinch-hit would be he pinnacle, he was out of baseball by the age of 26, which is strange because his career numbers are pretty decent for only 351 career at-bats. I think the problem, if I remember right is that he wasn't that great defensively.

• Career numbers: .254 AVG, 17 HR & 62 RBI, including 17 doubles in 351 at-bats. Problem are he only had 21 BB's & struck out 69 times with a .294 On-Base Percentage & possible defense woes. 

His OPS was a decent .747 though & he was only 26, you would think that someone else would maybe see if that power can be taken advantage of. Maybe he disappeared in the haze like many careers that were effected with the mess of 1994. For example, Kevin Mitchell... I was surprised the other day looking at the team standings in 1994, the Reds were in first, so I clicked on their roster & Mitchell's stats were staring right back at me. With players like Griffey, Matt Williams, Jeff Bagwell & Frank Thomas stealing the headlines with their 94' power numbers, they overshadowed players like Mitchell who actually had 30 HR's for Cincy, this is well (and many pounds) after Mitchell's 1989 season with the Giants in which he clocked 47 HR's, 125 RBI with a .291 AVG & OPS of 1.023 (all leading league) earning him MVP honors. His 1994 numbers? He batted .326, 30 HR, 77 RBI with an OPS of 1.110! If he had played a full possible season that year, he would have had 43 HR & 110 RBI, I believe he played in Japan in 1995, came back to the states in 1996 for the Red Sox, and getting traded back to the Reds that season; I think at this point his weight & injuries were starting to play a factor, because he still did really well in his brief at-bats in 96': .316 AVG, 8 HR & 39 RBI, .925 OPS in 206 at-bats.

Back to Cabrera, I loved seeing this on Baseball reference.com, under the sponsors section:

Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke? sponsors this page:
"He (Cabrera) has ruined my childhood and destroyed a franchise. The only thing I can do now is make sure a Braves fan can never sponsor this page."

I thought it was funny, too.

That's what I love about this game, I love the beauty of everything baseball, the star players and the guys that are forgotten, the heroes and the scapegoats. It's a game of drama, a game of passion, the sport is literally a religion for me & I love the simple fact that I can relive all this with APBA Baseball & share it with my friends.

Awww... APBA memories.