This ended up in the “your best season ever” thread but maybe fits better here.
Was born in Sydney Australia; Barranjoey Head and Point Piper are both places there.
“Barranjoey” ran a league I was smug enough to call “League of Champions” but never won. Eventually I got over myself and called it Bill’s invitational. We varied the cap and had blacklists in later seasons. Competitors included a couple of RL college friends who had introduced me to the site in 2001, jlipton and kuff6; kuff6 was WS champion one season. Others winners included revhow, khan, dbackbill (twice), jefcat, ARomano, dinguses, zackaryl, and tiger 19; other participants included dan6768, tracyr, eschwartz67, sptguy33, the original admin (Tarek), mudyhelmut, addunn99, laura, rob infinite and paland (aka philipdenman). There was a fair bit of turnover.
I quit in 2004 or ‘05 and came back in ‘06, playing at a much lower volume. Got hooked on hoops dynasty for a while though which was even more labor intensive. Anyway, the salaries had changed and we had just moved cities so I felt like starting over. Barranjoey’s team names were loaded with San Diego people and places, point_piper’s were initially full of LA references when it was all new and interesting to me.
That 133-win team played at Coors and scored 1450 runs with a team slash line of .389/.429/.564. Rogers Hornsby ‘21 drove in 246 runs and Joe Jackson ‘11 218. The rotation featured the not quite immortal Jim Bagby ‘18 (RL ERC# 3.54) and Will Calihan 1890 (3.17), plus one of Joe McGinnity’s worst years, 1900 (3.82). That approach really played in early ‘04 before an overdue update. But like I said we lost the WS, 4-3 to a team run by seymourhiney (yes that’s real) that had gone 107-55. MLB27460.
Another thing I notice looking back through my barranjoey notebooks is that I took a lot more risks in open and theme/private leagues - lots of experiments ending up sub-.500. When I was playing so many at once, it was like, why not? Now I play three or four and wouldn’t want to waste one. Kind of cowardly.
That seems like too much reminiscing, sorry I detoured your thread ozomatli.