Yesterday was a sad day. I had to toss out my WhatifSports T-Shirt as it had pretty much disintegrated (not that it fit me anymore). I joined this site in 2001 and with my first team I won it all. Back then, the winner got a free team or a T-shirt, and despite being a poor college student, I grabbed the shirt.

Now I'm 40 years old and can barely remember what I had for breakfast, but I still remember my first team. I didn't know the cookies at the time, especially that high ERA pitchers with low ERCs were amazing bargains (salaries were based off ERA then). My strategy was to use all switch-hitters, thinking that would give me a huge platoon advantage, and also use pitchers that could hit. Pitchers' hitting stats were not baked into salaries at the time, but I didn't know it. I just thought it would be an enormous advantage. Back then, baseball-reference was updated only at the end of the season and there was no play index to search easily. But I did buy Lee Sinins' encyclopedia which came on CD-ROM and did have a play index. There I looked up which pitchers had the best hitting seasons.

I don't remember the years I had for most of the players, but here's the main lineup

C: Manny Sanguillen/Jorge Fabregas
1B: Walter Holke
2B: Carlos Baerga
3B: Chipper Jones
SS: Ozzie Smith
LF: Pete Rose
CF: Bernie Williams
RF: Roy White
SP: Juan Marichal
SP: Warren Spahn
SP: Don Newcombe
SP: Red Ruffing
CL: Tom Henke

I only made one waiver wire transaction, as Rose was a sinkhole after 120 games, so I traded him for 1969 Yaz, who also did not normalize well.

I was down 10 games at the all-star break and wound up winning 17 of my final 20 games to win the division by one game. The league's top 3 teams were all in my division. Back then, there was no wildcard and six teams per division. One team I remember only drafted players that had types of food in their name.

In the finals I faced a guy who had that nutty 1942 Dutch Leonard season. He had a 4.11 ERA so he didn't cost much, but had a WHIP of 0.94. Back then, fatigue was not changed to 95% of total innings in the playoffs, so he kept Dutch at 0 innings all year and then started him 3 times in a 7 game series.

I somehow pushed it to 7 games and we went into extra innings. I gave up one run in the top of the 11th. With two outs and nobody on, Bernie Williams walked. Then Chipper Jones hit a home run and I think I woke up the neighbors I was so excited.

I've now spent half of my life with WhatifSports. Dang.

Happy Anniversary

Fabulous story. My shirt disintegrated years ago. Amazed yours made it this long.

Pretty good memory! Great stuff!

I remember when Don Newcombe was a sim god sad the shirt gave up the ghost

My original cotton tee from a year after that is long gone. However one of its polyester successors survives, with a few holes. That sh*t really lasts.

Normy did much better than I did with my first team. Crown Point Monarchs were 84-78 and fourth in one of those six-team divisions, led by Three-Finger Brown and Randy Jones. I don’t remember who my other two guys were; probably blocked out that info because they got clobbered. (At that time a four-man rotation was the only possibility, but as demonstrated by normy’s opponent starting Leonard three times in seven games there was a way to shuffle them. A friend from college - username jlipton - showed me that one.)

There were two times in the regular season when games did not sim due to some glitch. They were treated as rainouts and added to the end of the schedule. In my rescheduled game 162 my opponent was potman44 who led the division by one game. 3FBrown got us the win but the team in second lost too so there was no game 163.

Another owner in that league was stevensd, who seemed to like seeing how far he could go with team names without getting censored. His team was mrpeepeecanikissu.

Great story, better memory. Thanks for sharing

hee hee