Scoresheetwiz is a combination of my personal baseball blog and a handy guide to playing Scoresheet.
Most of my baseball observations are sent in my real name "John Carter" or by my Scoresheet team name "slicksilksox" to
the Yahoo group forum for Scoresheet players: know as scoresheet-talk. You can respond to my comments here or there by becoming a member of that forum. My lengthier more in-depth articles
will appear here in Scoresheetwiz. If you see a comment by hotstatrat in Baseball Prospectus, that’s me, too. I often comment in Bill James on-line as well.
Scoresheet Record
My first perpetual league began in 1991. That league (A.L. Robinson in Scoresheet Canada)
is still going strong. I won my division in that league every single year for its first 15 years finally falling to second
place in 2006 where they have lingered ever since. There, I won 10 championships and maintained a W-L percentage
of .634 (103-59) over a 14 year period. I had the best W-L record in Canada
twice, once the best record in all of North America. That was in 2001.
I ventured into the National League (Jenkins) in 1994, one year after expansion. I took over one of the last place
expansion teams. In my first year there I finished in 2nd place 1 game behind first. They stalled there for another two
years until they gushed forward with back-to-back championships. Due to the time demands of expertise in both leagues, I dropped
this team after that 5th season.
Later, I decided that I missed challenge of team building, so I took a 97-game-losing team in the AL Brett and brought
them up past .500 in their first year. The next year they were in a hot battle for the division right up to the end of the
season. The next two years they won their division. Finally, in their 6th year, they won their championship –
in a four game sweep. In 2007, they fell back into 2nd place with a wild card berth then return to first in 2008 with the
league’s best overall record.
Annual Leagues? I don`t play them. It misses the important dimension of viewing players with their long term value.
I tried it my first year (1990) and finished in 2nd place one game out of first.
Old Timers? That first winter I tried an old-timers league and won the championship. I prefer not to play them,
because I believe you need a little down time in the year. We should enjoy the winter solstice celebrations and get our mind
off our teams for a month or two before the heavy winter analysis begins.
Bias?
I have no professional affiliation with Scoresheet Sports or any Major League team. Although, I grew up in a Connecticut suburb of New York, the most avid baseball fans I knew
were in Detroit where my grandparents lived. So, I became
part of the Detroit Tigers tribe. That would be from 1963 until the Juan Gonzalez trade after the 1999 season. That was the
point I knew my team had completely lost their principles. I had also recently discovered the Fetzer-Campbell regime had decimated
the farm system just before they sold the franchise to Tom Monahan – which explained why they had such a drought of
young talent after their last championship – a year after the team was sold. Since then, the Illitch-Dombrowski regime
has revived the franchise and my loyalty has been restored – to a degree. My first allegiance is to the players I acquire
for my Scoresheet teams, but I try to stay objective about them, too. The Mets were my NL team as a kid, although, I had fun
post college getting wrapped up in the ’77-’78 Yankees. I have lived in Toronto,
now, for a quarter century and have duel citizenship. As my wife is from Montréal, les Expos had a place in my heart until
they moved away. However, since I dropped my team in NL Jenkins, I haven’t kept close attention to the players in the
National League. Of course, bias is to be avoided, I can’t help but come across more articles regarding the Blue Jays
as a local newspaper is a part of my daily reading diet.
Update Schedule
Come explore with me the art of team building, list making, book reviews, miscellaneous baseball inspired fun, and the
occasional social reflection gleaned from baseball observations. Heck, I have even veered into my other passion: music
ratings. For years the Scoresheetwiz updates were published near the beginning of each month. This year the schedule has been
random. I just announce the updates on scoresheet-talk and mcscoresheet.
-John Carter
