Making The League: A OOTP6 RL Dynasty Prequel

[Young Drachma]

During the summer of 1994, I got into a lot of things. No not drugs or anything, but I started working on web sites and spent a lot of time doing a whole lot of nothing.

But sometimes in July, I got the hairbrain idea to start a baseball league. Why? I'm not sure. Little League was just getting restarted in our town, but I wanted no parts of that. I just knew that I loved baseball and the only thing I loved more than watching it, was actually running a league. So, at 15, I started one.

I had no idea what I was in for.

This dynasty will not only chronicle some of the stuff that happened that summer, but is also going to use OOTP6 as a "recreation" to act out what might have happened if the stars were aligned the way I wanted them to be. That said, this dynasty will be one that has a finite start and finish. It'll begin that summer and end then. Maybe the teams will come back for a sequel? Who knows. But, I do know that there is actually a storyline here and that makes this dynasty attractive because I know it'll eventually be finished.

So, here we go.

[Young Drachma]

So, I was sitting in my room on a summer day in July. I don't exactly know where I got the idea to do this. But I decided one morning - it was a Wednesday - to call the newspaper <The Courier-News> to have them publish an announcement about the formation of the Mid-Atlantic Baseball League.

In my mind, the league was a semi-pro league. To me, I wondered why there was (at the time) no real minor league baseball in my area. So, I guess I had much bigger and more grandoise aspirations than I could ever muster on my own. But I figured that I would do this, I'd see what would happen and hey, it could be fun.

Almost immediately, I began getting phone calls about the league from people. I setup a meeting at the baseball field at Columbus Park in Piscataway, New Jersey. I figured I'd meet the folks and sign people up there.

I had a week to get uniforms together, figure out where we'd play our games, who was going to play. Seemed daunting, but I don't remember feeling daunted. And so it began...

[Young Drachma]

After the Courier ran my ad about the league, I was innudated with phone calls. My parents weren't too curious about what I was doing, until they realized that I was actually serious. Then my mother asked me about "insurance" and "what if people get hurt." Good advice, but I never paid much mind to it until later on in the league.

Still, I called a few insurance companies and explained what we were doing to find out prices. :eek: Needless to say, those conversations made things a bit harder to keep going.

Nonetheless, I did. I rounded up a bunch of my own friends, because I figured that they would play - and had already counted on them being in the league well before I'd asked them. Not exactly the best way to go about it, but hey, I was 15 and didn't really care. I was already assigning them to rosters and thinking about important things like - uniforms.

I called a few places to get prices, but because of my timid nature at the time, I was actually hesitant to ask for a direct sponsor. I managed to fall upon a place called T&C Screen Printers in my hometown. I told the guy what I was doing and it just so happened the knew my uncle. Laughed and asked why I didn't ask him to sponsor us. He then told me that he would be honored to sponsor the team and so, we had a uniform sponsor for at least one of the teams - mine, of course.

But hey, this was progress. It was about at this time, my dad realized I wasn't kidding around. I asked him to take me to the place to pick up our uniforms and he was seemed pretty shocked. But moderately impressed - as much as Dad's can be, I guess. So, alas we did that.

Now, I just needed to write a schedule and pencil in the names of who I thought would show up. Then we'd be on our way.

Or so I thought....

[Young Drachma]

The league would consist of six teams:

Piscataway Invaders
Plainfield Panthers
North Plainfield Phantoms
South Plainfield Fury
Branchburg Bears
Middlesex Blue Jays

IRL the latter two were late additions that never actually played any games. For this dynasty, they will. But, just to let you know that we never managed to use them.

The teams will play a 13-game season.

Player allocation was organized randomly, to create parity, but also to maintain alliances so you didn't pit too many friends against each other, though it might have been fun, no one seemed to think so back then.

[Young Drachma]

So, uniforms were in production. Now it was time to meet all the guys for our first practice.

I showed up at the park way early, like two hours before anyone was supposed to be there. I had nothing I could do really. Heck, I didn't even own bats or balls. I was hoping they'd have some stuff at the park - after a senior league game - that we could use when they'd leave it out.

Had I thought this thing through entirely? Probably not. But if I had, I doubt I'd have gone through with it at all.

In all, we had about 30 guys show up. Most of them came from well outside the area. I was shocked - I mean crazy - when people from 30 minutes away were showing up at the park to do this. Needless to say, most were quite disappointed to see that other than themselves, there was this 15-year old black kid who had told them "Hey, we're gonna do a league, let's play."

Despite that, a lot of the parents were extremely supportive. In fact, during our second practice before the "season" began, one of the parents asked "Are there any adults here?" And one of the parents, actually two of the parents that were probably the most helpful with the project, Mr. Novaks and Mr. Pandolfo said "Oh yeah, there are." When in reality, there were none other than themselves. They served as our in-house umpires, coaches and well, whatever else.

But they actually gave me a ton of latitude in how things were run and scheduling everything was all up to me. It was a bit weird, but I didn't think about that. Other than the lack of resources, I felt like we were getting closer.

So, who are our rag-tag bunch of characters? Stay tuned.

I've changed the names for the protection of folks whom I haven't talked to in a long time. I have a funny story about this that I'll post in a minute.

[Young Drachma]

I used one of the guys from this very league in a dynasty a long time ago. I used his real name, remembered his hometown and all that. He is somewhere in the Centurion OOTP5 Dynasty if I recall. Josh Eagan was his name.

Anyway, I used him in the game. He was one of my best players because as I remembered him, this guy was AWESOME and would've been a real star. I always looked for him in Baseball America after that, for years and never seemed to find him.

So one day, sometime last year I get an email from this guy. It was funny, because it was so weird. He was wondering how I'd got his name and saw that he was playing on one of my teams. It creeped him out, because I guess he googl'd it and found his entry was to this team and I knew his hometown, etc.

So, I wrote back and told him who I was, how I knew who he was and he didn't seem to remember the league that he'd played in back then. But he did tell me that he kept playing after that and that he'd gotten hurt before college and so never got to do much in pro baseball as a player, but he was working for a minor league team in the front office.

So, anyway..it was funny because it worked out that way and of course, he was a good player so he was happy about that. But I decided I won't use the real names of those guys in this dynasty so I can save people the heartache if they end up googling themselves again.

So there you go Back to the action.