STBL "Fantasy" Season 2009

Recently, I’ve had the itch to play some computer baseball. As I wait patiently for the early June release of Out of the Park Baseball 10, I decided to turn my attention to the old Southern Tier Baseball League. The last official STBL season was in the fall of 1998. Since then, however, I’ve played a handful of unofficial seasons against the computer AI. The last such season was in the summer of 2005. I wanted a managerial challenge beyond leading the Beach Bombers to another world championship. I decided to play a “what if” season in which I had taken over the last place Barton Bluejays. I vowed to turn the team into a winner.

That 2005 season was a lot of fun. It reminded me why Earl Weaver Baseball is my favorite computer game of all time. With two games left in the season, the Bluejays were one game behind the Holmes Hammers in the race for second place. We needed to sweep the Hammers to make it to the World Series. Unfortunately, we lost both games. I still felt that we had achieved a remarkable turnaround. It was the Bluejays first non-losing season in some time. Here were the final standings from 2005:

            W   L   %
Beach      34   6 .850
Holmes     23  17 .575
Barton     20  20 .500
DayHollow  16  24 .400
Hilton     15  25 .375
Edwards    12  28 .300

Now it is 2009 and I decided to resume my “what if” career as skipper of the Barton Bluejays. We are 16 games into the 40 game season and the team is playing even better than I expected. Here are the current 2009 standings:

            W   L   %
Beach      13   3 .812
Barton     11   5 .687
Hilton      9   7 .562
Edwards     5  11 .312
DayHollow   5  11 .312
Holmes      5  11 .312