Game Central's 17th Anniversary

K. Fields
2023-05-25T11:11:05-04:00
General, Baseball

May 25 means another year has gone by for Game Central. Today marks the 17th anniversary of the site. Five years ago, I celebrated its anniversary with a massive update to STBL WEB, the home of the Southern Tier Baseball League. This year is the 25th anniversary of the last STBL season played. In honor of that quarter century mark, I completed another significant update to STBL WEB. The Earl Weaver Baseball series was ahead of its time. It kept an impressive amount of stats at the team and player level. Where other baseball video games might present a box score for a single game, Earl Weaver Baseball tracked stats for an entire season. Unfortunately, it didn't have a career mode so there was no record of lifetime stats. I wanted a complete picture of players' careers so I took on that task manually.

STBL WEB now has a section for All-Time Leaders. I combed through 17 seasons of data to create leaderboards in four categories: batting (single season), pitching (single season), batting (lifetime), and pitching (lifetime). Now, STBL fans have the information to answer a variety of trivia questions. Who played more STBL games than any other player? Consult the batting (lifetime) chart and find the answer (spoiler—it's Ted Kluszewski). The other big addition this year is the inclusion of The STBL Encyclopedia. It includes the all-time leaders but also has a complete record of every position player and pitcher who ever played in the STBL. I modeled it after The Baseball Encyclopedia from Macmillan, which was one of my favorite baseball books I owned.