There’s been a Bob Faust sighting.

Bob was a Duck during the “Red Scare” years of 2005-2006. Before the 2007 season he ran away to California to find inner-peace, but came back because that state is infested with hippies. My dates might be wrong, but I know he led the team in times hit by pitch one year and played as hard as anyone on a bad team, which is not easy to do.

Bob introduced KT Murphy, Chris Roth, and Brett Pusateri to the Ducks. When Chris and Brett are healthy and present they are capable of putting up MVP type numbers. KT has been one of the most important, dependable Ducks during his two year stint in South Oakland winner of the 2008 Duck of the year, and the most improved Duck in 2007. Thanks, Bob, you have an eye for talent.

#99, Robert Faust is a Solid human being who hated losing all those games as much as I did. As the South Oakland Ducks founder and team blogger I would like to welcome him back to a winning team.

Team of Destiny 2009.

Quack.

Buy Ducks stuff for everyone you know this holiday season, it’s not too late.
I have done nothing to enhance the store, which I wanted to do, but I recommend buying a sweet Ducks hoodie or golf shirt and supporting our team while also providing a gift for someone you know and care about on some level. Or buy yourself something with the money you may or may not receive for whatever Pagan holiday you will celebrate this winter.

Go to the league site for info on winter ball

I played winter ball last year, it was fun. One night a week from Jan-March.

PGH NABA players will receive discounts at a few local indoor facilities this winter, I’ll have more specifics on this at some point (or you can contact the league office at pittsburghnaba@yahoo.com) and Coach Theodore Jones will email everyone about spring training at one of these facilities.

The Winter Meeting s will be held on January 11th at an undisclosed location (bar) in the greater Pittsburgh area.

The A and AA divisions idea will most likely be shelved.

I think pre-season tournament would be fun…. A fun way for the Ducks to display our dominance as early as May.

I expect a handful of new faces in South Oakland, attached to heads full of baseball wit and killer instinct, who will play key roles in our quest to reclaim the championship.

Our goal is to dethrone the Owls like Claudius, only without all poisoning and stabbing–in a literal sense anyway.

Opening Day is only approximately four months and ten days away.

The blog will pick up again when I have anything worth mentioning, expect a grandiose season preview. I’ll contact other managers to give their own thoughts on their teams and use that stuff against them later in the season.

“Scrooged” is the best Christmas movie of all time.
“Ghostbusters” is the second best.

Quack.

read my steelers blog

Garrett Moore, backup catcher, outfielder, prophet

Maybe you’ve gone through a phase where you frequently bet on college football, maybe you are just a fan of the great state of Alabama, either way Garrett Moore’s early season prediction of the Crimson Tide’s dominance must seem somewhat surreal, maybe a little bit frightening.

Among other things, Moore spent time between Blues game’s this past Labor Day weekend in Virginia shouting, “roll tide”, after winning a hefty sum on the ‘Bama, Clemson game that weekend, and now the University of Alabama has a shot at getting a shot at the national title, should they defeat #4 Florida this weekend. What an exciting game, kind of like the Ducks vs. Rakers season finale. We need to do more to make these kind of exciting games possible in the Pittsburgh NABA.

With the College Bowl Season right around the corner, and the only NABA news, revolving around how to improve the structure of the divisions, and make the league more inviting to potential players, I have come up with an idea I think will improve the level of competition and simplify things, a bit, i call it, Ben’s Competition Standardization, or BCS for short.

Here’s how it works, first all the teams need to have a town, borough or city in their name, and then we take what I assume will be 16 teams (if the current rate of expansion holds true) and put them in four, four-team divisions based on their location. So we have the 16 teams, last season’s 12, plus the Gray Bats, and these 3 imaginary teams: The Grove City Grave Diggaz!, the South Side Brewers, and the Bloomfield Blue Sox…

Now we rank these teams in the pre-season based on last years finish, not taking the divisions into account
1. Owlz
2. Warriors
3. Black SOx
4. Oilers
5. Ducks
6. Bull Dogs (yeah, I know)
7. Grounds Keeper Willies (rakers)
8. Hotel California’s
9. Matadors
10. Hurricane Carter’s
11. Phantoms
12. The Confederacy

13. Gray Bats
14. Grave Diggaz!
15. Blue Sox
16. Brewers

Now after each week, we have the managers and the media rank these teams. “What Media?”, you might ask. Well there would be some overlap, as most blogs are run by managers, and I guess Joe at the Bull Dogs Blog wouldn’t be able to vote since he’s the comissioner, and he’s a cheater . And no one will be around to run the Grounds Keeper Willie’s blog since Sorosky left for the Ducks, I mean Larry’s future 10-14 Gray Bats ( I give you eight wins next year Sorosky, get used to Steve Carlton references). So some folks will get two votes and some teams will start blogs just to get a chance to vote in the media polls, but that shouldn’t matter too much. the other part of the rankings system will be based on a computer formula no one really understands, and will depend on margin of victory, strength of schedule, opponents strength of schedule and a team’s opponents’ opponents’ strength of schedule, plus wins and losses.

We will then take a composite ranking, basically the mean of the coach’s poll, media poll and the computer rankings, and at the end of the season the top two teams will play for the championship, the third and fourth ranked teams and the fifth and sixth seeded teams will also play for the right to call themselves champions of their respective series’. Then we have the rest of the teams play in post season games that mean absolutely nothing.

This allows for teams like the Bull Dogs and Oilers (the Oilers are my sleeper team to come out of the Allegheny this year as the will probably pick up a couple defectors from the Warriors.) , who play in the weak division to pile up wins against The Hurricanes, Phantoms, and Matadors, and knock out teams like last year’s Rakers who will probably lose close games to better teams.

With this formula, teams will have to run up the score, so naturally this gives the defending champs the best shot at becoming the first repeat champions in the league’s six years.

I guess that’s basically it, there will be divisions that mean nothing,a team in an extremely weak division can go undefeated and it will not matter, and if a team has a great record but loses to good teams due to playing in the toughest conference, they will be punished for playing in that conference while a Big Ten team gets desrtoyed in the championship. So the best way to secure a bid in the championship is to assemble a very good, not necessarily dominant team, and play in a pretty good conference, but not the toughest conference because that would just lead to unnecessary loses.

It may seem like this would prevent the two best teams from playing each other, but it will make the regular season so much more exciting. Just imagine, the Ducks, Black Sox game in the second week of the season will basically be for the right to go to the BCS Championship.

Quack.

The PIttsburgh NABA’s Inaugural Fall Ball season ended on a cold Saturday Morning when the Pitt Louisville game, dreary weather and whatever else prevented a full-scale all star extravaganza from materializing. Pie Traynor Field was, however, impeccably, manicured before a final round of batting practice was held for the ten or so players who braved the elements to take the field for a final time in 2008.

It should come as no surprise that the 2008 Fall Ball season provided a good jumping off point for future Fall Ball sessions, and served as a forum to introduce a number of new players to the Pittsburgh NABA.

In the grand scheme of things the most important functions of the fall season is to improve and expand the league for the summer, and of course to give us a chance to play baseball for two more months.

I know the Ducks will benefit from key additions via the Ghostbusters, and two or three gauranteed wins against Larry’s Gray Bats team, who, for Josh Gibson’s sake, should just call themselves the “Grays”

The league continues to grow despite the leadership of Joe Graff, who works year round conceiving ways to rig things in favor of the Bulldogs.

The reality of the state of the league is it is expanding rapidly, and Graff works harder than anyone to keep it running as well as it does.

The Winter Meetings are the next order of business.

I assume a handful of new teams.
Names of teams that could be
The Grays
anything after a seemingly benign animal, ie. the Cows.
Why is there not a team named the Bears, or the Bulls?
The Union
The Blue Sox or the Green Sox
The Athletics, (were it not for just Ducky Tours, we’d be the South Oakland “Athletics” )
But more likely there will be more overly aggressive misspelled team names ripe for satirizing, which will be much more fun.
It’d be great if an expansion team called itself the “Phillies”.

I’m fairly certain one of the over 28 league teams will join our league.
The idea of “un-affiliating” our league with the NABA has been kicked around, the only thing that stand in the way of this is the dirt cheap insurance we get through the national office, adn the promotion and recognition we get through our affiliation, concerning the Blues participation in national and regional tournaments.

We’ve been tossing around the idea of hosting a tournament in Pittsburgh this summer.

The biggest topic will be realignment.
How can the league be promoted as one which gives everyone and anyone the chance to play (which we should never lose sight of), while maintaining a high level of play amongst the top-tier teams like the Ducks.

We don’t want to push anyone away; not the guys at the top end of the spectrum who play in college, and not the guys at the low end who just want to play real baseball, but can’t catchup to a pitcher like Strom who throws meatballs. (we’re at that point right Strom? where we can joke about this? You’ve struck me out in the past, and made me look bad at the plat on several occasions. )

I ask anyone who attends the meetings in the upcoming months to consider what is best for the league, not simply your team, and most certainly not yourself in particular.

I see the greater danger being the potential exclusion of players who are bad, but love the game and aren’t offered the opportunity to improve, and a left with a bad taste in their mouth when they are suddenly erased from the email list, after going 0-5 and making an error in right field, and are forced into slow-pitch softball purgatory.

A split into A and AA divisions seems to make sense, maybe the last place AA team moves down every year or the winner of the A league moves up. An unbalanced schedule in which teams play inter-division teams once, and intra-division teams two or three times would work. The division champions should surely play each other in the post season. So if based on last season’s winning percentage, a team is placed in the lower division, they can show they don’t belong by winning that division and losing to the Ducks in the finals.

More as it comes. The blog will surely devolve into mush between now and the second winter ball session, hopefully the Blues can get ourselves together for the Citrus Classic and produce another strong showing.

OK it’s the future, the summer of 2009, and the Gray Bats have just been swept by the Ducks.

That’s about it.

Back into the phone booth/delorian/weird bicycle like machine from H.G. Wells’ book.

It is the present again.

For the record, I’ve never tried to take a player from another team. I was approached, (after the Ducks took two of three from the Rakers last season) as Ducks team blogger and founder about the availability of two spots on the roster for pitchers Jeremy Barchie and Ben Sorosky.

They’re two of the top five pitchers in the summer league so of course I said we’d find room. Barchie was adamant about leaving the Rakers for his former team, the Ducks, Sorosky seemed reserved never committing entirely.

Now Sorosky has claimed allegiance to the Gray Bats expansion team for this summer, and I imagine he’s already contacted his pal Jeremy Barchie about forming a formidable top of the rotation for manager Zalewski.

Larry, why not just be the “Grays”? it would be a wonderful tribute to the Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues. And if your team is all white guys, it would be great irony.

Best of luck in the Summer or 2009, Gray Bats, may you win all of your games not versus the Ducks, when Barchie no-hits you on his way to the 2009 Pittsburgh NABA Cy Young Award.

The ducks have three no-hitters in team history, all by Ian Dickman.

Also, I have no ill-will towards the owlz, aside from their use of the letter “z” and the fact that they are champions and I have been waiting for five years to get the trophy back to South Oakland. I disagree with some of Rob Coolz methods, (the incessant recruiting of other team’s stars, and the scouts he has sent to the Mexican Winter League and every American Legion team in a five twp. radius) but you can’t argue with the results, they are the champions and they earned it.

2009 is the Ducks’ year.