About...
...The Origins
The league started way back in the 90s with games between Matt St Hilaire and Greg Nelson, both of Hooksett, NH. The rules were developed as a hybrid of the standard 2-player wiffleball rules, making specific changes to make the game both more interesting, and more playable on the Hooksett field.
The league gained a new member in the summer of 2003. The newcomer was then 19 year old Bryan Marble. His rookie season was rough, needing to learn the rules that St Hilaire and Nelson had set forth years before. The league took on new form as numerous games were played. At the end of the season, the players thought it would be great to have a way of tracking statistics and so they called upon CS major, Bryan Marble to develop a way of tracking the games.
Marble, using Excel skills honed at BAE Systems, designed a stat tracker for 2004 and beta tested it throughout the 2004 season. It was decided that 2005 would mark the first statistically recorded season. And so we arrive at the summer of 2005, stat tracker whirring and games getting ever more intense.
...The Rules
...The Website
The website was launched in July 2005 as a front end to the stat tracking system designed in 2004. It is currently under heavy development, and plans are to have it finished by the end of August 2005. The fully functional page will have statistics for all players, including options to display stats by matchup, by date and so on.
The site is written in PHP, using MySQL databses to store stats, player information and articles. Limited javascript is used in the menus. The site is hosted by ASmallOrange and comes highly recommended as a host with a very knowledgeable, very friendly, and hands on staff. The artwork was all done in Photoshop by Bryan Marble. Photos were taken by various players in the league and by contributing photographer, Sara St Hilaire.
Future plans for the site include creating a web interface for the stat tracker in order to get out of Excel. Migrating to a web interface, while restrictive because of the need for an internet connection, will provide the ability to do live updating of stats for games, as well as the ability to "watch" the game much like mlb.com's MLBGameday.
The site is optimized for Mozilla browsers though it looks fine in IE. Regardless, I encourage you to try Mozilla Firefox and come out from under the rock that is Internet Explorer. Mozilla is faster, cleaner, and more secure than IE and allows for many incredible add-ins including ad-blockers and more. Try it out and come back to the site and look at the difference. It's amazing. So click on the Firefox button to the left underneath the menu and change your browsing experience for the better....the much much better.
The site is managed by Bryan Marble. Any questions or comments can be sent to him at mahbles@gmail.com. You can also check out his personal web site at www.lostmahbles.com.
...The Stat-Tracker
The 2004 season marked the development and testing of the new stat tracking system. The system is written in the background of Microsoft Excel and allows for portable access to the statistics. Recording stats is done by placing a laptop near the pitcher with the tracker running. After every pitch (or after every at-bat) the pitcher tells the tracker what happened. The tracker will then keep track of the score, the count, the runners on base and all relevant (and sometimes not so releveant) statistics. For more information on the stat-tracker, and to try it out yourself, go here.