Nine Innings To Winning: Free Agency Kills the As Traditional Cache
Nine Innings To Winning: Free Agency Kills the As
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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It's time for the baseball season to start and a new geocaching series. Last year featured a Home Run Derby. This year we will have nine weeks (innings) of hides, followed by a mid-season break, then a second half with nine more weeks.
A new geocache will be released each Saturday. After it's published, you will have roughly a week to find it and select a baseball team (We will post specific dates and deadlines with each cache). This is optional of course and as long as you find the container you can log your success for all fellow Geocachers to see.
Name one team and include their name in your log. Its record the following week will be your score.
The "catch" is every team must be unique, so FTF has choice of any squad, even the Padres. STF has second choice, and so on.
After the first nine weeks, the standings will reset, and then the winner of the first half will square off versus the second half champ in a geocaching World Series classic.
This geocache is the fourth inning! Anyone making the find through Sunday, April 28th is eligible and the scoring will occur from Monday, April 29th through Sunday, May 5th.
For almost a century major league baseball owners had upheld the practice of what was known as the reserve clause system. Under this system the team owners retained exclusive rights to their players. As their contracts expired the players remained at the mercy of the owners and had only two choices: they could either play for whatever amount the owners offered in the form of a new contract or they could retire from baseball. To many critics this system was tantamount to indentured servitude. Throughout the decades the system survived various legal challenges. That is until in 1975 when an arbitrator ruled that that Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith should now be considered a free agent after having played a full season with no contract. Messersmith signed with the Atlanta Braves the following spring and became modern baseball’s first free agent. This opened the door for all players to become free agents once their contracts had expired. The next offseason saw many high profile free agent signings and perhaps no other team, or their fans, suffered as much under the new system than the Oakland Athletics. Their miserly owner Charlie Finley refused to pay free market value to retain his best players. After winning three consecutive world championships earlier in the decade they soon lost almost all of their star players, including Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, Don Baylor, Sal Bando, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Joe Rudi, and Bert Campaneris and sadly, by 1977, the three time world champions were considered the worst team in baseball.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)