In my effort to put out a few caches for the not quite able-bodied, here’s a second one that will allow you to avoid ticks, poison ivy, and thorns even in the middle of summer! Just for fun, I’ve reworked the same sorts of materials (baseball and caching) in a set of three puzzles; namely, this one and GC7QNVN: We Too Play! and GC7RQX0: THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM! OR MENAGE A TROIS? So if you haven’t checked out all three yet, maybe you ought to. After all, the third time’s the charm, right?
The Baltimore Black Sox
I was musing the other day about who the greatest Orioles might be, no doubt because this year’s Orioles seem so thoroughly removed from greatness. (Chris Davis, for instance, in a mere 955 games, has struck out 1278 times; that’s an average of 1.34 K’s per game. Cal Ripken needed 3001 games to strike out 1305 times, an average of only .44 K’s per game. As of 6-4-18, Davis was tied for 4th-worst WAR among qualified players! Is that among 750 players?) Anyway, I tried to lift myself out of this kind of negativity by thinking of the truly great players of Major League Baseball, and eventually I mused over a manager’s dilemma if he had to choose from among All-Star caliber players. Whom would you pick among these pairings, for example, if you could pick just one?
Probably MLB’s most famous player of all time (.311 137 HR 197 SB) or The Sandman (2.21 652 SV)?
Tom Terrific (2.86 3640 SO) or Eddie Mattress (.271 512 HR)?
Roger Eugene Maras (.260 275 HR .476 SLG) or Mr. October (.262 563 HR .490 SLG)?
The Splendid Splinter (.344 521 HR .634 SLG) or Enos Slaughter (.300 169 .453 SLG)?
Stan the Man (.331 475 HR .559 SLG) or Al Kaline (.297 399 .480 SLG)?
The Mick (.298 536 HR .557 SLG) or Pudge (.296 311 HR .464 SLG)?
The Iron Horse (.340 493 HR .632 SLG) or The Duke of Flatbush (.295 407 HR .540 SLG)?
The Human Vacuum Cleaner (.267 268 HR .401 SLG) or Detroit’s Hammerin’ Hank (.313 331 HR .605)?
The Little General (.267 389 HR .476 SLG) or Mullet (.305 361 HR 201 SB)?
Prince Albert (.304 622 HR .558 SLG) or The Yankee Clipper (.325 361 HR .579 SLG)?
The Say Hey Kid (.302 660 HR .557 SLG) or Cincy’s Big Dog (.279 379 HR .463 SLG)?
Well, Finding the Cache Can't Be Hard, Can It?
Anyway, this sort of musing got me to thinking about our favorite recreation: geocaching. I suppose you could argue that those with the most finds or most hides or most FTFs are All-Stars. But most of us can’t devote the time to grabbing top honors in those categories. Still, there’s a bunch of interesting data about us cachers, many of whom you probably know and with whom you’ve no doubt cached.
Consider, for example, Rural Seeker, who hid as many traditional caches last year as he did in his very first year of hiding caches!
We have lots of cachers who took a while to get started, but then picked up the pace considerably. In her second year of caching, Flamingo_girl found very few caches.
In 2016, KayakKathy's per-day average wasn’t too shabby.
Some of us, like LPaulRiddle, do amazing things, such as finding lots of different cache types in a single day.
Many cachers eventually decide they want to be hiders as well as finders and the rest of us reap the rewards of their efforts. Look at the traditional (and quality!) hides TheWoodenRadio put out in 2017, just his second year of placing hides! (And, yes, he really owns a wooden radio!)
You’ve often heard that time flies when you’re having fun, something I thought about the other day when I wondered to myself just how long GardenNClay and IAmJustTheDriver have been caching together.
Some cachers (I’m thinking of FatOldBaldMan) like to attend Mega and Giga events; they must like road games more than most of us do.
Do you pay attention to souvenirs? You can get them for all kinds of things. I bet Soccertoa enjoys collecting state souvenirs.
Like many ballplayers, some cachers stay in the game a long time, accumulating lots and lots of finds; but, like other players, some cachers seem to be flashes-in-the-pan. I hope kestrelgirl isn’t one of them, but as of now her first-year effort seems to have stalled.
There’s always hope, though, because some seasoned and very successful cachers just start slowly, like PortlyWalker, who didn’t set any find records in 2004.
Then there are the cachers who challenge us in complicated ways regarding our stats, the way Gabi & Beecharmer13 do in their Rock Creek Puzzle (GC16W4Z), which demands, among other things, that you solve a specific number of puzzles.
(It occurs to me that I might have hurt PortlyWalker's feelings, so maybe I should add that in 2004 I didn’t get out of the gate spectacularly either.)
You’ve probably heard that lots of cachers enjoy puzzles. They hide a cache but require you to figure out something like the average number of caches found by Ed302v8 per day in 2017, multiplied by the number of caches found by GRIST in 2011. And then you can figure out where to find the cache. Some cachers swear by such puzzles, thinking they add a little challenge to our recreation. Others swear at them—or their creators.
You can tell which camp I’m in because of the way I’m ending this puzzle cache: what is the value of the number of webcams found as of this date by Vinny & Sue Team, minus the number of such caches found by Puzzlid, then divided by the number of years MD Crab found zero caches?
Hide is in a public place, so I urge you to wait until there's no one in the vicinity before you approach the GZ. And the tool you'll want to bring is tweezers. I don't usually place hides in this sort of location, but lately I've felt the need for more accessible caches. A bum leg will warp a cacher's thinking like that.
All caps, no spaces: four words.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.