Welcome to the 2021 Home Run Derby! Every Saturday morning a new cache will be released. After it is published you will have roughly a week to find it and select a slugger to represent you in that week's edition of the home run derby. Select one player and include his name in your log. The number of home runs he hits the following week (starting the Friday after cache publication) is your score; don't worry, we will handle all the scoring.
The series will be cumulative points from April through September with a week off over the All Star break. The "catch" is every player must be unique, so FTF has choice of any player, second to find will have second pick and so on. The cache hiders will also be playing so the cache owner will select fifth each week.
This is week 17 of the series (17 of 24). All scoring will take place Friday, August 6 through Thurday, August 12.
Participation in the scoring aspect is voluntary so feel free to log a find with no pick and just watch from the stands.
Game on!
Great moments in quantitative baseball:
1858: New York sportswriter Henry Chadwick invents the box score.
1941: Former major league player Ethan Allen introduces table top board game “All-Star Baseball” utilizing a spinner and real word data player discs to simulate games.
1961: Bucknell University mathematics student Hal Richman creates the table top board game “Strat-O-Matic”.
1964: Earnshaw Cook published his book “Percentage Baseball”.
1970s: Davey Johnson used an IBM System/360 to write a FORTRAN baseball computer simulation in an unsuccessful attempt to prove to his manager Earl Weaver that he should bat second in the lineup.
1977: Bill James self-publishes his annual book titled “The Bill James Baseball Abstract”.
1989: David Smith founded Retrosheet with the objective of computerizing the box score of every major league baseball game ever played.
1990: The Oakland Athletics began to use a more quantitative approach to baseball by focusing on sabermetric principles. GM Billy Beane and his assistant Paul DePodesta inspring the book and film “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game in 2003”.
2010: Geocacher dougandsuzy creates the first Saturday morning baseball series rewarding points based on what order the first four finders located the cache.