Hello everyone, my name is Will Albers and I am an IS baseball sim addict. I figure I must be an addict as I’ve been playing this game every single day from the earliest leagues of its forefather, The Winter Game, in 1992/93 all the way through to the Classic/SSG games of today at Imagine Sports. Along the way, I’ve run 6-12 teams at a time, managed over 1,040 teams, played around 166,000 games, spent thousands of dollars, untold hours keeping my own database of player statistics all while accumulating a very modest .502 win % and a few dozen championships. So yeah, I might be addicted but, yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.

Will’s Early Life

My love affair with baseball began in the mid-1960s when I started to play Little League baseball.  We lived in Severna Park, MD, not far from Baltimore so I was already in Oriole fan but my first LL team was called the Dodgers so I thought I should follow them too.  I played 2nd base and wore #8 and I quickly latched on to Jim Lefebvre (who also played 2nd and wore #8 and was ROY of the year in ’65) as my favorite ballplayer.  In 1966 my loyalties were put to the test as the Dodgers and Orioles met in the World Series.  I decided to root for the Dodgers due to my love for Koufax, Drysdale and Lefebvre but promptly had my dreams smashed as they were humiliatingly swept by the O’s.   But my choice had been made and hardened in the cauldron of defeat and since then my heart has bled Dodger Blue.

By the way, I sucked as a baseball player.  I had no skill and lacked that spatial awareness of what’s happening on the entire ballfield that truly skilled ballplayers have.  I spend most of my two year career in LL backing away from pitches and praying that nobody would hit the ball to me.  I am pretty sure I only had two hits in all my AB’s and on one of them I was thrown out at third trying to stretch a line drive into the left field corner to a triple.  It was no different for me 5 years later when I attempted boy’s club football (95 pound division).  I had no skills whatsoever and shoulder pads looked huge on my skinny weakling body.  I was a wide receiver but my team had an even worse offensive line so the QB rarely got off a pass.  I do remember catching a fairly long pass with an open field to the end zone ahead of me but I tripped over my own two feet as I turned to run downfield.  Not a very distinguished highlight to an extremely mediocre football career.  However, my ability to outrun everyone on laps around the field eventually led me to my true athletic calling.

For The Love of Stats

Though I sucked in organized leagues with better athletes I was, in fact, a sandlot ball god.  I taught myself to switch hit like my idol, Jim Lefebvre, and I smashed towering fly balls left and right against the smaller kids in the neighborhood.  I spent hours tossing up a ball and hitting it into a backstop fantasizing about baseball glory while inventing my own baseball games.  I even started keeping baseball statistics.   I don’t have any talent in mathematics, but I have always been fascinated with the statistics of baseball.  I pored over the backs of baseball cards and I kept notebooks of stats related to my own backyard baseball exploits. Eventually, I started to discover baseball board games like Strat-o-Matic and Avalon Hill’s baseball game (I was also heavily into strategic war board games too).  I created leagues and kept stats for those as well.  Pursue the Pennant came along and then the advent of home computing and games like Earl Weaver baseball.  I pretty much played them all.   And if they allowed for creating your own player profiles then I was putting myself into the leagues I simulated.  More often than not I was the switch-hitting SS for a Los Angeles team that could pull off a 40/40 season while leading the league in hitting as we’d win Series after Series.

Eventually I stumbled across The Winter Game through an advertisement in Baseball Weekly.  I had also been playing Bill James Baseball, a rotisserie style game, but much preferred the historical simulation aspect of The Winter Game and quickly got hooked.   I loved reading about the old players and spent hours poring over Total Baseball (once ran a league called the No Black Ink League which excluded players who were black ink category leaders in that book.  Took me hours to look up all the excluded players, LOL).  As computer technology improved, especially the internet/web-based activities, I set aside the computer games (PtP, SoM, OOTP, etc) and devoted more time to the Stats game, and now Imagine Sports.

I’m not a “spreadsheet” guy, I don’t really play the values aspect of roster building.   I almost always play custom leagues, especially unusual themes or rules that limit the player pool or roster building in some way.   I don’t consider myself especially skilled at this game, I just have fun building the teams and I win the occasional championship like a blind squirrel finds acorns.   I keep my own database of players that have played for me and I actually refrain from using players after I’ve tried them a certain # of times.   This forces me to use other players and keeps the game relatively fresh for me.    I guess my current goal is to use everyone in the classic pool at least once.   I am a couple hundred players shy of that at the moment.

What I Like About Imagine Sports

What I really like about the game is the community and what I value the most are the friendships I have made here.  Most virtual friendships but I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of meeting many of you in person and I’m looking forward to meeting more in the future.  For me, that’s the best aspect of this game.  I’ve scaled back on the number of new leagues I enter but I remain committed to the continuing leagues I currently play in even though it seems I am losing more and more often.   It’s my friends that keep bringing me back.  <grin>

Will’s Family Life

I am a 63-year-old native Californian but growing up I moved around a bit as my father was a career naval officer and pilot.  I went to HS and college (George Mason University) in Northern Virginia.    After the dismal failure of my forays into skilled sports I discovered I had modest talent as a runner and took up the sport in HS.   Did OK in college and had modest success as a road racer for a couple of years.   Ran in the 1980 US Olympic Marathon Trials but my running career was over within the next year as injuries and the need to earn a living took over.   I finally finished up my college degree and my best friend Mike Greehan (who plays here as mfgreehan) offered me a job at Brooks Shoes in 1982 and that’s how my career in the shoe business began.   I moved over to Taiwan in 1990 to help set up an office for Brooks and since that time I have lived more than 20 years in Asia (Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and China) working for different companies.   I’m currently working for a company called Advanced Manufacturing Group, where I am the Director of Production for our Walmart business (sort of a moral conundrum for me, LOL).   We are their main supplier of work and safety boots and I have to admit we provide them with an exceptionally high-value product.  I live in a small town (by China standards) called Gaomi, in the province of Shandong, China.  I am probably the only Westerner living in a town of 1 million people.   The pinnacle of Western-style food here is a KFC.   Life over here is wearing kind of thin but it’s a living and I guess I’ll give it a few more years as I save up for retirement.

I have an amazingly wonderful wife (Sarah) and have been blessed with 4 beautiful children from previous marriages.   My oldest daughter Kelly graduated from Berkeley last May and is currently employed by the City of San Francisco Planning Department.   Kaitlyn will graduate from Berkeley this May and William graduates from there next May.   They are all A students and an immense source of pride for me.  It used to be an annual tradition to get in a game each year at Dodger stadium together.   We haven’t been able to do that since they moved up to Berkeley but they at least have a passing interest in the Dodgers and Kelly is going to see them play in SF this month so that makes me happy.  My fondest baseball memory is being at Dodger Stadium with them on Oct.2, 2004.  The Dodgers were down 4-0 in the bottom of the 9th.   They scored 7 runs capped by Steve Finley’s 0-2 walkoff grandslam to beat the hated Giants and clinch the pennant.  The stadium exploded and my kids marveled as tears streamed down this old Dodger fan’s face.

So……that’s about it for me and if you’ll excuse me I need to feed my addiction by going to set lineups for two new teams starting this week!