Boys of Summer APBA League: Inaugural league drafts despite issues

Sometimes even I am amazed by what happens when APBA fans get together.  When faced with a pretty major setback, a group of baseball fans will find a way to get things done. 

The Boys of Summer APBA Online League, spearheaded by commissioner Shawn Baier, were ready to draft for their inaugural season this morning.  We had planned to use the new APBA Online system to draft but after about six picks into the first round, the system sort of went into autopilot and began to exhibit a series of issues including auto picking players for managers and locking managers out of the draft session altogether. 

In the middle of round #2, we regrouped on Facebook and the bulk of us had decided to scrap the idea of using the APBA Online drafting feature.  After some discussion, we decided that while we were all online, we might as well draft and since most of us were already on Facebook, we could conduct the draft via FB chat.  So that’s what we did.  We gathered those who weren’t already on Facebook onto a single chat session and continued the draft from the sixth pick. 

It took a while to get into the swing of things but once we got going, it ran pretty smoothly it was a lot of fun too.   We didn’t finish though we got through 14 rounds and 223 players.  Shawn is pretty sure that he can upload the players to APBA Online via Advanced Draft. 

So what happened with APBA Online?

I can’t say with certainty what happened that caused the APBA Online problems.  To me, it almost seemed like there were multiple draft sessions going on at the same time.  Same teams listed but some of us were in different ones.  Some of us were seeing completely different drafts than others.  From my end, it seemed like it was working fine until I realized that I was the only “live” person drafting.  Players were being drafted but apparently, they were being “autopicked”.  I began to get suspicious when there just wasn’t any discussion in the chat area after a while. 

All I know, is I’m still getting notifications eleven hours later from the draft that we started and subsequently abandoned. 

I know browser compatibility is an issue.  That is something that the programmers will have to work on among a host of other problems.  John Herson has said today he plans to be looking into this whole thing and hopes the programming team can have it fixed. 

More importantly, who got drafted?

I suppose you all are interested in who got picked.  We’re not finished… we only got through 14 rounds.  Here were the first round picks in the Boys of Summer Draft:

• 1 – Mike Trout, OF
• 2 – Miguel Cabrera, 3B
• 3 – David Wright, 3B
• 4 – Clayton Kershaw, SP
• 5 – Robinson Cano, 2B
• 6 – Yadier Molina, C
• 7 – Justin Verlander, SP
• 8 – Felix Hernandez, SP
• 9 – Andrew McCutchen, OF
• 10 – Craig Kimbrel, RP
• 11 – Paul Goldschmidt, 1B
• 12 – David Price, SP
• 13 – Max Scherzer, SP
• 14 – Buster Posey, C
• 15 – Bryce Harper, OF
• 16 – Yu Darvish, SP

And what did my team, the Urbana Locomotives, end up with?  Well, here they are: 

I went with pitching early.  It just occurred to me now that I was going with what was comfortable later.  In rounds 11-15, I picked players who were on my Illowa APBA League Twin City Thunderchickens team.

Many thanks go to Shawn Baier as well as my fellow BoS managers for pulling this off.  It was a frustrating morning but we regrouped and found a way to do this.  I sure hope Shawn is getting some sleep now.  He’s been working real hard to make this league a success. 

While we’re not done yet (we have to schedule another day to finish the draft) we’ve got the hard part done.