Every summer the Toronto Star hosts a contest called Star Ball. In the days before the World Wide Web we registered our team by mail, picking a player from each position and earning a point for every run, RBI, home run and stolen base. Needless to say, my team was always heavy with Blue Jays.
For one glorious week during the summer of 1990, week 21 of the contest to be precise, I was in second. I still remember my brother Ryan running down the stairs to excitedly tell me I was in the newspaper with 1649 points. That was only eight points behind the weekly winner of a $100 cash prize. The winner at the end of the year won an IBM Personal System/2 Model 50 Z-031 computer, 14-inch colour display model 8512 with PS/2 mouse, LaserPrinter E and DOS 4.0 software. The approximate retail value was $7,500.
Seeing my name in second caused me to save that paper for posterity. It was validation, of sorts, that I really did know my baseball. Here's a scan of the week 21 standings of Star Ball '90.
