What's in a name?

The dog days have arrived in the ICL. 20XX Keeper Leagues are completing their Supplemental Drafts....Andy is keeping the beat with his "Alternate History" leagues....other than that it's pretty quiet. How about posting the origin of your Manager name and how you got into Strat?

I came of age in Montana and am now living in Palm Springs, CA. So Palmtana. When Strat was hosted by TSN I played a salary cap game there called Ultimate Fantasy Baseball. In 2004, when the MLB season was over, I scrolled down the message boards and came across the Forum for Stratomatic. I spent that winter reading every post to get up to speed.

In 2003 SOMO had a free 21 day trial, and work my job at the time was slow. I created several user names and accounts to check out the game I played in middle school. My name is Grant and I have a spam email that's grant.rant, thus my moniker came to be. I may be a PITA at times, but don't tend to rant on the Internet or IRL.

My username is on honor of Alexander Hamilton and one of my favorite of the Federalist papers (number 17). I have used a version of Hamilton as a moniker for online games and forums since the turn of the century (2000). LOL

I found SOM back in 2005 ish when is was still TSN and ran a couple of free teams, but I was a college student and didn't have the money to be paying nearly on a per season basis. So I joined a competitor's site because they offered more free seasons. Eventually I helped that other site with a new owner chat and implementing salary capped leagues and other game development, but their ownership involvement and customer support became increasingly abysmal. In 2020 I finally gave up and left that site for good.

Since it was 2020 and we were all bored, I recruited several friends to join in a 1999 single season league with me. We did a live draft thread on Facebook with wax pack baseball cards, requiring you to open a pack and select a player from the pack. It was loads of fun. Draft took us a month or longer.

Then I connected with some of y'all here in SOM world and now I'm hooked. I'm part of a group of SOM players called the Boys of Summer which play several leagues together and email about baseball and life stuff. And I play on several of Andy's alt reality leagues. I have some philosophical differences about how SOM works compared to my old site (looking at you bullpen management and Ballpark effects) but overall I'm having a blast and enjoy this community of baseball nerds!

In 2003 SOMO had a free 21 day trial, and work my job at the time was slow. I created several user names and accounts to check out the game I played in middle school. My name is Grant and I have a spam email that's grant.rant, thus my moniker came to be. I may be a PITA at times, but don't tend to rant on the Internet or IRL.

My origin story is very similar, started with the 2003 free trial and was hooked. Single, living alone in a northern community at the time not much else to do. Prior to that as a kid I never played the board game but had often seen advertisements for Strat. If I remember correctly I think it was in Baseball Digest, or could have been baseball weekly. I had one single Strat card that must have come out of one of the publications. Starting from about age 9 I started to follow baseball and loved the statistics side of it so strat was a natural progression.

As far as the name, I had a dog named Rosco at the time (named after Sheriff Rosco P Coltrane haha).
So simply his name and the fact he was a dog.
Roscodog

In 1978 I started college; my sight unseen roommate was from Chicago and brought his strao set with him...we soon formed a league in the dorms...

When grocery stores began to have the electronic signature thingies...I realized no one and no bots were monioring what we signed so on a lark I signed my credit card purchase with the ghost of roger maris....

My name is my biggest regret. I think of all kinds of great monikers now but when I first signed up I just put my real name down. BOO!!

I discovered Stratomatic in 2000. I was playing mutiiple Rotisserie leagues when a member of one my leagues asked if I would be interested in taking over a team in his face to face Strat league. Apparently this league had been running continuously since 1982 and still is today. So I learned how to play strat in a 20 team face to face league and discovered the old TSN site around that time. Used to play Strat football on that site as well. I live in Delaware.

I started playing dice and cards Strat in 1981. The on-line started in 2001 (under the TSN banner) and I jumped in. Took the moniker Ironwill. Iron Will was a movie done by Disney in 1994 about a kid involved in a dog sled race. I was running sled dogs (huskies) at that time in New Hampshire. The movie action scenes was filmed in New Hampshire and Maine. The dogs and drivers were locals. I know some of the folks that contributed sleds and dogs. My family got involved with huskies in '97. My son Will was born in '98. When SOM came about in 2001 Ironwill was there!

I got into the board game with the 1985 season as a young teen. I had always been a stat nerd, which probably came from card collecting, so this was a natural progression. I played the heck out of that '85 set for a year or so. Then moved on from Strat. Rediscovered the PC game in the mid 90s, and the online community in the mid-oughts on the TSN site. What really hooked me on the online version was the discovery of keeper leagues and the sense of community from those. I like that there is an element of fantasy baseball to the keeper leagues.

Calbatross is a portmanteau of my name Cal and albatross, the bird. It was a nickname given to me by a high school baseball teammate... maybe because I was gangly with long arms. Are albatrosses gangly? It was one of a slew of similar nicknames (Caloysius, Calvinator, Calisthenics, Calbert, Cal State... and on and on), and probably my favorite.

I would have come up with something better for my moniker as well had I known what I was doing. It is essentially my email address (without the @hotmail.com). It's my name plus the number 7, which has always been my baseball number owing to the fact that I am a 7th son. As for Strat, I was introduced in 1988 when a new co-worker at the local mall told me about it when he realized I was a baseball fanatic. He had a league with 2 of his buddies that they had just started with the newest set. They essentially had a base team for themselves, supplemented with some stars they liked, then played a 162 game schedule. They let me join in late and I took the Royals as a base team and I ended up winning the title and was hooked. We became best friends. We lost touch with Strat after college, but I jumped into the TSN leagues the first year (I think). I'm the only one of that group who still plays, but I am addicted!

I was a International Spy working for Leonid Brezhnev under cover trying to take down the U.S.A in the early 80's because they knew I had played my first game of Strat in 1975. I was introduced to the board game then and also bought the 1977 game. The Phillies were loaded as were the Yankees. That game was burned up in a house fire at my dad's house. Was it Regan or was it the Soviet Union? I will leave that up to you to conclude because I was on to the arms deal that Regan was doing.

I did some great work for the Soviets and took down many Americans spies. I then infiltrated the CIA and wiped out everything on Hillary's blackberries. They said it was a hammer, but I know better.

My name comes from my 2 kids being Chase and Ally and when I started this online game Ally was 16 and now she is 32 or is she and really is any of this really even kind of true. If you report any of this to authorities, you will hear the shot long after it exited your ear.

I don't have a dog, but if I did and you killed him then yes "I am back" in the game.