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Only the Wonderland Warriors made use of the August Reactivation Draft. Two former Khe Sanh Commanders have been selected by the Warriors for roster status next season. The Warriors trying to get through a rebuilding year are trying to shore up some glaring gaps. Colonel David Lownds, former commander of the 26th Marines in Vietnam during the siege of Khe Sanh (1967-68) and the former rightfielder for the Commanders has been reactivated. Lt. Colonel J.B. Wilkinson, a battalion commander also with the 26th Marines at Khe Sanh will get the call to join the beleaguered Warrior pitching staff. The 
Warriors have not announced who these Vietnam veteran commanders will replace on the roster. Lownds and Wilkinson both have distinguished careers in the Marines. The Cosmic Baseball Research Alliance is currently in the process of creating a special archive plate on the 1987 Khe Sanh Commanders. Lownds and Wilkinson were both original members of that team.
August, 2000 NOTE: The Index Plate has been taken offline.
CBA has published a comprehensive detailing the contents of the CBA site. The index includes plate names, descriptions of plates, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and update information. Links to all the plates are included in the Index.
The two worst teams in the Overleague played a relatively mediocre game. But since it was the only game played on Sunday, we thought we would post the game details. Virgins starter, Mata Hari (9-11) won and Warriors starter, Lt. Calley (4-14) was the loser. No homeruns, no stolen basses, it was a relatively uneventful game. Virgin designated hitter, Emily Dickinson, was the game MCP: she went 3-for-4 with 2 runs.
Volume Fifteen of the JCBA has been published and several of the articles are available online. The featured article in this edition of the JCBA is the poet Robert Kelly's Pastoral Dialog on the Game of the Quadrature. First written in the 1970s the "dialog" takes place between two shepherds who spend an afternoon watching a baseball game and pondering the game's deeper mysteries. Other articles from Volume 15 of the JCBA will be made available in the future, including Presidential Pitchers: The Politics of the Curve Ball; a Chronology of CBA's First Fifteen Years; and a review of baseball literature about southpaws, Literature on the Left.
the 1992 Barsoomtown Explorers . The Explorers played two seasons in the Outer Space League. Consisting of Martian exploration spacecraft, the team did not play exceptionally well in the very competitive OSL. Owned by NASA and managed by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Explorers were nevertheless a popular team that sold out Cydonia Fields nearly every game. The special archive plate contains the complete 1992 Roster of Players, Managers, and Coaches and includes basic statistical data for the Explorers' 1992 season. Additionally, there are a number of links to other places on the World Wide Web containing Martian-related information.
Mars has been known by many names, the Incas called the Red Planet Auqakah, the Armenians named Earth's closest planet Hrad, the Japanese referred to Mars as Kasei and the Greeks called Mars, Ares. That life might have existed on Mars, many Earth years ago is an exciting possibility. Humans have long guessed that life exists or existed on Mars. The form of that life, 
has spanned the traditional imaginary landscape from little green men, to orb-like, tentacled beings. The current paradigm suggests that the type of life on Mars was less sophisticated and archival in nature: micro fossils representing a past no longer present. In the latter part of the 19th century, when Percival Lowell aimed his Arizona-based telescope at Mars and saw 
"canals" he empirically concluded an intelligent species of Martians must have constructed such a well-ordered matrix of channels. Today, peering into electron microscopes our scientists conclude that life on Mars was quite small and more bacteria-like. And, of course, H.G.Welles, Orson Welles, and Edgar Rice Burroughs have their own paradigms and metaphors. The Barsoomtown Explorers represent just one aspect of the issue: the spacecraft that explored, or tried to explore, matters Martian.
William Burroughs and through Burroughs Huncke met Kerouac, Ginsberg and other members of the Beat tribe. Huncke died in New York City on Thursday August 8. In 1990, he published his autobiography entitled Guilty of Everything.In a short obituary posted to the BEAT-L mailing list, Levi Asher wrote: "Huncke was a close friend of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg during the days of their early adventures together in New York City. He was their prototypical Times Square junkie/hustler connection, the "real thing" that they (especially Burroughs) often tried to emulate."
Huncke played in the CBA between 1983-1995 as a catcher for the Dharma Beats. He retired at the end of last year, for health-related reasons. His best season was 1984 when he batted .300 and knocked in 12 homeruns. Huncke's career statistics are provided below.
YEAR TEAM POS BA AB H HR RBI 1983 Beats c .281 384 108 9 42 1984 Beats c .300 520 156 12 57 1985 Beats of .259 85 22 2 9 1987 Beats c .223 206 46 4 22 1988 Beats c .278 609 169 14 67 1989 Beats c .236 487 115 11 54 1990 Beats c .287 599 172 14 66 1991 Beats c .267 270 72 12 37 1992 Beats c .215 261 56 13 40 1993 Beats c .202 257 52 14 37 1994 Beats c .233 275 64 14 45 1995 Beats c .201 319 64 2 17 Totals .257 4272 1096 121 493
Castro will assume Dole's responsibilities as firstbase and batting coach immediately. Castro, a controversial figure in international politics (some call him a tyrant, others say he's really a dictator) issued a statement that said: "I am delighted and honored to be a member of the Presidents and I look forward to working with the batters." Dole's resignation comes as somewhat of a surprise. However, the mounting pressures of the election campaign, apparently weighed heavily in his decision. According to an informed source, Dole opted for politics instead of baseball during the weekend when he was preparing his tax policy speech.
The first pick went to the Vestal Virgins and they selected the noted and out-spoken social historian, Camille Paglia. Paglia has written provocative words regarding the relationships between men and women. Her ideas are controversial and alarm the more militant feminist writers. The Virgins have assigned her to the Green Leagues in preparation for her advancement to the mother team next season. Noam Chomsky, the honorable linguistics guru was 
selected second in the draft by the Alphatown Ionians. Chomsky's first book, Syntactic Structures, published in 1957,
outlines his system of transformational grammar. Chomsky has also been a political activist and his moral absolutism has made him controversial. The third pick was American playwright Eugene O'Neill, tagged by the Eden Bohemians. O'Neill wrote a number of important plays including the taut Long Day's Journey Into Night which examines, autobiographically, the prototypical dysfunctional family.
Note: From time to time CBA will offer reviews of interesting baseball sites discovered on the net. The rating system used is similar to batting averages. Sites rating over .250 are above average, a .300 rating indicates, in our opinion, an exceptional site. If ever we bump into a .400 site, well it could only be the best of the best. Sites including the LINKS reference indicates that the reviewed site contains additional links. However, those links may not have been reviewed or visited. All sites reviewed here have been accessed within the last 24 hours.
Baseball Engineering Home Page
[.289] [LINKS] [Baseball, Statistics]
Keith Woolner has created a baseball performance statistic called VORP (Value Over a Replacement at a Position) which endeavors to express a player's total contribution towards winning games. Is this statistic more reliable then Bill James' Runs Created stat? Check out Baseball Engineering. Several good links to other baseball resources including a well-written defense of the designated hitter rule.
Total Baseball
[.290] [Statistics]
Excellent reality baseball database with a fast search utility. Type in the name of a professional major league baseball player and Total Baseball returns a wealth of statistical information, in an organized display.
The Sabermetric Manifesto
[.251] [Statistics]
Not an interesting site graphically but in keeping with the theme of the statistical sites reviewed above, those of you interested in the "search for objective knowledge about baseball" might want to check out the document that supports the view that such an undertaking is possible. Sabermetrics is the study of baseball from the numbers point of view. But what makes sabermetricians so interesting is that most of them also adhere to the notion that ultimately, it is people who count, not numbers.
E-mail:editor@cosmicbaseball.com
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