Thought you guys might appreciate this. Sorry about the dirty windows and the shoddy camera work…

(choose HQ or fullscreen (or both!), if your connection can handle it…much better)

CAIRO, Ill. – The team from Little Egypt is shoring up its bullpen, with eyes on the Platonic League wildcard.

After a smoking hot June and July where the Cairo Leveemen rang up a 35-15 record on a run to within two games of  wildcard holders Miami Masters of Their Domain, Cairo traded picks for pitchers.

Sending its first- and second-round draft picks to league-leading Pittsburgh, Cairo receives relievers Douglas Isabell and Richard Johnson to help its struggling bullpen.

Isabell, a 2006 All-Star selection, is 7-3 with one save for Pittsburgh and has a 2.54 ERA on the year.

Johnson has a 3.62 ERA and 15 saves for Pittsburgh’s AAA affiliate Imperial Guards this season.

Cairo’s bullpen has struggled this season, and currently has thePlatonic-high bullpen ERA at 4.80, second only to Marietta in the OEL.

In a separate transaction, the Leveemen acquired infielder Juan ‘Beans’ Favela from the New York Knights in exchange for minor league starter Chuck Finger.

Favela, a three-time All-Star with a Gold Glove at second base and last year’s Socratic League Ted Williams award to his credit, has a career average .297 and hit .317 last year.

Cairo’s second/third/short  combination — with the exception of Rafael ‘Cricket’ Palermo — has lacked offensive oomph, with Berny Gonzalez, Baldo Santana and Tyler Payne combining this year for a .235 AVG and 7 homers between them — Favela has eight.

Chuck Finger, a starting pitching prospect for the AA Marion Miners, is 10-7 with a 2.95 ERA. He’s second in the OEL AA with 131 Ks and was selected to the 2006 OEL AA All-Star Game.

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement. . .

A classic. Enjoy.

Hello folks,

Welcome to the new home of the OEL! With Nate’s and Mack’s blessing, I’ve donated some of my server space to set up this blog, as well as to host the league pages. Here, everything’s all in one spot.

A few items of interest: I’ve set up a page for past league champions, as well as a contact page. You can get to the leauge pages by clicking the left button in the navigation bar. There’s also a links list in the middle column with links to each team’s page.

All the posts and comments from the old blog should be here, so we have the collected history of the OEL on one page, basically. We may go through some adjustments as I figure out what should go where and how to make things work. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment here or email me.

You should each have received an email with your username (same as your team name) and a password (which you should change). If you have problems with the site, send me an email, and I’ll take care of it.

Thanks, and enjoy,

Brent (Cairo)

The Cairo Leveemen, currently in the Platonic League’s wildcard slot and 4.5 games behind the leading Pittsburgh Pisces, today attempted to shore up its pitching staff with the acquistion of starter Wilfredo Desilva and closer Ariel Santos, both of the Pisces. In exchange, Cairo ships off middle reliever Dominique Peters and triple-A short stop top prospect Danilo Henriquez. In the deal, Cairo also snagged Pittsburgh’s 1st round pick in the 2006 draft.

The Leveemen, smack in the middle of PL pitching with a 4.99 ERA, hopes to add some consistency to its starting rotation with Desilva, coming off his best season yet in 2004 with a 13-7 record and a 3.59 ERA.

Closer Ariel Santos makes a welcome return to Cairo. Pitching in 9 Pisces wins this season, Santos has received saves in eight of them. Over the 8.2 innings, he’s compiled an impressive .071 offensive average, allowing just two hits. His 0.00 ERA, 0 homers or walks allowed, 2.08 hits per 9 innings, 2.08 runners per 9 innings, .23 WHIP and the OAVG are all league-leading statistics for relievers. A 2003 and 2004 All-Star, Santos was drafted in the 4th round by Cairo in 2001 and traded to Pittsburgh in July 2003 for starter Chuck Finger. Cairo regrets the error.

Dominique Peters, a 24-year-old middle reliever, accumulated a 2-11 record with 12 saves for Cairo last year, with 1 win and 2 saves so far in 2005.

18-year-old shortstop phenom Danilo Henriquez is batting .313 for Cairo’s triple-A affiliate Danville Dans. Henriquez tops the monthly Baseball America Top 100 Prospects report released May 1.

Huge thanks to Mack for updating the Google Spreadsheet for me…it was a big help.

On a more personal note, sorry for my unavailability over the past week. My grandfather had a stroke last Thursday and went into the hospital. I drove from school to home (~3-4 hours) Friday, to see him, then back early Sunday morning for work Sunday night. My family called at about 4 Monday morning to tell me he’d died, so I made the arrangements with my job and professors, drove back Monday night, had the services Tuesday and Wednesday, drove back early Thursday morning, and have kind of been playing catchup since. I’m doing better than I thought I would be, but it’s the first close family member I’ve had who’s died, so it’s a new experience for me. Thanks for understanding.

Apologies to Marietta, your line was wrong in the last set. Hopefully it’s all fixed in this set.

Thanks to some horrendous interleague play by the Kant Division, we’re all trending down while Hegel’s on the way up.

New this week, click for a bigger version! The Google spreadsheet is now updated as well — in case you forget what game day the sim began on, I put the next day to be input in the top left of the spreadsheet.

A couple things: First, I just used some default colors for these. If you have any preference, let me know (first come, first served on anything too similar).

Second, I very nearly decided to leave the game recently, because of college and whatnot. These sorts of things help keep me interested and feeling useful. I’ve posted a spreadsheet on Google Docs (you all should have gotten an invite) which I use to make these graphs.

If you’d like to help me out, you can visit that graph after a sim is run, and update it for your team, division or everyone. It’s pretty easy: The teams are listed across the top, and underneath is their cumulative win total. For example, Cairo, my team, went 3-2 over the first sim — but what’s important for the graph is not just the total wins and losses, but the order. I lost my first game, so I entered a “0″ for the first game (that’s a zero, not a letter “o”). Then I got my first win, so I entered a 1. Then I lost one, so my win total remained at 1. Then I won again, so it went up to 2, and so on. For a win, increase your win total by one. For a loss, leave your win total the same, but be sure to enter a number for each game. Also note that sometimes the number of games played by each team is not the same, so your column may not be even with other teams’. I get the info by going to the “schedule” option under the “league” menu, then scrolling back to the first day I need to add to the graph (listed in the top left corner of the graph, by the way). I then write down whether each team won or lost that day, rinse and repeat.

Anyway, I can keep up with it myself if I have to — it doesn’t take terribly long each time as long as I do it every sim, but if any of you feel like helping out, I thought I would give you the option. Also, suggestions for other things that might be interesting to see change over the season are welcome, and I’ll see what I can do.