If You Build It, They Will Come

Baseball is updated in TCDB, and is the last major update. Baseball Iowa Connections will fall under three major categories.  MLB players, minor league players and the slim slice of players who were good enough to play in the Perfect Game high school showcase, but didn't have much of a pro career. I have 1627 Iowa Connections currently in my spreadsheet, by far the largest group.  This is due to the number of years baseball has been around (pre-1900) and the fact that there are probably 200 professional baseball teams in the US alone and not even considering foreign leagues. 789 players tracked do not have a single card in TCDB.  These are minor leaguers who didn't play in an era minor league cards or the team didn't have cards made (or yet tracked in TCDB).  These also include major leaguers who didn't play enough to have a card made, many in the early years of baseball.     I developed a ranking system for the player collections to determine which pl...

The World Series is played every year (well, 1994...), and every year there is a winner.  The right team doesn't always win though.  No, sometimes the universe makes a mistake and the wrong team wins.  But how do we know who these "Misplaced Winners" are?   Well, this blog circles around one thing, and that's the Iowa Connection.  So, obviously every World Series champion should have at least one Iowa Connection, but not every one does.  Either I've missed the connection (possible!), or the universe messed up.  Thanos snapped his fingers and the Yankees won.  So lets look at those Iowa-less World Series champions and see who it should have been. If this universe happened, here are number of titles these Iowa Connections would have gained (2+): 4 - Davey Lopes 2 - Cal Eldred 2 - Corey Koskie 2 - Denis Menke 2 - Jerry McNertney 2 - John Wathan 2 - Paul Splittorff 2 - R. C. Stevens 2 - Gene Baker Note: I'm only going back to 1958 here,...