Quick summary:
- Started a fictional Continental League as a third major league on Pure Stat Baseball on a Commodore 64 in 1988.
- Manually transitioned to Earl Weaver Baseball in '89. No fast sim so I had to play out each game of a 14-team league.
- Transitioned to Earl Weaver II in the middle of the 1992 season. Stuck with Earl II through the 1999 season. Kept up a spreadsheet of each season/team/player results. Had to manually age each player in the league because Earl II didn't have a career mode.
- In 2000 I found OOTP and went through the labor-intensive process of making my own Lahman database out of my spreadsheets. Eventually imported the whole CBL to OOTP2. But ended up with some problems like the 1999 season stats didn't fully import. To this day I have issues with pre-2000 records that
I've been trying to fix. But I still have the spreadsheets going back to '88.
- In 2006 I was finally able to realize a goal of having the CBL as an active part of the larger baseball universe. I created a construct with all of the active professional leagues as of '06 including MLB, all the real minors, indy minors, and a lot of foreign leagues. I added maybe 10 fictional independent leagues including some wild things like a Greenland Winter Ice Baseball League, and a league in Sao Tome that has a 230-game schedule and two-man pitching rotations.
In the beginning I was the GM/manager of the CBL's Yukon Prospectors, and I'm still the GM today. I used to also run the Las Vegas Gamblers, but gave that up about a decade ago. I try to keep the league approximately on the real calendar, running a day at a time. Not always successful, the last couple years I fell way behind and had to catch up this winter. But now I'm back on track, getting ready for the 2020 CBL season, which will be the 33rd. I was 17 when I started, I'm 48, going on 49 now.