2022 A to Z Challenge Reflection

 

 In 2012 I completed my first A to Z Challenge. In 2019 I had gotten away from blogging for about an 18 month period. I got back in to it shortly before the 2019 challenge my theme that year was the Songs of the Sherman Brothers.  In 2020 My theme was Capital Cities and In 2021 My theme was people who were alive 100 years before in 1921

My plan as the 2021 challenge drew to an end was to participate in the challenge from all 4 of my tive blogs at the time.  Random Acts of Roller, HSD (Previously known as Home School Dad), Crazy Uncle Dave's Sports Page and Dave Out Loud.

The past 12 months has been some of the happiest and trying months of my life.  I at times worked 3 different jobs concurrently, I have spent large percentages of my time helping care for my aging parents and my disabled daughter just among many moving parts in my life.  Creating content while still a passion and a priority needed to diminish in some ways.  

At the beginning of this year I began consolidating the 4 remaining blogs into HSD but changing the name to Leap of Dave.  The previously mentioned things have kept me from fully completing that task but having just one blog to maintain has alleviated a world of pressure.

This year instead of having 4 different entries to the challenge, I just had 3 different themes for the challlenge.  The first was A to Z limericks.  I seem to be a limerick whisperer able to turn anything into a 5 lined AABBA poem.  Here's one off the top of my head

There once was a blogger  named Dave

whom during the challenge neglected to shave

And just as we feared

He grew out his beard

and looked like he crawled out of a cave

The above limericks not true

It's just a show of what I can do

If you give me  time

I'll come up with a rhyme

But now let us talk Rod Carew

Wow, was that a non sequitir or what?

Actually that's an ideal segue to my 2nd theme.

My 2nd theme was home run hitters in my life time.  I was born in 1964 but late in the baseball season, so for ease of use I counted the entire 1964 season as part of my life time.  Besides dividing the players alphabetically, I also divided my life time into 5 segments: 1964-1975, 1976-1987, 1988-1999, 2000-2010, 2011-2022.

The first thing I did was made a list of the top home run hitters in each of those periods.  I used a tool called the day by day data base from the blog Baseball Musings to make these lists.  

You can pick a range of dates and a range of stats to look at,

When I seleected 1964 to 1975 for batting average (for players with a minimum of 1000)  plate appearances, it gave me this list ...

The aforementioned Rod Carew is listed 3rd with a batting average of .328.  I wont put in the screen shot but from 1976 to 1987 he also batted .328 and was 4th place on the list.  He was a consistent hit machine but not a power hitter only hitting 92 homeruns out of 9315 career at bats.  I will be making an index of the homerun hitters I did include this year and will be making some lists of who I left out.

To start that off I will turn to the Cubs from 1964 to 1975.  They had 3 players who hit more than 100 homers for them during that period.  All 3 of them Hall of Famers and when preparing for this list I felt certain that at least some of them would have been included.  Not one of them was.  They  are in  order of home runs :

 

Billy Williams 381

Ron Santo 263

and 

Ernie Banks.  159

That is 740 homers between them by far the most of any 3 teammates between 1963 and 1974.

My 3rd a -z challenge theme was wordle starting words.  This took actually the most preparation.  On March 1st I started beginning my wordles with a different letter for the first 26 days of the month and then recording all my guesses guess in a notebook.  Starting on April 1st I took out the notebook and recounted my wordle guessess for the previous month.  For continuity's sake I started my wordles in April with the same starting word as the previous month's guess.  

Personally April 2022 has been an extremely busy  month for me.  This at times really got in my way of enjoying the a to z challenge as much as I have in years past.  Unfortunately May has not gotten any less busy, which may explain why I am writing my a-z reflection an hour before it is due.  I have a few ideas for themes for next year, but I think I'll limit myself to just 1 next year.