APBA
CONVENTION 2004
June 25 - June 27
Las Vegas, Nevada
Twenty-three
floors above its Casino, the Stratosphere Hotel's Sierra Room
was the gathering place for about seventy-five die-hard APBA
Baseball fans (including some wives). The weekend-long event
began at approximately 5 PM Friday evening and concluded with
the Championship Trophy presentation to former APBA JOURNAL
Editor/Publisher Eric Naftaly (Davis, CA) around 1 PM Sunday.
The
long-anticipated event drew a mix of the "usual suspects," to
borrow from Claude Rains in the movie "Casablanca:" Nick Braccia
(Stamford, CT); Dom Provisiero (Centereach, NY); Roy Langhans
(Cockeysville, MD); John Cochrane (Alexandria, VA); Joe Krakowski
(Las Vegas, NV); Frank Welsh (Rosemont, PA) and Jim Sce (Burbank,
CA), just to name a few, and a large number of "Mid-Westerners",
"West-Coasters" and a few Canadians, who were attending an APBA
Convention for the first time.
The
activities began shortly after five with an opening address
by APBA President Marc Rinaldi followed by an informative presentation
by long-time APBA devotee Jack Kohn (El Dorado Hills, CA) (aka
The Cardfather) in which he revealed how his enjoyment of a
simple table baseball game had led not only to the acquisition
of many, many friendships over the years (something to which
everyone in the room could probably relate), but to some successful
APBA-related commercial ventures as well.
APBA's
Veryl Lincoln followed Jack to the podium and reviewed the Baseball
Tournament's rules with the crowd. Then came free time and the
FOOD!
APBA's
Las Vegas connection, Chris White, had arranged for pizza, wings,
steak sandwiches and sodas through a friend's restaurant, and
everything was delicious! APBA Baseball and a lot of "carbs;"
who could ask for anything more!
It
was Chris who had initially contacted the Company almost a year
ago about staging an APBA Convention in Las Vegas, and APBA
commends him for his fine efforts in bringing it to fruition,
then helping to make it a success.
Saturday
morning at 8:30, all sixty tournament participants (some bleery-eyed
from their Friday night in Las Vegas) were present, ready to
take their favorite teams to a Championship.
APBA's
Skeet Carr and Lincoln had spent late Friday night randomly
dividing the sixty players' names into eight divisions, the
winners of each to advance to the eight-team Championship Bracket.
Two
6-team and six 8-team divisions were created, and a round-robin
schedule was formulated so that all participants would play
ten divisional games. For those in the 8-team divisions, that
meant each team playing its first three opponents two games
and its last four opponents one game apiece.
It
was hoped by Rinaldi, Carr and Lincoln that the best-of-five
Quarterfinal Round could be completed by early Saturday evening
to allow everyone a night on the town, and so that the Semifinals
and Championship Round (also best-of-five) could be scheduled
for Sunday morning. All sixty players did a great job to make
that goal a reality: the last Quarterfinal Round concluded about
7:30 PM.
Results
of the Divisional play and the Championship Bracket
Congratulations
to Eric Naftaly on his victory, after being down two games to
one, and to every APBA Fan who attended for making APBA's Las
Vegas Convention 2004 a complete success!!! Thank you all! See
you next year in Lancaster, PA!!!
For
an attendee's perspective on the Convention, visit www.pengy.org
and click on the APBAstuff button.
View
pictures from the 2004 APBA Convention & Tournament in Las
Vegas, Nevada
