This Darnell Uhland shot cut the deficit from 13-0 to 13-1.

Boxscore:
Team         1  2  3  4  5  6  7   R   H
A.Dreams     4  7  2  1  8  0  0  22  27
G.Monsters   0  0  3  1  0  4  0   8  11

A.Dreams     AB  R  H BI 2B HR SO BB  |   IP  H  R  SO  BB  W  L
Montgomery    7  3  4  1  0  1  0  0  |  1.0  0  0   0   0  1  0
Evans         7  4  4  3  1  2  0  0  |  1.0  1  0   2   0  0  0
Stuempfig     7  4  5  5  0  2  1  0  |  1.0  6  3   2   0  0  0
TCreighton    7  4  3  2  0  1  0  0  |  1.0  1  1   1   0  0  0
Carmichael    7  2  3  1  1  1  1  0  |  1.0  0  0   1   0  0  0
JEberhardt    7  4  6 10  0  4  0  0  |  1.0  3  4   1   2  0  0
Gosling       6  1  2  0  1  0  1  0  |  1.0  0  0   2   0  0  0
Totals       48 22 27 22  3 11  3  0  |  7.0 11  8   9   2  1  0
G.Monsters   AB  R  H BI 2B HR SO BB  |   IP  H  R  SO  BB  W  L
Uhland        5  1  2  1  0  1  0  0  |  1.0  4  4   0   0  0  1
Voth          4  1  1  1  0  1  1  1  |  1.0  8  7   0   0  0  0
Morrison      4  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  |  1.0  2  2   0   0  0  0
JCreighton    5  3  3  2  0  2  1  0  |  1.0  3  1   1   0  0  0
Christensen   5  1  2  1  0  0  2  0  |  1.0 10  8   1   0  0  0
Kendall       5  0  2  0  0  0  2  0  |  1.0  0  0   0   0  0  0
AEberhardt    4  1  1  3  0  1  3  0  |  1.0  0  0   1   0  0  0
Totals       32  8 11  8  0  5  9  2  |  7.0 27 22   3   0  0  1

Carmichael knows what Vassar would do!

Really? Dean Evans, MVP? Good thing Vassar wasn't there!

Boxscore:
Team         1  2  3  4  5  6  7   R   H
B.Warriors   2  0  4  0  1  2  2  11  14
W.Powers     0  4  3  0  0  0  1   8  11

B.Warriors   AB  R  H BI 2B HR SO BB  |   IP  H  R  SO  BB  W  L
TCreighton    7  3  5  4  0  3  0  0  |  2.0  3  1   2   0  0  0
Voth          6  0  1  0  0  0  2  1  |  1.0  2  4   0   2  0  0
Kendall       6  2  1  1  0  1  0  1  |  1.0  3  3   0   0  0  0
Stuempfig     6  2  2  3  0  2  2  0  |  1.0  1  0   1   0  0  0
JCreighton    4  2  3  2  0  2  0  2  |  1.0  0  0   0   0  0  0
Carmichael    6  2  2  1  1  1  0  0  |  1.0  2  0   0   0  1  0
Totals       35 11 14 11  1  9  4  4  |  7.0 11  8   3   2  1  0
W.Powers     AB  R  H BI 2B HR SO BB  |   IP  H  R  SO  BB  W  L
Uhland        6  2  4  1  1  1  0  0  |  2.0  4  4   1   2  0  0
Evans         6  2  4  3  0  1  0  0  |  1.0  0  0   1   0  0  0
Christensen   6  2  3  4  0  2  1  0  |  1.0  5  4   1   0  0  0
Montgomery    5  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  |  1.0  1  0   0   0  0  0
Gosling       4  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  |  1.0  1  1   1   2  0  0
Morrison      4  1  0  0  0  0  2  1  |  1.0  3  2   0   0  0  1
Totals       31  8 11  8  1  4  3  2  |  7.0 14 11   4   4  0  1

Once a year we get together. To ignite that spark of recognition that we did, in fact, have the greatest league in the history of the universe. That's not a knock on you and your sorry league; it's just that the truth can sometimes hurt.

We also get together once a year to remind ourselves why we never held our league's seasons during the miserable winter months you can find all too easily in Chico. For this day we expect a 68% chance of downpour and a mere 8% chance the temperature will climb above 50 degrees. But those who truly love Santa, and even more love Swingin' for Santa, find, once a year, rain or shine, a respite from their daily shit life and an athletic haven. A fountain of youth, if you will. If only for a few hours.

Even if they're now terrible; even if they can no longer catch up to Casey Sylvester's mysteriously still-filthy offspeed stuff; even if hitting a homerun now seems to require a Carmichael-ian blast they probably don't have in them anymore, at least they can remember that they once COULD. They could hit that homerun, they could get that bat on Casey's stuff, and they could once round the bases without resulting chest pain.

And afterward they can all sit at a table and eat a large burrito really fast. While Clint Wattenberg washes his down and makes fun of them. Unless he's not there. In which case they all mock Commish Creighton as he suffers through his very slowly.

1/15/10

• -After a long time spent telling brother Terry he was working on the videos slowly but surely when really he was watching season 1 of Who's The Boss, Joe Creighton has finally got a writeup and accompanying video collection for the 5th Annual Clint Wattenberg Invitational. Go battle insomnia by either clicking the "Clint Wattenberg Invite" or "Videos" header graphics down below.

1/3/10

• -The full recap of the Swingin' For Santa 2009 games are up! As are some fabulous pics of the action courtesy Terry Creighton! The sortable stats are also updated, both for 2009 and the totals. CW Invite recap in the works, video of everything on the way!

12/27/09

• -The SFS event was a rousing success! Two high-octane 7-inning games were played (scores of 22-8 and 11-8) in a complete reversal of 2006's complete absense of hitting. Aside from a couple exceptions (Dean Evans, surprisingly enough, being one), most players' lack of season-ready arm strength was apparent as pitches looked like Homerun Derby offerings. There were 146 ABs on the day...and only 19 Ks.
• -The action only continued in the 5th Annual CW Invitational as the top 5 finishers all finished within 42 seconds of one another. In the end, the upset of the year was Mark Montgomery (7:13), the very man who provided the "Tips From The Amateurs" found below, sneaking by Nate Stuempfig (7:15) in the final seconds as Nate accidentally left a bite on his plate. The great people at Tacos De were enthused to hear of the event and made the burritos extra gigantic as well as offered to post a framed picture of the eventual winner. We're gonna call their bluff.
  
  Stats and videos and more to come...eventually.

12/21/09

• -Another interview! This one also focuses more on the league in general, but they link to this site, so we'll allow it! The National Wiffle Ball Association, the site that ranks Darnell Uhland the 3rd-greatest African American wiffleballer of all time (travesty!) spoke with Commish Creighton about the golden days & just where Skyla is.

12/19/09

• -Stats are now sortable! Welcome to a Saturday in the life of Joe Creighton!

12/18/09

• -Joe Creighton was interviewed by Shaun Breen of majorleaguewiffleball.com about the old league and our upcoming SFS gameday! I didn't get an official number, but I believe there to be roughly 57 links to this site in that interview. Good work, Commish! And thanks Shaun!
• -Firefox bug fixed (I think).

12/15/09

• This little page is launched. Has not been tested on macs (fingers crossed). Tested on Win IE, FF, and Chrome. Runs smoothest in Chrome, and only bug we've found is the CW History section does not seem to paginate in Firefox for whatever reason.

12/15/09

• ------------>
  Use our Twitter feed on the right there to stay up to date on any news that's fit to tweet about, and to follow along on game day with Terry Creighton!

Let's not kid ourselves...we only get together and play so Joe Creighton can go home and fiddle around with the calculator while the numbers accumulate. To prove this, he added a number of new sabermetric stats, including wOBA, wRAA, Runs Created, and FIP for a bunch of guys who have played at most six games. His loss is your gain!

Batting:      
Totals
    
2009
    
2006
    
2005
        Pitching:    
Totals
    
2009
    
2006
    
2005

Mouseover column headers to expand stat title, click column headers to sort.

For years, when the league was active and alive, we played what we called "Winterball". And we'd try to make sure to schedule one close to Christmas day, weather/participation permitting. The league disbanded in 2003 though, and it felt disingenuous to refer to it as "Winterball". Also, boring. So we dubbed it "Swingin' For Santa" and amped up the merriment to 11.

2005

Clint Wattenberg and Joe Creighton were the life of the offense...and the party!

It was as beautiful a day as one could hope for as we got together a couple days before the 25th @TheSac. Everyone in the league seemed to have put on about 20 lbs, with the exceptions of an emaciated Joe Creighton, who had just run the Seattle Marathon, and Casey Sylvester, who has to take steroids just to maintain his barely-triple digit weight. As for the games, brothers from a different mother Joe Creighton & Clint Wattenberg combined for a large chunk of the offense, together going 10-21 with 7 of the 13 total extra base hits on the day and 10 of the 20 RBIs. For the duration of the two games, we had two 10ish year old girls running around the perimeter of the field (audible in many of our video clips from the day) making noise and begging Nate Stuempfig to flex his biceps for them. Of course the 'roid monster obliged.

League gift was a custom-made DVD of our highlight video collection that spanned from 1998 to 2005. The DVD probably no longer works on most DVD players, unfortunately, and has a street value of $0.12.

2006

The dudes brought their appetite but forgot their batting skills at the 2006 SFS festivities, as the first game on the slate was a 10 inning (league record), 1-0 snoozer which saw the lone run score on a friggin' bases loaded double play.

Casey Sylvester is still virtually unhittable.

After Game 1, the Creighton Bros unleased the newly-launched Wiffleball2k Xclusively Xtreme! soda brand on the world, featuring five rancid flavors modeled after the five original teams. Consensus said the Horsemen Cream Soda blend was the least offensive, while even Jeff Morrison himself couldn't muster up any positive words for the Wiffolution 51 Lemon-Lime blend. It has been warned to players who may still possess their bottle(s) that under no circumstances should they sample the drink today and if they do, neither Terry nor Joe are liable in any way to whatever occurs.

Though the taste was uniformly bad, there may have been something in the sodas that enhanced eye sight, reflexes, and strength (HGH? Cialis?), because in Game 2, the bats came alive. Unfortuantely all fans had scurried home. The team that would have been unfairly favored against even an in-their-prime In The Box team--Scott Carmichael, Joe Creighton, Dave Cain, and Casey Sylvester--thrashed their opponents with 6 homeruns and an 11-1 beating. Performance enhancers were further hypothesized when Joe Creighton was rounding the bases after his 2nd homerun, barking out loud about his "4 hour erection".

Relive the glory of our previous winter outings where skill is obviously no longer a requirement...or failing that, watch us giggle at the thought of having a wireless microphone to play with.

2006 Game Highlights

Misc. Mic'd Action

Eric Interview

Darnell's Mic'd

Morrison Mic'd Up

Joe Interview

Our good friend Dr. Rapp is back! For our Swingin' For Santa festivities, he's supplied us with the all-important betting lines on various events that may or may not transpire. Reference these numbers before placing your bets on game day! Also be sure to check further down the page to find his odds on the 5th Annual Clint Wattenberg Invitational!

Montgomery Shocks Nation, Annoys Stuempfig

It was another Full House at the latest iteration of the CW Invite.

Mark Montgomery defied the odds and barely came in under Nate Stuempfig at the 5th Annual Clint Wattenberg Invitational, finishing just as Nate realized he had left one last bite on his plate. The times were slow for everyone not named Mark, and reached via text msg shortly after the event, Mister Wattenberg himself seemed none too impressed.

The subplots were wide-ranging at the 5th Annual CW Invite, and aside from those poor souls who picked up the event's first ever "DNF", it lived up to its expectations. We had two rookies (Jeff Morrison & Scott Carmichael). We had the much-hyped "Who's Worse?" competition between Joe Creighton and Nate Ogden, a rematch from CW2 that only two people cared about.

But surely most interestingly, with the two men easily ranked #1 and #2 all-time (Clint Wattenberg and Pat Plummer, how you rank them is up to you, the point is they're both far ahead of #3) absent from the competition, it was opened up to the layperson, and we had a stacked card of voracious appetites hoping to cash in on their improved odds at victory. Nate Stuempfig finished 3rd at CW3, Eric Christensen had a 3rd finish (CW2) and a runner-up finish (CW3) to his credit, Terry Creighton was 3rd at CW4. A much-improved Dean Evans signed up (2:32 improvement from CW3 to CW4). All four would be at the table, this time not figuring they would have to settle for at best 3rd place. They could win it all.

The bite Nate Stuempfig left on his plate was his downfall.

After the dust settled, it was actually none of those four men who first swallowed that last bite. Nor was a surprise rookie. It was the amateur, the quiet, forgotten one, who penned for this very site the tips every competitor should employ to ensure a finish in "the middle of the pack." Mark Montgomery slipped by a weary and broken down Nate Stuempfig in the final seconds, taking the title in 7:13 as Nate, who figuratively slipped and fell right before the finish line, got up and crossed two seconds later in 7:15. Terry Creighton, Eric Christensen, and Darnell Uhland (respectively) all came in shortly thereafter as we had our closest race in the history of the competition.

The times appeared slow, but they were slow across the board. This was primarily thanks to the three helpful souls who went and ordered/bought the burritos. These three alerted Tacos De to just what all these burritos were for and in return, the excited Tacos De staff built the burritos even larger than their normal "gargantuan" proportions. They also advised us to have the next competition at their establishment, and to feel free to send along a framed photo of the eventual winner to hang on their walls. Somewhere in Ithaca, Clint Wattenberg bellowed with jealousy.

As a result, everyone's time was slower (except for Mark's, unbelievably) and we had our first ever "Did Not Finish" participants in Mickey Kendall, who picked at his rice & beans the way a child might pick at his brussel sprouts, and Jeff Morrison, who started with a fork and knife and didn't even make it halfway through. Jeff was such an unintimidating presense that the Commish broke the rules and allowed him to go with the veggie burrito. The three who went to fetch the burritos claimed Jeff's had about "7 weeks" worth of vegetables inside the tortilla and they did not envy the task he had before him.

Name     Sex  Time
Mark      M   7:13
NateS     M   7:15
Terry     M   7:33
Eric      M   7:51
Darnell   M   8:56
Dean      M  10:08
Joe       M  14:08
NateO     M  18:08
Scott     M  19:49
Mickey    M    DNF
JeffM     M    DNF

Finally, in the "Who's Worse?" competition, Joe Creighton manhandled the overmatched Mormon kid, who paid two of his (Mormon) sisters to show up and watch for ineffectual inspiration. The monstrocity that was the day's burritos was his downfall as his larger-than-before-yet-still-severely-underdeveloped build just could not handle the increased size of the burritos. Still, he was faster than our other rookie, Scott Carmichael, who kept a good pace for half of the race, fell apart late, and had to muscle up and sprint across the finish line in order to simply come in below 20 minutes. As he said afterward though, "at least I didn't DNF like those other guys." Indeed.

********

Goals for next time:

Joe Creighton's girlfriend berated and mocked him for not thinking of implementing it at this year's festivities, so he's definitely going to try and do it next time if Clint Wattenberg cannot make it out, and that is have Clint present via Google video or some such avenue so that Clint can inaugurate and inspire during his namesake event and at least watch and berate the competitors who are all 50% slower than he is. As such, all we could do at the most recent competition was announce around the 3:00 mark that "Clint just finished!!" and then laugh as no one was even close to being halfway finished. Although with hindsight, most guessed Clint and Pat would actually have finished in the 4:00-5:00 range considering the massive size of this year's burritos. Yes Clint, really.

Prospective Clint Wattenberg Invitational Participant,

Friends, eating a huge burrito really fast is painful. It's really unbecoming to the opposite sex and only appeals to the ugly American inside of all most of us. The amount of calories inside these little footballs could feed a small child, or Dean Evans, for a week. Not only is it overkill, and not only will it burn coming out your ass the next day, but why shovel it into our mouths as quickly as possible? Fame? Surely no one is that deluded. Money? This is the 5th one and we still make you pay for your own burrito, and there's never been any prize money, so that's out. No, it must be the simple chance to, maybe not win, but beat SOMEBODY at something. Perhaps somebody who usually beats you in all other aspects of life. Somebody smarter than you, or better looking. In years past, most at the table had no shot at winning, but they were more or less guaranteed to beat me (or the Mormon kid), and let's face it, that makes people feel good. They'll give up a couple dingers to me during Swingin' For Santa, watch in disbelief as my fastball does things previously thought impossible with a Cosom Ball, and watch me snag their deep fly out of the sky. But at least they can get in their car at the end of the day and say "Well, I did eat that burrito faster than him." And that's worth something.

This year though, for the first time ever, it's finally about more than that. For the first time, there will be no Clint Wattenberg, no Pat Plummer. The field is wide open, a free-for-all of sorts. Now, more than ever, YOU have a shot to win. Not just beat me, or that anorexic-looking kid in the corner, holding the Book of Mormon, not getting laid, but win the whole damn thing.

So come. Sit down. Give me $8 and let's get ugly. First one to finish wins. Anyone who beats me still has dignity, and a story for their grandkids*.

Very Truly Yours,

Joe Creighton

*Unless you're sterile, in which case you can always adopt, but then those are kinda like fake grandkids.

We tolerate playing through those two wiffleball games earlier in the day because we know that true glory awaits us in the Creighton dining room afterward. Hopefully it doesn't take a true Chico native to appreciate our desire--no, our NEED--to make sure, above all else, that the video camera is running when the clock strikes midnight and we dive face-first into Mexican heaven. You can't put a price on bandwidth this wonderful.

Introductions	Flurry of finishers	Back of the pack
Scott + Award	Darnell interview	Women + Dean(?)
	Mark/Nate/Scott

Introductions

Action underway

Post fight interviews

Introductions	Clint wins	Eric takes undercard
Road Warriors finish in style!	The back of the pack	Clint interview
Road Warriors/Mark Montgomery interview	First ever woman	Wrap up

Introductions

Main Event

Undercard

Come on already!

Post interviews

Introductions

They're off!

Post-match Ceremonies

Dr. Rapp here...

It's been awhile since I've studied the tape on how able these athletes are at eating burritos, but once I got cracking, everything started to come back. Without the previous champions, Pat Plummer and Clint Wattenberg, it's an open invitation for anybody to take the title. I've always been exceptionally impressed with Eric Christensen's willingness to embarrass himself for the sake of victory, so I like him to take the title this year. Other hopefuls are Nate Stuempfig, who was impressive in the CW Invite #3. He only lost to Eric by 30 seconds that time, so look for him to fight for that title. Matt Plummer is another strong contender since he's a blood relative of Pat Plummer, but odds of him showing up are not good. Terry Creighton, who took 3rd in CW Invite #4, has had good days and bad days. Which guy are we going to see? Who knows.

As for the bottom of the list. I seriously have more faith in Clint Wattenberg paying $1000 to fly to Chico just for the CW Invite than Joe Creighton taking the title. Another story is Nate Ogden, who lost to Joe Creighton in CW Invite #2. Word is that he has been practicing hard these past couple years! Look for a much better performance out of him. Maybe...3rd to last!

Bold = game experience