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NORTH SUBURBAN
YOUTH BASEBALL ASSOCIATION
ANNOUNCEMENTS You can print out this
page by selecting the "print" option on your web browser. As the
season progresses, this page will get quite long, so you may want to
cut-n-paste announcements of interest into your word processor and print
them out that way. Announcements are posted most recent first. Email links on this page are
clickable. I encourage league commissioners and team managers to submit
announcements for this page: email the scorekeeper. |
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FROM:
The Scorekeeper (Tom Kendall Your opinions and suggestions are very valuable to us. Improvements we've made this season have come from many sources: commissioners, board members, managers and coaches. We want to make the 2003 NSYBA season even better and more fun for all concerned. I've posted survey forms on the website. Click here to access that web page. You can also get to it from the home page by clicking on the Season Wrapup: We Want Your Opinions option. You can email the form or print it and fill it out, then mail it to me. The more you tell us about your season and give us suggestions for the future, the better the NSYBA will become. Thank you very much! |
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The Commissioner (Joe Hasman) The 2002 NSYBA regular season American League Champions are the Edgebrook-Sauganash Giants. The 2002 NSYBA regular season National League Champions are the Edgebrook-Sauganash Cubs. In recognition of their accomplishments, the players of both teams will receive trophies. Mike Pagano, Edgebrook-Sauganash Commissioner, is handling the arrangements and will contact the managers of the Giants and the Cubs when the trophies are available. As the Commissioner of the NSYBA, I congratulate these two teams for their outstanding play and teamwork. Great job, Giants and Cubs! |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) . . . is now complete, with an explanation of how our double-elimination tournament works, final regular season seedings, the championship season schedule and game reports. I will update the schedule as promptly as possible, within a half hour of knowing game results if at all feasible. I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at the game reports page. I think it's a usable format, but if anyone has suggestions for improving it, I'd like to hear them. |
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FROM:
The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) I posted the final regular season standings, the regular season seedings, and the playoff round one schedules on Tuesday night by 10:40 PM. I also emailed all the managers with links to the relevant pages on this website. Please, folks, the double-elimination tournament is a bit squeezed, time-wise, and the Weather Gods threaten frequent rain, so constantly consult the website. Especially, encourage your players and parents to do the same. I'll make every effort to email affected managers, but on occasion I do drop the ball. Updating the website is my first priority, since the website is the means by which I can disseminate information as quickly as possible to the greatest number of people. Thanks! |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) I've started building the part of the website that explains and reports on the NSYBA Championship season. Parts of it are still under construction. But the explanation of how a double-elimination tournament works is available. If your players or parents have questions as to how it works, and if you or anyone want a printout of the matrix we'll be using, there are links on that web page. Click here to see the explanation page. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) I've altered the format of everyone's Schedule page. It's now three columns instead of five columns across. The new format is much easier for me to update. It should be just as useful to you as the old format. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) The website now has one team page, for the Skokie Indians Bulldogs. Click here to view it. It's probably too late in the season for any of you to start from scratch on a team page, but bear it in mind for the 2003 season. It can be an excellent builder of team solidarity and spirit. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) The regular season ends on Tuesday, June 18. Managers, please schedule those makeup games as soon as possible. If you and the opposing manager are having trouble finding a date or diamond, please email me. I'll be glad to help you find a date and diamond. Most of the teams are more or less on schedule, having played ten to twelve games. However, there is one team that's only played eight and another that's only played seven. Considering the regular season consists of 16 games, and that as of today there are only 12 days left before playoffs begin, those two teams will really have to scramble to play eight and nine games respectively. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) The website now shows standings by league. Click here to see that web page. You can get to this page from the home page by clicking on the Scores and Game Statistics option, then clicking on View or print out standings page. This page is one time-consuming bear to update, so I'll only update it every few days until we get closer to the end of the season. Starting on Monday, June 10th, I'll make every effort to update it daily. Please note that there is a considerable lag-time, so please, winning managers, get those game results to me as quickly as possible! |
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FROM:
The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Once again, I remind everyone -- managers, coaches, players and parents -- that this website can be a wonderful enhancement for everyone's NSYBA baseball experience. I have disseminated this information before in pre-season handouts to managers and coaches, in numerous emails and in telephone conversations. However, here it is again. Rather than have it be simply a dustbin of game statistics, I've engineered two features into this website that make it easy for managers, coaches, players and parents to tell the rest of the association about their games and themselves. GAME HIGHLIGHTS: On their game statistics pages, people can report game highlights. In particular, this is a good place to mention events of the game, as well as who pitched well, who hit well, who made an astonishing play, and so on. If the manager gives players game balls, this is where you'd mention the recipient(s). Click here to see the statistics page of a manager who is doing a great job using this website resource. As with all the eighteen teams in the NSYBA, most of his players have access to the internet. It's quite a thrill for them to see their names and feats in the game highlights. Please note that, whenever someone has given me game highlights, the same game highlights appear on the statistics page of the opposing team. And whenever I have reports from both sides, I've cross-referenced them on the statistics pages. THE TEAM PAGE: I designed this website to accommodate a team page for each team. Click here for a typical statistics page, then look at the bottom left. You'll see a link which says "View Team Page." Every one of the team pages at this point is "under construction," meaning that no team has sent me material to put on their team page. Appropriate material would include brief player biographies, brief manager and coach biographies, and pictures of games, good action shots and maybe a team photo. The team page is also a good place to thank your sponsor for his generous support. There are some things which I don't think are appropriate for the team page, though. This is a public, though mighty obscure, website, so individual player photographs and identification of players by their full names might invite unwanted attention. Also, I will not deal with updating individual player stats: doing so is simply too time-consuming for me. (I'm not being paid for this effort, and I'm hosting this website at no charge to the NSYBA, but enough is enough!) SUBMISSIONS: I'll accept game highlights and information for team pages in any written form that's convenient for you. I vastly prefer email, since then I can quickly and accurately cut-and-paste into this website. But if scribbling on the backs of used envelopes is your thing, that's fine, too. The only way in which I will not accept submissions is via dictation over the telephone. Not only is this time-consuming, but the potential for errors and misunderstandings is enormous. You can send me photographs, team logos, or any other graphic material for your team page in any way that's convenient for you. I'll scan photos and artwork, and graphically edit and convert images to internet-acceptable format. I prefer to get images as attachments to emails. If you send me actual photographs or art work, please enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope. I also take no responsibility for unreturned photographs or art work or items lost in the mail. You don't need to know anything about HTML coding to set up a team page! I'll do all that. All you need to give me is the written material and artwork. By the way, for both game highlights and team pages, I reserve the right to edit submissions for clarity, conciseness and editorial consistency. |
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FROM:
The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Please, managers, give me complete game data in a timely manner! Especially, I need last names of pitchers. First names are not appropriate: I can't check to see if they're rostered players. Also if you have two players with the same last name, I also need the first initial. A lot of you have pairs of brothers who pitch, and opposing managers are not going to know which "Carter" pitched ("Jimmy" or "Billy") or even that there are two Carters on your team. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) The playoffs this year, by vote of the board, will be a double-elimination tournament between the sixteen best teams in this eighteen-team association. "Double elimination" means that a team has to lose twice before being eliminated. Needless to say, this is much more complicated than a simple single-elimination tournament, such as we've had in the past. Below are the game dates we've reserved. In formulating this playoff schedule, we will make a good-faith effort to ensure that the higher seeded team plays on its home diamond. But, no promises on this. Also, by vote of the board, it was determined that the World Series would be played, if possible, on a neutral diamond. In a double-elimination tournament, the winner of the losers' bracket and the winner of the winners' bracket meet to determine the championship. The winner of the losers' bracket has to beat the winner of the winners' bracket twice to secure the championship, while the winner of the winners' bracket only has to win once. Here is the key to abbreviations in the table: PO
R1: playoffs round one Here is the table of games: Central Park West Wed., June 19 5:30 PM alternate I will email commissioners with their league's schedules so they can resolve any conflicts with the North Shore Baseball League's traveling-team schedules. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) MANAGERS: The NSYBA local rules do require that game cards be filled out completely by the winning manager and sent to the scorekeeper on a timely basis. Please see Local Rules 10A and 10B. Here's the easiest way I've found to fill out the game card. 1. BEFORE THE GAME: The home team manager or (preferably) his/her scorekeeper fills out the "date - time - field," "home team" and "visiting team" lines. Then get the plate and bases umpires to sign the card. If one or both aren't present, then write "none" on the appropriate line. If one or the other shows up during the game, be sure to get them to sign the game card. 2. DURING THE GAME: The home team scorekeeper keeps track of pitchers used and innings pitched by BOTH teams. 3. AFTER THE GAME: The home team scorekeeper gets both managers to sign the game card. If the visiting team has won, present the game card to the visiting team manager for reporting to the NSYBA scorekeeper and mailing. It doesn't hurt if both teams' scorekeepers start game cards. If one has to be discarded, it's no big deal. Before the season started, the NSYBA distributed 25 game cards to each manager. Each team plays only 16 games during the regular season. And we have plenty more blank game cards: just ask if you need them. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Shant Hagopian, of the Morton Grove Cardinals, pointed out to me that the Morton Grove Baseball Association has a website. So, his and Paul Berg's (Morton Grove White Sox) schedule and stats pages now have links to that website. If your league has a website, please email me the address and I'll be glad to include links to it as I've done for the Morton Grove Baseball Association. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) MANAGERS REPORTING GAME DATA: If you're reporting by email, please use the game reporting form supplied on the relevant web page! Click here [link disabled] to see the form. Simply copy this form, click on the "Email scores" link lower down on the page, paste it into your email program and fill it out. It's a lot quicker and easier for you to copy-n-paste this form than to invent your own. Also, the highly variable nature of email formatting (or lack thereof) means that often I get totally garbled results. Since I don't have rosters yet from many of you, I have no idea who pitches for what team. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) On weekdays, I will update the website with scores, etc., around 2:00 PM and then again late at night. For the next two weeks, through Sunday, May 19th, I will update the website on weekends whenever I can (usually only late on Sunday night). After that, I will be able to update the website at least once per day on the weekends. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) It turns out that the diamonds at Prosel actually bear numbers. The lighted diamond bears the number "3," while the unlighted diamond bears the number "2." All games starting at 7:30 PM or later will be played on diamond 3. All games that start before 7:30 PM will be played on diamond 2. I've renumbered all the schedules and the map page. "Anything worth doing is worth doing twice." Sigh. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) There are two pony league sized diamonds at Prosel Park in Lincolnwood. One has lights for night games and the other doesn't. The second diamond is immediately adjacent to the first. All games that start at 7:30 PM or later will be played at the lighted diamond, which will be labelled "Prosel 1" on the revised schedules. All games that start before 7:30 PM will be played on the unlighted diamond. The revised schedules will show "Prosel 2" for this diamond. For those of you who check and/or print out the map to Prosel, I'll make a note of the existence of the two diamonds on that web page. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Please, every manager, report the game statistics to me as quickly as you can! I want to update the stats pages on this website no later than 2:00 PM on the day following the game date! You have three options for reporting game stats: email, fax or phone call. See the "Reporting Options" page for instructions. And please give me complete statistics. By the Local Rules you or your league representative approved, I need team names, scores, and pitchers plus innings pitched for both teams. When you report the game stats, it would also be good if you give me brief highlights of the game. Click on this link, 04/29 S-Y Diamondbacks at S-Y White Sox, for an example. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Thanks to scheduling conflicts, two games have been moved from Dee Park to other diamonds and locations. I've changed the three website schedules affected. The teams affected are the Skokie Youth Cardinals, the Skokie Youth White Sox and the Edgebrook-Sauganash Diamondbacks. This website has proven to be a profoundly useful tool and timesaver for administering NSYBA. But it only works well if EVERYONE checks it quite often for schedule changes. Especially, given rainouts, etc., scheduling changes may occur daily. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Whenever you change a game date and/or the diamond at which a game will be played, please email me at scores@nsyba.org as soon as you can. Then I can change the affected schedules on the website. I've done this already: as a for instance, check out the Skokie Youth Braves schedule. After each change, at the top in little type I note the date I made the change and precisely what got changed. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Laramie, it turns out, is not available on Saturday until after 6:30 PM during most of our season. This scheduling glitch has affected at least one game played by six different teams. In addition the 12:30 PM June 1st game at Central Park West was moved to Laramie at 7:30 PM. The team schedules have been revised. Here is the revised listing for home games at Laramie: SKOKIE YOUTH: Laramie Sat., April 27
7:30 PM |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) For league commissioners, here are the home game assignments, sorted into date order: MORTON GROVE: Prairie View Sun., April 28 5:00 PM |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) For league commissioners, here are the home game assignments, sorted into date order: SKOKIE YOUTH: Laramie Sat., April 27 5:30 PM |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) For league commissioners, here are the home game assignments, sorted into date order: EDGEBROOK-SAUGANASH: Wildwood Sat., April 27 1:00 PM |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) For league commissioners, here are the home game assignments, sorted into date order: SKOKIE INDIANS: Central Park Sat., April 27 12:30 PM |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) For league commissioners, here are the home game assignments, sorted into date order: GOLF-MAINE: Dee Park Sat., April 27
10:00 AM |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) For league commissioners, here are the home game assignments, sorted into date order: LINCOLNWOOD: Prosel Sat., May 11 7:30 PM |
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The Commissioner (Joe Hasman) This is your reminder that this coming Saturday, April 20, 2002, from 11:00 a.m. to approximately 12:15 p.m., there is a mandatory meeting of all managers of the North Suburban Youth Baseball Association in the Board Room of the Weber Center in Skokie. At least one representative from each of the Pony League Teams must be present at this meeting. At this meeting, the official game balls will be distributed, along with a set of the 2002 Major League Rules of Baseball. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) The revised schedules (all marked "revised 04/15") are now on the website. Please double-check them soon! If you're a manager or coach and want your contact information listed on your team's schedule page, please email me with your contact information. I'll include phone number (and email, if you want it listed). Opinion
seems to be divided as to whether we list managers' and coaches' contact
information on the team schedule pages on this website. So, we've left the decision up to you. If you want contact information on the page: fine. If you don't, it's all just the same. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Given the brevity of the season and unavailability of some diamonds, there is a considerable number of games to be played at neutral diamonds. Once the schedules finally stabilize and are posted here in their final form, (probably about April 16th), I'll make a compendium of games to be played at neutral diamonds and post them on this announcements web page. Then you commissioners can arrange with your park districts to have the diamonds prepared for play on those "neutral diamond" dates. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Amazingly, there have been some game date changes. Also, I and other people have found and corrected errors in my original emailed schedules. From here on out, the schedules posted on this website will constitute the Sole and Unvarnished Truth. So please regard as out-of-date any schedules you've received from me via email. You'll note that all schedules bear the notation "PRELIMINARY" followed by a date. The date represents the latest posting, and schedules bearing the latest date supercede those bearing earlier dates. Probably around April 16th, I'll declare the schedule-wrangling to be over and mark all schedules as final. (Have to stop sometime, right?) |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) I've now made the individual team schedules pages compatible with the AOL web browser. I hope. (Rows wouldn't align properly when printing out.) If you had problems with rows not lining up properly, try printing them out again. If the rows still don't line up correctly, please email me. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) I've now uploaded the regular season schedules to this website. From the home page, select Schedules, then select your team's schedule. I still don't have team nicknames and/or manager names for Paul Berg's Morton Grove team, the four Skokie Youth teams, the Lincolnwood team or the Golf-Maine team. Commissioners and managers: please get this information to me as soon as possible! I'll update the schedules with team names, etc., after I receive all the information from every team involved. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) NSYBA Opening Days are Saturday, April 27th, and Sunday, April 28th. Because we have two leagues of nine teams each, one team from each league plays an interleague game on Opening Day. The game is Edgebrook-Sauganash 9 (American League) at Edgebrook-Sauganash 12 Phillies (National League). Their game date is Sunday, April 28th, at Wildwood, at 3:00PM. Each of these teams also plays its full 16-game regular season within its league. At this point, I don't know if this game will count in the standings. Sadly, there aren't enough slots to accommodate full interleague play and a season of 17 games per team. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) I'll post the schedules by Tuesday, April 9th. When they're posted you can select your team's schedule from the Schedules option on the home page. Some notes: 1. We don't have all the teams' names yet, so some teams are still identified only by codes. Here are the team codes (with team names and managers in square brackets where I know them): AMERICAN LEAGUE: Morton
Grove 1 [Cardinals - Shant Hagopian] NATIONAL LEAGUE: Edgebrook-Sauganash
10 [] League Commissioners need to assign team nicknames to team codes and let me know by email as soon as possible. I need team code, team nickname and manager. I'd like full rosters, especially so I can double-check spelling of pitchers' names, as soon as possible too. Players' names (except last names of pitchers) and contact information will not be published on this website. 2. The schedules are all about equally good or equally bad, depending on your perspective. I faced some remarkable constraints when doing the schedules. It's a short season for sixteen games per team. There is one Orthodox Jewish team from Skokie Youth which can't play on the Sabbath (Friday and Saturday). Some diamonds are not available for quite a few days out of the week. One league, Edgebrook-Sauganash, has six teams, but they only have one diamond which is only available for about two-thirds of the days in our regular season. So they're playing a lot of games at neutral diamonds. Several managers had unavoidable conflicts with certain dates. These last I did my best to accommodate, but inevitably some of those conflicts remain. 3. Even if it's sunny, early in the season the temperature and wind can be bitterly cold when there's a lake breeze. So, very generally I have teams from close to Lake Michigan (i.e., Skokie Indians, Skokie Youth and Lincolnwood) playing a lot of away games on warmer diamonds (i.e., at Golf-Maine, Edgebrook-Sauganash and Morton Grove) early in the season. But there were a lot of exceptions to this rule. 4. Given how thin pitching is, I bent over backwards to avoid back-to-back games. There are only two teams in the National League and five teams in the American League that will have to play a single pair of back-to-back games, and most of those occur early in the season. Of course, rainouts will knock this schedule into a cocked hat and there will be more back-to-backs as the season actually progresses, but we'll just have to deal with those as they occur. 5. At this point, I will not change game DATES. The dates are graven in stone, as far as I'm concerned. (As the season progresses, the dates will erode due to rainouts, but such changes are up to the Weather Gods, not us mere mortals.) DIAMONDS can be changed in some circumstances, however. If a diamond gets occupied by something else (park districts have been known to goof up their schedules on occasion), please let me know: I may be able to assign you a different diamond. 6. League Commissioners are the final arbiters of attempted date changes. They should be aware that any date change will probably negatively impact at least four teams and that all four teams affected have to approve the change. My advice to League Commissioners is simple: don't even try to change dates. Have your managers assign assistant coaches to manage games where there are conflicts. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) At this point, the finalized Local Rules of Play are not yet posted here. Also, the Adobe Acrobat downloadable version is not current. (I simply put them on the website to test my coding and hyperlinks.) The final version of the Local Rules we'll actually play under will be posted on April 23rd or before. Joe Hasman, the Commissioner of NSYBA, has solicited final suggestions but won't be able to act on them until he gets back from vacation. |
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The scorekeeper (Tom Kendall) Welcome to the NSYBA website! Here you'll find contact information, rainout hotlines, maps and directions to ballparks, schedules and scores and pitchers used in games. You'll even find accounts and pictures for some games. We welcome submissions! Please email me for details on how to submit text and pictures. I've tested this website using several different popular web browsers, but if anyone has problems using the website, please email me. (There's one reported bug already which I can't fix: if you're running Norton Firewall, you may have to turn it off to see the correct visitor count on the home page.) Also, I'm always looking for suggestions to make the website more useful. This website will disappear sometime after October 1, 2002. If you want a copy of the website, the association will make them available after the end of the season on CD-ROM for $10.00 postpaid. The profits will go to the North Suburban Youth Baseball Association to help reduce the costs we charge your league to play in this association. At the end of the season I'll post an announcement about ordering the CD-ROM. |
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