So what has occurred since last this page was updated? Let's see ... the Vermont state championships, the North/South All-Star games, the College World Series, basically the entire Vermont Lake Monsters' season, the Cannons' run to the regional tournament and even the Little League World Series New England Regional Tournament ... all since I last promised there'd be some news, and each of which reminded me I needed to hop back on and provide some updates. As an aside, congratulations to the guys on the team who played for the Cannons this summer and made their way to lovely Manchester, N.H.

Let's get right down to awards. Spencer was named to the All-Metro League first team, becoming the first Laker pitcher named to an all-conference team since Travis Clairmont '02 in 2002. (The nugget all those months ago that I wanted to throw in there about Spencer was that he set the school record for no-decisions - games in which he pitched but did not receive a win or a loss - as a sophomore, with 12 in 14 appearances while primarily being used as a reliever. As a junior, he set the school record for decisions, recording 10 in 11 games. Of course, this year he was utilized primarily in a starting role. Who had held the former record of nine decisions? Dave Prescott '76 in 1976 and Mike Battistini '82 in 1982. That's a ways back.) Additionally, Nick Barton and Brian McGary were each All-Metro League honorable mentions. Coach Perry was also selected to serve as a coach on the North team for the North-South Senior All-Star games in June, and he also sent along the team awards. The Leigh Mallory Teammate of the Year Award went to Brian McGary, Nick was the Laker Hustle Award winner, and Andrew Cootware was the Point Parade Winner - compiling the most points on the team despite being just a sophomore. I'd also be remiss if I didn't thank everyone in the program for choosing me as the recipient of the Scott Benoit Memorial Award. Having done so much research of the program, knowing what I've heard about Scott, and having been fortunate to earn the award in the past, I truly feel honored. I really enjoy continuing to run the Web site and remaining involved ever so slightly in the program, and I hope to continue on with it for 2010.

In the time since the season ended, I've worked on a couple things on the Web site, and one thing I have yet to do is to put the 2009 stats into an HTML document. For now, I think they're alright in STATCREW, but rest assured they'll end up in HTML at some point. With my position at Wheaton College being extended from 10 months to 12 months in July 2008, I was on contract for 12 straight months for the first time this past year, meaning I've been fully engrossed in my job all summer after being used to having a little time off. We're in the midst of launching a new Web site (shameless self-promotion alert: we'll soon be at http://athletics.wheatoncollege.edu, which as I write this has a lot of content but not the design we'll end up with) and have done such things as launching a Wheaton Lyons Facebook page. That got me to wondering how many former CHS ballplayers are floating around Facebook and, with 292 guys who have ever played varsity at CHS, how many we'd be able to round up with a Facebook page. As I finish this entry off, I know there must be some of you out there who are interested in stats and sports writing and the like, and I encourage any of you who indeed are interested that you track down your college's sports information director once you get to college. Those of us in the profession are always looking to get young people interested in the business of sports information, and at least to see if they might enjoy some of the aspects. Good luck to all with your fall sports, and good luck to Brian with his first year of college.

[Updated on 6/14 to reflect nuggets with final stats. I will also soon go more in depth on Spencer setting the school record for decisions in a season - a year after setting the school record for no-decisions. I'll also mention award winners, both All-Metro and for team awards.]

Here are some additional team nuggets:

• You guys were 11-5 in 2008 and 9-8 this spring. It's the first time since 1999 and 2000 that the program had back-to-back teams post records of .500 or better
• A school-record eight pitchers were used this year, eclipsing the mark of seven (recorded in 1976, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1988, 2001 and 2007)
• This season marked the first time since 1995 and 1996 that the Lakers yielded a single-digit run total in consecutive seasons
• You guys recorded an ERA under 4.00 for the third straight season, the first such time doing so since a four-year span between 1995 and 1998
• And the coup de grace: You guys had 24 sacrifice bunts in 17 games, decimating a school record. The previous program mark had been 14 in 17 games during the 1980 season. With 11 sacs last season, you guys had 35 over the past two seasons under Coach Perry, or 17.5 per year. In the program's first 32 seasons, the team's average was 5.1
• By dropping down four sac bunts at MMU on May 30, you single-handedly met or surpassed a season total of 15 prior Lakers teams. Chew on that for a second
• As an aside, you guys tied a school record with seven doubles against Missisquoi on May 5. The 1982 team hit seven while hosting Milton on May 6

I also want to throw out some tidbits of info about the individual players themselves, at least some of the noteworthy feats I was able to uncover:

• Three sophomores were regular starters, as each appeared on the infield (Andrew 1B, Zach 2B, Tommy SS). The last time CHS had three regular sophomores starting in the infield was 2005, when Lance Nichols was at first base, Sean Burns was at second base and Mickey Merola was at third
• Andrew became the first sophomore to lead the team in putouts since ... Nick Barton in 2008. But Nick was a catcher, not a first baseman. In fact, the only other sophomores to lead the team in putouts were Dusty Fregeau in 2001, Bryant Perry in 1991 and Dave Monty in 1984, and each was primarily a catcher, with none even appearing at first base. CHS's sophomore records for putouts and total chances were 128 and 148, respectively, both by Monty in 1984. Andrew broke the putouts mark with 130 this year and fell just short of the total chances standard, with 141
• Zach led the team in assists, becoming just the fourth sophomore to do so, joining Jason Carey (1999, SS), Shea Lamphere (1986, P/3B/SS) and Ray Halnon (1977, P/3B). And with 38 assists, Zach tied Lamphere's sophomore record
• In putting Andrew and Zach together, CHS had never had sophomores lead the team in both putouts and assists in the same season until this spring
• Spencer became just the third player in program history to lead the team in both hits (17) and wins (5), joining Doug Bergstein (1983) and Jamie Vetters (1979)
• The most amazing part of Spencer leading the team in hits is that he batted .067 with one hit as a sophomore. Thus, he improved his hit total by 16, very close to the greatest improvement by a regular from one year to the next in program history (17):
  • Justin Bissonnette was a regular in 1998 (8 hits) before missing the 1999 season due to injury and returning with 25 hits in 2000, his senior season
  • Sean Burns had 17 more hits in 2006 than he did in 2005
  • Galen Doud also had 17 more hits in 2008 than he did in 2007, but he only had 22 plate appearances in 2007. He sort of falls into a category with Tom Hergenrother, who had just one hit in 13 plate appearances in 1995 (despite appearing in every game) before going 20 hits better as a regular in the lineup in 1996, recording 21 knocks while batting .420 and being named Metro South Co-Player of the Year. Quite a turnaround
• Nick Barton had 14 stolen bases, the most since Mike Wasko swiped 15 bags in 2004. Since 1986, only five players have now stolen at least 14 bases
• I base the team's ERA leader on pitchers who pitched at least one inning per the team's games (so in 2009, only pitchers who threw at least 17 innings qualified). With that in mind, Matt Ravey became the first sophomore since Lance Nichols in 2005 to lead the team in ERA.

Just as an FYI over the next few days, the Web site (and Metro standings) likely won't have any updates, as I'll be in New Jersey at our annual regional sports information convention. But I'll be checking in with the Free Press and your coaches to see how you're doing in the playoffs - best of luck, beginning later today at South Burlington. (As I write this, it's almost 12:45 in the morning, and I need to get up at 5...) I hope to have some fun facts together to post this weekend, but already I can mention that you guys obviously continue to obliterate the old program record for sacrifices, and Coach Perry just got to 20 wins. Beyond that, with his next appearance, Spencer will tie the program record for pitching appearances. For a career. Now, granted, I know that he pitched on varsity as a freshman, but he only pitched in three games that year. Thus, he has pitched in 24 games over the last two seasons - out of a possible 32 games thus far. Anyhow, here's hoping that the next time I post to the site I'm talking about some additional historic accomplishments. Good luck, all.

I tend to write more on the site come the end of the season, and today I felt the need to write something regarding something rather historic you guys are experiencing. Not being able to string together many wins consecutively sometimes speaks to the difficulty of having a high school baseball team click on all cylinders for two straight weeks and to not only be competitive but fundamentally sound - if not dominant - in nearly all facets of the game (in particular pitching). It also requires a little bit of luck. Throw that all together and you guys have a five-game winning streak. It began against a team you're currently tied with in the Metro standings (Rice), and then it continued when you beat the two teams that currently occupy the final two spots in the league (St. Jay and North Country). But then you scored the first seven runs against a Mount Abe team now tied for first in the Metro, and it continued today against a Spaulding team that is tied for fourth in the league. Doesn't hurt that you blanked them after they dropped 10 runs on Rice (albeit in a loss) and hadn't been shut out all year.

One major thing I'm negating to mention here - and don't let it go to your heads - but this is the longest winning streak the program has had in 25 years. Yes, that's a quarter century worth of baseball. It occurred from May 12 to May 19, 1984, during Coach Saddlemire's first year coaching varsity. At the time, Coach Crazy had just turned 2 and I was four months shy of turning 3. So while five might not seem tremendous to some of you who have been part of highly successful Little League or middle school teams, it is pretty historic for this program.

Also, continued thanks to the ballplayers who have helped me with the stats. We'll continue on until we've hashed everything out. Good luck to all the rest of the week as you approach a possible top-eight seed and thus a home playoff game.

The list of players to pick up their first varsity hit continues to grow: As a testament to the youth of this team, seven different Lakers have done so already. I highlighted the first four (Cootware, Crowley, Eustace and Zach Dandurand) a couple weeks back, so further congrats to juniors Matt Dudley and Tyler Richland and sophomore Matt Ravey.

I like records. With so many stats to track in baseball, records are bound to fall. You guys have already set a record for most sac bunts in a season, believe it or not. It's not a glamorous record, but one that definitely bears mentioning and is critical to the success of a lot of great teams (for instance, in 2006, the Wheaton College baseball team set an NCAA Division III record with 62 sac bunts. We were one of eight teams to qualify for the World Series). As far as I can tell, you guys have roughly 16 this year in the first 13 games. In 1980, the Lakers had a record 14 ... in 17 games!

Here's another one for you that just illustrates how odd a game baseball really is: Entering the Mount Abe game, Matt Dudley had no extra-base hits in 15 at bats this year, and the entire team had combined for three triples in the first 12 games. So, of course, he goes out and hits two triples, becoming just the eighth Laker ever to do so. The last was Mike Wasko '04 on May 14, 2004 ... in a home game against Mount Abe! In fact, of the eight instances in program history that a player hit two triples, four have now occurred against Mount Abe, and three have occurred at Mount Abe. That makes little to no sense at all, but that's pretty cool.

For those who read the site for its content and insightful fun facts, I wanted to send along congratulations for the team's recent run of success. Unfortunately, a start in the neighborhood of 3-6 hasn't been unusual over the years (I was an assistant for five years, so I partially have responsibility in the matter...), so to see you guys go on a four-game winning streak to get back above .500, at 7-6, is tremendous. It's not how you start, anyway: It's how you finish. And the fact that you guys just knocked off Mount Abe, which was tied for first place in the Metro League, is all the more reason to be excited about things as this season progresses. Following are some fun facts.

• It turns out you guys also won four straight at one point last year. Thus, you have a pair of four-game winning streaks in the last two years after the program totaled two four-game winning streaks in the eight seasons prior (between 2000 and 2007).

• This one is more impressive, believe me: You guys won a game each of the last three days (as I mentioned to Coach Perry, it was like you guys were a college baseball team this week; I work in athletics at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and our season ended with us playing our final nine games in 10 days. Our 32-game northern schedule was completed in 43 days. I have no idea how college ballplayers in New England have time for class in the spring). Back to point, this was only the third time in the program's 34-year history that the team won a game on three straight days. On May 11-13, 2000, the team actually won four games (including a Saturday doubleheader), but all four of these games occurred at home. (This was during Coach Crazy's senior year.) The first time this happened was on May 17-19, 1984, a stretch that ended with two road games. I had yet to turn 3, and none of you were born. That's how long ago it was.

• Another nugget: You guys were 9-4 through 13 games last year and are 7-6 after that many contests in 2009. The last time the team posted a winning record through 13 games in back-to-back seasons was 2000 (9-4) and 2001 (7-6). We also started 1999 at 9-4 (and then lost our last four games).

• As for your win over Mount Abe, the team is actually 3-1 in its last four trips to Bristol. Which is great, because we haven't beaten them anywhere else since winning at home in 1998. And back to Rice, against which this three-day run began: Since an 0-10 all-time start against the former Little Indians, CHS has gone 12-8, including winning the last four.

• And here's a cool note about Coach Perry: He got his 18th win in his 29th game today. In CHS varsity baseball history, here is the list of how quickly each coach got to 18 wins (it's a random win total; I do suppose it will appear to make a little more sense once he reaches a round number, like 20):

That's all for the fun for now. Thanks to all for your offers to help me in piecing some stats together, you will all be contacted. I hope to have stats for the first 13 games ready to go this weekend. I have something called a three-day weekend coming up.

An update! And with only a little more than 50 percent of the regular-season schedule to go! I'll be posting stats relatively soon, but please keep in mind they'll be a little rough until I sort everything out with Coach Perry. Check through the box scores (and play-by-plays) and feel free to e-mail me or find me on Facebook and let me know of anything I might have incorrect. (Reading the pages after getting them faxed over was a little difficult, but it'll all be sorted out.) I'm looking forward to keeping the stats as you guys move forward this season, and I'll be doing so with STATCREW, which is the program we use for college baseball and softball.

A little housekeeping has also been done on the site - updated are the Opening Day Lineups and Uniform Numbers PDFs. Coach Perry also faxed over the points leaders, so those have been posted through the first six games of the year. I also posted the roster a few days ago and am happy to adjust it if anyone notices inaccuracies.

Random note: By beating Missisquoi, 14-4, you guys posted the most runs against Missisquoi since 2000. When Coach O'Hara was a senior.

I also want to extend congrats to a handful of you guys for picking up your first varsity hits (some of us get only one): junior Sean Eustace and sophomores Andrew Cootware, Ryan Crowley and Zach Dandurand. And Crowley's was a home run. Now then, prior to this year, the first 77 sophomores to appear for the Lakers had a total of nine home runs, with none hitting any since Jason Carey '01 in 1999. Prior to Carey, Kevin Grabowski '88 was the most recent sophomore to homer, in 1986, a shot that came in his first varsity game, but not in his first at bat. So while I'm not sure if any prior Laker homered in his first career at bat - or for his first career hit, for that matter - I do know that Ryan is just the third sophomore to go deep since 1980 - that's 30 seasons.

Let's move on to freshmen for a sec. The program's first year was 1976, and in the first 33 seasons, only two freshmen ever pitched for the Lakers: Travis Clairmont '02 on April 27, 1999, and your teammate Spencer three times in 2007. Between the two, they made four appearances and struck out five in 11-2/3 innings. Already this year, through your first six games, Jared Cayia and Josh Place had upped the total of freshman pitchers to four, themselves combining to make five appearances while striking out five in 8-2/3 innings. For anyone who has paid attention to Milton over the years, at times this is how they've built up their program: Bring up some freshmen who might take some lumps before getting better every year. By the time they're upperclassmen, they're challenging for a state championship. (An extreme example is the four-year stretch between 2003 and 2006: They were 2-16 in 2003, upset some teams to get to the 2004 Division II Tournament semis, drew the #2 seed in 2005 and then advanced all the way to the 2006 title game as the #1 seed.)

The latest update are some of the larger historical documents: the record book, and the career batting, fielding and pitching statistics. Check under the "Statistics" and "Misc" dropdowns for these documents, which will force open another window in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Since I wanted to encompass all players and records from the two seasons I inputted into each document, I decided to highlight the 2008 records/competitors in red and the records set in 2007 - and players who completed their careers that year - in blue. Enjoy.

Beyond the obvious redesign the site has undergone, which I'll address in a second, I've posted the tentative (read: tentative) 2009 schedule, as well as the 2007 stats in HTML format. Again, I can't thank the 2007 ballplayers enough for their assistance on helping fill in pieces of missing information for me.

As I've returned to Massachusetts and my real job as the assistant sports information director at Wheaton College, I've been trying to finish off the redesign of the Web site. What started as a site whose strength was its content has now become a site that hope will be more user-friendly, in addition to being content-heavy. One day during vacation from work - some time last week, in fact - I decided that I could make the site easier to navigate, so I through the power of Google and many tutorials on the Internet, I learned how to do Javascript-based dropdown menus, as well as the dropdown menus that you can scroll though. The latter allows for easier access to the yearly history pages, upon which the entire Web site is based. I also put the site in frames, so the selection on the above toolbar shows up below. It's not the most high tech Web site out there, but it's light years ahead of what I had for the better part of the first 12 years of the site's existence, in my opinion. Among the other features:

• When entering the main page of the site, it now goes straight to the current year's news.
• For the time being, I'll have a dropdown menu for both the current year and the previous year.
• I added a Contact page that includes webmaster contact info, quick facts for the program and the school, as well as the back story of the Web site itself.
• Another new page is the Tradition page. Working in sports information has taught me how to properly put a spin on things, and one of the objective I've reached for on that page is positively spin some highlights from the program's history, which you can see under the Accolades section. I've also put the longest-standing program award, the Scott Benoit Memorial Award, onto the page with a description from the media guide I put together for my Senior Seminar project in 2003. Included are all winners, including this year's recipient, parent Doug Cauchon. I've also added a chart of former CHS ballplayers who went on to play in college, and that's a project I'm still working on. If anyone has been omitted from the list, don't hesitate to contact me at javy@sover.net.
• Additionally, I have freed up a lot of space on the server by putting three photo galleries on Flickr, where I created a free account. The entire Lakers Baseball Page takes up nine megabtyes. Those three galleries alone were taking up four MBs. Links to the photos, as well as additional photos and stories from alums, can now be located on the Tradition page.

Those are the highlights of the new design. I'm still going through some of the yearly history pages and cleaning things up, always trying to make things more readable and user friendly. As with anything, this site might have some kinks to work out, so please let me know if you notice anything truly odd that occurs when you try accessing anything on the site. I also hope to finish career stats soon. Hope everyone is enjoying winter up in Vermont.