The St. Petersburg Defectors

Phil,

I live just east of Tampa, Florida in Plant City. I’ve been a baseball fan since I was a little kid, since I grew up being able to go

to a lot of spring training games. My Dad actually got me involved in Strat at a young age as well and I’ve been playing the

game for about 15 years. My team in the league I play in is the St. Petersburg Pirates.

The league I play in is a bunch of college buddies of mine, so when we all graduated, we went our separate ways. The league

sort of broke up for a few years, with only guys who lived close to one another being able to play. But as more of us got the

computer game, we were able to get most of the league back together and play by mail or communicate by e-mail. It was still 

always fun to get together and play FTF when we had the chance.

A funny thing happened one year when I was travelling. I had to go to Chicago on business a few years ago and since a guy in

the league lived up that way, I took my team with me so we could get together and play one night. I had just bought my cards

and received them in the mail, but I hadn’t really had a chance to look at them yet. I packed them in my suitcase for safe

keeping, but later regretted it. I got bored at the airport and would have loved to have had my cards to look at. Little did I

know.

The flight I was on was not direct to O’Hare, and went through St.Louis first where I had to change planes. I arrived in 

Chicago and found out the airline had lost my luggage! Needless to say, I was pretty upset. The woman at the claims desk

could see I was pretty angry and did her best to try and calm me down. She assured me that the luggage would be found, but if 

it wasn’t that the airline would reimburse me for any loss. I told her I didn’t care about my clothes, but that they had lost my

Strat-O-Matic cards! The look of confusion on her face was priceless!

Lost in the Devil’s Triangle,

Corey Murphy

Corey, I feel for you guy mano…First time I’ve ever heard of a team defecting before!