With a small stretch of imagination, it can be suggested that the name "Zingrods" implies a team with pop in the bats. Couple this with the notion that pitching is notoriously difficult for fantasy baseball players to predict, and it seems ironic that the Zingrods' most successful season in the GBUFBL (2nd place a few years back) was spearheaded by a sweep of all pitching categories (wins, saves, ERA, WHIP and strikeouts).
While that's no mean feat, it's topped by the following season's 10th place finish, spearheaded by a dead-last ranking in all batting categories (home runs, RBI, average, stolen bases and runs scored). I believe the record for all-time worst team batting average in the league, set that year, (.254) still stands.
The Zingrods entered the GBUFBL in 1993, the second year of the league's existence (and have been saddled with the stigma of "expansion team" ever since). The team was still unnamed on Draft Day, when the owner was struck with the questionable inspiration to create a name totally at random. Since several members of the league had played fantasy role-playing games (like Dungeons and Dragons), this was not unprecedented. By using a normal, 6-sided die to generate vowels and a 20-sided die (anyone who has never played D&D will just have to take my word for it that such things exist) to generate consonants, a word can be created letter by letter. The one-armed barbarian Ixowu (a D&D character played by the two-time league champion Short Gap Slayers' owner, also the Zingrods' owner's brother) was named in just this fashion.
The catch (and there usually is one) was that no one had forseen the need for dice at a fantasy baseball Draft Day event. Fortunately, it is possible to use the hundreths of a second on a digital stopwatch (one of which WAS available) to generate pseudo-random numbers between 1 and 10. Then it's relatively simple to extrapolate the results into the ranges of 1-6 or 1-20.
A word of advice: alcohol will NOT accelerate this type of endeavor.
Unlike the Zingrods' owner, many of the league owners are relatively normal people, so this lengthy process was naturally received with much wailing and the wearing of sackcloth and ashes. Eventually, however, a name was determined: ZINROGS!
The Tater Tankers' owner's wife was manning (womanning?) the posterboard that day, and attempted to affix this new name atop the as-yet-unnamed team's roster sheet. Since she is of sound mind (and also because the room was quite loud), she subconsiously translated the nonsensical "Zinrogs" into the marginally more logical "Zingrods". And so, a team was born!
Draft Day of the Zingrods' first season in the GBUFBL was held in a little bar-and-grill in Cumberland, Maryland. There was a pinball game of sorts which actually dispensed baseball trading cards if you won, and a dissatisfied winner had left several cards in the dispenser. One of these cards was an '88 Atlee Hammaker. Sadly, Hammaker is usually remembered as the man who gave up the first grand slam ever in the history of the All-Star game (to Fred Lynn in 1983). At the time, however, this bit of trivia was unknown to me, as was the fact that he had undergone seemingly career-ending surgery in 1991 and hadn't played at all in 1992. Being a fantasy baseball neophyte, I was getting pretty desperate by the late rounds of the draft, and the stats on Atlee's trading card were pretty impressive, so I drafted him with my last pick.
Ironically, 1983 (the year in which he gave up the grand salami in the All-Star game) was also Hammaker's career year. He led the NL in ERA with a 2.25 mark, had a WHIP of 1.039, and posted a 10-9 record in 23 starts for San Francisco. (He must not have gotten any run support to win a measly 10 games with those numbers, no matter what your opinion on ERA inflation in these post-expansion days). OK, so drafting the guy based on a season he had 10 years earlier might seem foolish in retrospect, but I submit that if you drafted Maddux today based on his 1988 stats, you'd still be pretty happy.
Anyway, Hammaker didn't play at all in '93 and I suffered some ruthless taunting from other owners. But I was to have some (limited) revenge. Toward the end of the '94 season, I saw that the White Sox had given Hammaker a late-season call-up. I immediately picked him up from the free agent pool and activated him, and was rewarded with an 1 1/3 innings of shut-out relief over two appearances in which he gave up only one hit, walked none and struck out a batter. I felt somewhat vindicated, although for some reason this seemed to only make the taunting worse.
These things have a way of snowballing, and Atlee Hammaker has become part of the league vocabulary. I've even had other owners give me Atlee Hammaker trading cards that they've spotted at yard sales and such. In the process, I've become a fan. He never pitched more than 77 innings in a season after 1988 (the year of the card that started this phenomenon), but he retired in 1995 with a career ERA of 3.66 and that's pretty respectable.