I have just been informed that great owner and great friend to many of us Ken Frye passed away last night. My heartfelt condolences to all who knew Ken going back to his original days in the league back in 1982 and before, and of course especially to Doug.
Wow, that's just devastating news. I offer my condolences to Doug and the entire Frye family in this very difficult time.
I also feel compelled to share some history that illustrates what Ken means to ARBA and to me. Of course he was one of the guys who welcomed me into ARBA when I was a freshman at UT, WAY back in Spring 1988. My recruitment was a chance occurrence as my cousin happened to see a stack of Strat games in my dorm room and connected me with a guy in the league. I don't recall much about that connection now, not even his name. I do remember him being pretty strange though and ARBA included quite a cast of colorful characters in the early days such as JR Rogers, Don Edwards, Don Butler, Tom Stearns, Gary Mayes and of course Ken. As may of you may not know, it really was the Austin Replay Baseball Association at the time. Everyone was in the Austin area and we played a board game called Replay Baseball, often meeting in person with our dice and cards. We also recorded box scores and tracked stats by hand. However, the league almost died in my 1st season as we didn't even finish and ended up skipping the playoffs.
Ken was the league commissioner and led the bold move into the future of expanding to include people around the country, shifting to more of a play-by-mail model. He managed most of the league business without help from any fancy technology and mailed out regular league updates. We even did the auction and waiver draft by mail in the early days. So it's fair to give Ken a lot of credit for saving ARBA. Of course, that's when I brought my childhood friend Tom into the league and of course the jerk won it in 1989, his first season. I'm not sure of the exact timing, but that's also around when we added the Ringlands, Dennis D, Art C, Dave N, and the infamous Keith Bernard, among others.
The league continued to evolve as we made the move to Strat and to the computer era. Ken handed off the commissioner job to Keith before Tom took over in 2002 (!). Even that was a long time ago at this point. Over the years, ARBA has obviously seen a lot more changes and new faces. Through it all, Ken has been the rock who could always be counted on to actively fulfill his responsibilities and share his opinions. I've been doing the league stats for approximately forever and can confidently state that Ken was never late in turning in series results or sending instructions, not even once. He obviously loved baseball and the league, further evidenced by recruiting his son Doug in 2007 (I think). So yeah, it's very hard to imagine the league without Ken. I'm sure that it wouldn't still be around decades later without him. We'll really miss you, man!
