30 MLB Team Countdown Contest Results (Winner Inside!) and a Carnival Cruise Company Rant.

I had originally put off posting the winner announcement for my recent contest because I was supposed to be on a cruise ship in the Bahamas right now (and I wanted to be able to mail out right away).  Unfortunately, with the recent coronavirus stuff going around (and the fact that my wife and I were planning on taking our almost-two-year-old along for the trip) we cancelled our spring break vacation. 

Side rant:  I booked our cruise with Carnival and they were AWFUL in terms of customer service related to the recent coronavirus.  I tried to get my money back (they wouldn't do that which wasn't a surprise) but also I tried to simply reschedule for a future cruise date instead (and agreeing to pay the difference if the cost were more).  They wouldn't do that either with a "switch date penalty."  The price of that penalty I asked?  "One hundred percent of your cruise fare."

Yeah, safe to say that I won't be trying to book with Carnival any time soon.  I've actually gone on three Royal Caribbean cruises over the years and had a wonderful experience each time.  They can probably count on my business over Carnival...I can't believe how anti-customer Carnival is being right now.  It would sure seem to me that offering free reschedulings would be a way to A) keep your current passengers and B) keep some sense of goodwill among paying customers.  Carnival obviously cares more about the immediate dollar than they do long term goodwill and growth.  They are keeping my money for a cruise that I'm not going on but they are unlikely to ever get another dime from me given their actions.

Alright, rant over.  Let's get to the contest results!

Here are the final entrants into the contest with the numbers next to each name representing the number of entries that person earned. 

33  John Sharp
32  P-Town Tom
30  bbcardz
24 hockey kazi
39  Brett Alan
30 Fuji
1  acrackedbat
1  Wilson
35 Matt
4 Trevor P.
2 friend11
3 Adam Kaningher
1 CrazieJoe
1 Brian
9 OhioTim
1 Jon

There are a total of 246 entries.  I'm going to use random.org to give me a number between 1-246 which I will use to determine a winner.  If a 1-33 comes up, John Sharp will win.  If a 34 - 65 comes up, P-Town Tom wins, etc. all the way down to if a 246 comes up then Jon wins.  To keep things fair, I'll do my usual of three randomizations and use that third number to determine the winner of the contest.

Congratulations to Brett Alan for winning the contest!  It's kind of fitting that Brett won since he had the most entries in the contest.  In order to earn 39 entries, he had to have guessed at least 9 teams in the correct spot of my countdown, an impressive bit of deductive work given many of my rather opaque clues!

Brett, email me your mailing address and I'll get your prize out to you quickly...especially since I'm sitting at home this week rather than lounging in the warm sun of the Bahamas.  *grumble grumble*

Note:  As you can see from the timestamp, I actually wrote this post last week a few hours after getting off the phone with Carnival (and being quite frustrated with the company).  I had originally planned to have a series of other posts go live while I was gone (as of the time I'm writing this post I had already scheduled posts up through yesterday). 

I had a blast with the contest, it was fun to read everyone's thoughts on the various teams as I rolled through the countdown.  I'll definitely have to do something similar next year - plus it gave me something fun to write about during February which is typically a rather difficult time of the year to find interesting baseball topics (esp. if you don't buy Topps Series 1 or Heritage which I'm not doing this year)!