Back in the wild and woolly early days of the internet -- the late '90s, early 2000s, before spam-friendly 
  Google algorithms, before the loathesome existence of SEO consulting, before "social networks" prefabbed,     
  homogenized, and ironically depersonalized personal websites -- folks had to learn a little HTML coding, 
  build their own websites from scratch, and then try to make their sites known by trying to get them listed 
  on a hundred different search engines and search directories and, especially, by reaching out to the 
  owners/webmasters of every other site they could find, personally asking for a link exchange.  
  That was social networking!  How quaint it all seems now.  And how preferable! 
 
        One other way to publicize your website was to win an "award" given out by another site and to 
  hand out awards from your own site.  The mutual free advertising was the object -- it was just an 
  alternative sort of links exchange -- although some missed the point and made you jump through hoops 
  with intrusive questionnaires and draconian "rating" systems, ignoring quality of content and awarding 
  only sites stuffed with browser-crashing animations and gimcracks, while others just posted an award 
  image and said "take it, it's free."  Most were somewhere in the middle, requiring a modicum of skill 
  and content, but the happy upshot was frequently a friendly exchange of several e-mails, and the mutual 
  discovery of some genuinely interesting stuff at each others' sites as well as an appreciation for the work 
  each webmaster had put into their own little place on the ol' interweb.  

        While taking a nostalgic surf, recently, around the 'Net as it once was -- through the magic of the 
  too-little-known but marvelous and indispensible Internet Archive Wayback Machine and the diligent 
  work of the Reocities project -- we found the well-preserved remains of many old internet acquaintances 
  freeze-dried in their archives, but linking only to what's now a decimated landscape of "404" craters 
  where those sites once stood, obliterated when monolithic freehosting services like AOL and Yahoo 
  pulled the plug on those services back in 2007 and 2008.  A sad vista!  But then, networking our way 
  through literally hundreds and hundreds of ancient websites, we also found a handful of sites still active, 
  or at least still on-line, some familiar, some new to us, some still doin' it after ten, twelve, fifteen years 
  or more -- and a few still collecting and/or handing out website awards.  

        Since Baseball Games is all about an antiquated, hands-on, old-school way of doing whatever it is 
  we do here -- from our antique generic baseball boardgames to our primitive basic HTML website -- 
  we thought we'd take another swing at that bygone pastime of soliciting and distributing internet awards.  
  In a moment, the results of that trial...