Bits of pancake, part of Ryan Perkins’ 10th, 11th and 12th of the day, hung on his fork. He stared at them as his belt cinched around his khakis.

Earlier mistakes in his fantasy football league put him in the Baldwinsville Diner on Thursday, eating pancakes for what was now the seventh hour. The belt and khakis were just two of his Thursday morning, post-Christmas oversights, though these were mistakes that made eating the pancakes that much more miserable.

Perkins let two quiet burps clear his airway. He, nor anyone else, wanted to see his past handiwork reappear.

“If you put it in before you burp, it might come back up,” Perkins said.

His eyes had widened and reddened with each passing hour. Perkins’ run at Baldwinsville Diner would involve two waitresses, a bottle and a half of syrup, more than 20 friends and family, 10 cups of coffee, $840 raised for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and a $169.23 bill.

This particular stack of pancakes would eventually take him 3 hours, 45 minutes and three applications of syrup to moisten and finish. Having done the math, he knew that every bite would bring him closer to a merciful end.

He exhaled, lifted the fork and chewed.

On Monday, Perkins, 29, lost his fantasy football league, The League of Mediocre Gentlemen.

On Thursday, he paid for it.

His punishment: Spend 24 hours in Baldwinsville Diner. For each pancake he ate, he could shave 30 minutes off the time. The other 13 members of the league were free to eat a pancake, wherever they were in the world. Each of those shaved 15 minutes from the time.

While Thursday’s debauchery was about pancakes and mistakes, it was also about a fantasy football league that captured 14 friends, all Baldwinsville High School graduates, in 10 of their most formative years. The league was named when some were still 19, “doing mediocre stuff.”

There has been a cavalcade of marriages in the last several years, with at least three in each of the last two years. In all, 12 of the 14 are now married. Members of the league have a total of five kids, the oldest being a 6-year-old. At least three more are on the way.

Most members still live in the Syracuse area, though other members live in Boston, Charleston and Washington, D.C. as well as New Hampshire and Romania.

Perkins works at National Grid and had to take a day off to fulfill his punishment. His has been the latest in a run of what could be seen as brutal punishments.

“(The punishments) seem like they’re getting more and more painful,” he said.

Perkins made the first mistakes that landed him in the diner on Labor Day weekend.

He bid too much on James Conner, Le’Veon Bell, Aaron Rodgers and OJ Howard in his fantasy football league auction draft. Overbidding on four players who would eventually underperform left him with little money for other positions.

That same day, he voted with other league members to have the league’s last-place finisher sit at Baldwinsville Diner for 24 hours.

On the day after Christmas, he was that loser.

Perkins woke up in Westvale at 3:15 a.m. and drove to Wegmans to buy a whiteboard to track his pancake intake. The store was closed.

He drove from Wegmans to Baldwinsville Diner. Perkins walked to the diner’s front door at 4:15 a.m., hoping to get an early start. A sign spelled out bad news: The diner didn’t open until 6 a.m.

Perkins drove to his parents’ house down the street and napped on the couch for another hour and a half before heading back.

After Perkins sat down at a table at about 6 a.m., a waitress, Paula, came to his table to ask him if he wanted coffee.

“So, listen,” Perkins said to the waitress. “I came in last in my fantasy football league and I’m going to be here 24 hours. Each pancake I eat takes a half hour off. I’m going to be on my best behavior and spend a lot of money.”

“Well, we’re glad to have you,” she said.

The League of Mediocre Gentlemen started in 2010. The explanation for the name was simple -- they believed themselves to be doing mediocre things at the time.

Mike Carroll, an original member and the assistant commissioner, said the league started when they were still doing things like ordering multiple takeout meals on a Sunday morning.

Carroll and Perkins were 19 at the time and sophomores in college. They both attended Le Moyne College and lived in a house at 816 Euclid Avenue near Syracuse University with a dilapidated porch, heat that struggled to come on and a dirty bathroom.

“The house served its purpose,” Carroll said.

Ryan Perkins (left) and Chris Lawrence (right) pose with the League of Mediocre Gentlemen's trophy. Lawrence won the league in 2019.

Right around the time the league started, the Baldwinsville Diner was a popular spot after a late night for various league members.

On one night in 2011, Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” played in the diner. The granular details of what followed have been lost to time and maybe they’ve been intentionally lost to the healthy shame that time and maturity afford.

According to Ryan Carroll, Mike’s brother, a league member unscrewed the top to a container of sugar. As Joe Elliott’s voice sang the chorus -- “Pour some sugar on me” -- the league member dumped the sugar on another league member. In another incident, two league members engaged in a syrup chugging contest. Both incidents, which happened on separate nights, got league members kicked out of the diner.

The league name fit at the time.

All members of the league graduated from Baldwinsville High School between 2005 and 2010. Two sets of brothers - the Carrolls and the Lawrences - account for five people in the group, which has helped keep everyone close.

The buy in for the league is $269.23 for 13 members. Each March, the league hosts a March Madness pool and the winner gets their buy-in covered by the other 13.

Over time, the league has grown more complex, with more rules and more inside jokes.

It hosted its first live draft in 2016, when David and John Lawrence held a double bachelor party in the Poconos. Pulling from Richard Connell’s famous short story about a big game hunter, “The Most Dangerous Game”, the league punished the previous year’s loser by hunting him with paintballs.

In Week 7 each year, the league has a rivalry week and most of the games are named. Perkins’ team, for example, plays in the “Passive-Aggressive Bowl” for he and his rival’s noted passive aggressiveness. Each week during the season, the winner of each game gets to rename the loser’s team.

For the league’s first punishment, Mike Carroll, sporting suspenders and a goatee, had to make freshly squeezed lemonade at the Baldwinsville Farmers’ Market. A later punishment involved a league member sitting in Sharkey’s Bar & Grill for an hour and being hit in the face with whipped cream pies.

Each punishment raises money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society .

As Perkins tried to finish the last stack of pancakes on Thursday, he lamented his own fate and pondered what he hoped someone might have to do next year. Fifteen minutes of stand-up comedy was most frequently mentioned.

“There seems to be a need to top ourselves every year,” Perkins said.

Perkins ate the first three pancakes in 30 minutes, but ate fewer and fewer as the day dragged. By noon, six hours in, Perkins had downed nine pancakes.

The fourth stack of pancakes, Nos. 10, 11 and 12, would take nearly four hours for him to finish. By 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Perkins cut the last quarter of the stack of pancakes into smaller pieces, “to make it less intimidating.”

“I can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Perkins said.

Throughout the day, a group of people showed up to the diner to give him their support. At least half of the league members came. An aunt, an uncle, several sets of league members’ parents and even Perkins’ own parents attended.

More than 20 people sat in Perkins’ booths -- he was moved at least twice as the crowd grew and peaked at eight people.

Inevitably, they discussed the league’s ever-creeping impact on their lives. Summer, Mike Carroll’s wife, proposed that maybe kids, wives and girlfriends should be invited to next year’s draft. In 2019, the league drafted in a rented house in Canandaigua.

Perkins said he’s pushing 30 and as that number goes up, time for consuming events like Thursday’s decrease.

“We’ll make it work,” he said.

The previous pancakes hadn’t hurt his hopefulness.

Realizing how close he was to finishing his pancakes, Perkins did the math: He needed 45 minutes’ worth from the last group member he knew to be visiting him -- Chris Lawrence, the league’s champion.

“The guy’s a garbage disposal,” Perkins said.

Lawrence, who Perkins also noted to be the most fit of the group, arrived around 4 p.m.

“What if I ordered a burger melt?” Lawrence said with a smile.

Three pancakes arrived shortly after in front of Lawrence. He finished them with three coatings of syrup and some strawberry jam. Perkins’ left the diner at 5 p.m., about 11 hours after he started.

“If I ever have to do something like this, I’d want friends like yours,” the table’s second waitress, Nicky, said as she grabbed a bill for the table.

“No,” Perkins shot back, jokingly, “You want friends who would never do this to you.”

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