Musings on Fantasy Baseball or Why You Should Join the TGBL

Back in 1993 I was working my way through college at a pizza joint who had just given up the guarantee of  "30 minutes or less" - which as far as I was concerned was all the franchise had going for it – because some driver who creamed a minivan* in St. Louis used the guarantee as his excuse.

The manager of this place was named Lloyd, and he invited me to join his fantasy baseball league. It was an 8 team Rotisserie league, National League only with all the rules taken pretty much straight from Dan Okrent's book. The draft took place on a beautiful March Sunday, with the NCAA tournament on the TV and a spring training game on the radio. Somebody brought brats, and another brought a cooler full of Yoo-Hoo – which I found out gives me heartburn after about five. We had a 7 hour auction draft, and it was an exhausting experience. I was completely clueless. I thought I knew baseball (I was in my early 20s... I thought I knew everything) until I came out of there with a team that would prove to live up to its herald: Jonathan's Rotten Apples. I overbid early (I had a mancrush on Greg Maddux) and ended up with a bunch of middle relievers... and Greg Maddux.

In my three years in that league (the name now escapes me) I never finished out of the basement. If you are around my age, you remember the day when Compuserve was dying, AOL was still pretty cool, and the web was quite novel.**  The info we now take for granted wasn't as accessible back then. For three summers and offseasons, I followed and learned about baseball like I'd never done before. Every day before, between, and during my classes I would devour the box scores and game summaries from the local paper. I subscribed to Baseball Weekly. If I remember correctly, lineups were due on Monday, stats started for the week on Tuesday, and Wednesday's USA Today marked time for a series of summers that are among the most enjoyable of my life. Lloyd had to do the stats pretty much by hand – and we were usually a couple weeks behind in the scoring. Didn't matter though. It was a blast learning to play the game-within-the-game.

All this is to lead into my pitch – I've created a Yahoo league that is set as close as I could remember to the old-school style of fantasy baseball. It's a 12 team 5x5 NL only Rotisserie scoring auction draft league. The only oddball thing about it is the draft time – Sunday, March 28, at 10PM central. The draft should last till about 1:20 in the morning. I work an odd shift, so this draft time was chosen to accommodate my work schedule.

If you're like me - and I know I am - and you have Monday mornings off and would like to play in a retro-roto league, we'd love to have anyone who'd enjoy a recreational-but-serious league. As of this posting, there are two of us (thanks MooCow), and we would really like to fill out the league with clubs so we can draw deep from the limited pool that is the NL.

Yahoo has mock drafts that will allow you to become familiar with the auction interface. The webapp that they are using seems to be pretty good – except it tends to overbid when you have it set for autobid.

The name of the league is the Total Grit Baseball League (in honor of Aaron Miles).

League ID is 273321, and the password is "grit".

If you'd like to join, you can get there from here: YahooPage

Hope to see 10 of you there.

• Update: Seven teams have joined as of 3/11.  Looking for 5 more so somebody will have to draft Troy Glaus.
  

* This may not be totally correct, but the town is right (I think), and you get the drift.

** Actually, AOL was as bad as ever, but we didn't see the shortcomings yet.