WARNING: TL;DR LURKS. WOE TO ALL WHO CLICKED THIS

are you a fantasy baseballer? are you a baseballer? are you a fantasy? are you a baller?

even if you steadfastly answered NO to all of the above hypotheticals, rejoice, for there is still room for you in my recovering-bastard-child fantasy baseball league, fear and loathing in #hardball (you should be able to see the league by clicking this link)

last year we endeavored to start a league from scratch that would go on to have 6 keepers, a balance between a total yearly reset and having a dynasty/franchise style setup where you retain most/all of your team and therefore have a focus that goes beyond the current year. i ended up recruiting some people who were new to roto, if not fantasy baseball as a whole, and that opened up roughly ~5-6 slots going forward.

if you're unfamiliar with roto / fantasy baseball, basically you field a team that covers all of the offensive positions (and two "util" players who can be any position) and a mix of starters/relievers to accumulate stats for you day-in/day-out as the season progresses. if there's say 10 teams in the league, then whoever has the most HRs gets 10pts and the fewest gets 1pt, same for R/RBI/SB/BA etc.... pitching-wise you flip flop that with ERA/WHIP ( (walks + hits) / innings pitched) and then seek to accumulate wins, saves, and strikeouts. You then add up all of the point totals from those 10 categories and whoever has the most points wins.

With the keeper format, you're able to keep 6 players between years and even trade draft picks, so if you're out of contention in august/sept, it very well might behoove you to acquite young stud prospects and/or trade with other teams to augment/supplement your core and set yourself for the future. Hell, you might even decide to spend a season or two purposely collecting young/developing assets to set yourself to rain hellfire on the league for a few years to come.

On a day-to-day basis you set up your lineups. each position slot has a max of 162 games, so you can mix-and-match players via cutting dead weight and picking up free agents, waiver guys (a freshly cut/called-up player has a waiver system which goes in the order of who's last used it) and trades. whereas H2H fantasy baseball is like fantasy football in that you're only going against one person for one week at a time, roto baseball is a bigger picture game where an aggregate of your output each and every day builds up to determine who was the best from day 1 to the last day of the season, aka the ultimate in fairness and equity. And if your team is sufficiently out of it by august/september, with the advent of keepers and tradeable draft picks you're in a prime position to ready yourself to be more formidable for next year. Hell, some of the best players out there find ways to make runs at the league crown AND save a couple'a slots to develop kids for next year.... Maybe Jurickson Profar has a mediocre year but picks up later in the year, well then, why keep a mark trumbo or a ryan howard when you can sit on profar for a few years and possibly end up with the next Hanley at SS? The choice is yours!

I'm going to set up a system where, hopefully, as opposed to having new players take over one of the non-returning teams straightup you'll be given a list of the players from all of those non-returning teams and i'll randomly set up a sub-draft order and get everyone their own somewhat-customized core of "keepers" to start off this year b4 we draft @ 3pm on march 24th. Worst case scenario would be that you'd have to take over one of the non-returning teams, however I'd have to stack the draft order so that you guys would start off out in front of all of us returning teams when we start doing the normal draft. Regardless, there's guys like Braun, Strasburg, and Carlos Gonzalez out there to be kept for new teams, so it's not like you're going to get a pile of crap to start off this year.

Not only will you get to play with board luminaries like Nas/HOVA/Makaveli and Chus, but you'll get to play with quality people from efnet IRC's legendary #hardball channel, the home of baseball talk.

So hey, as you know I could and would go on forever, but I'd like to be somewhat couth about this. The proper league link is up there, and if you went the standard yahoo signup route (httpCOLONSLASHSLASH-baseballDOTfantasysportsDOTyahooDOTcomSLASHb1) the league id = 50499 and the password = marcdlives --- not only would you be guaranteeing yourself a summer full of fun, adventure, heartbreak, turmoil, and likely getting your ass kicked in a trade with nas (LOL sorry man, you're just good at fantasy baseball =) but you'd also be helping america. seriously, god would look down at you with divine providence and smile and make sure that you'd get to nail an impressionable dimepiece this year, or perhaps your kid will find a $100 bill floating down the sidewalk.... who knows? alls i'm saying is good things happen to people who play in my league. SHOMER SHABBOS!

any questions? just PM me here, sinicalypse on aim, or sinicalypseATgmail.com

hasta

# james

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