Dear Mr. Fantasy

I have been playing fantasy baseball for over fifteen years. I started when I joined a league with my room mate from my De Paul days. The next year I took his scoring system and stared my own league with my friends. It is kind of geeky, I admit, but I love it. I love the draft which is tomorrow. It is one of my favorite times of the year. I have always maintained winning the baseball league is a skill and winning the football league is luck. Maybe that is because I have won the baseball league four times and never won the football league.

You see in baseball you can’t be a lazy owner and win. You need to check the box scores daily and stay on top of injuries to your lineup. It is a two part deal. You need to draft well and make shrewd moves during the season. Football is basically once a week. You worry about it Saturday night, put your lineup in and you are good. On top of that football is head to head, so you can get lucky and win when you shouldn’t. Not to bitch but I was 2^nd in total points this year in our football league and finished 5^th. Sometimes, it just works out that way.

Anyway, here is a list of who has won the baseball league each year. I write this here on my journal, (I am banning the word blog from this point going forward, as I hate that term for some reason.) to preserve it. We really don’t have any place on the internet where we have posted the league winners. Also our league is so old it really kind of pre-dates the World Wide Web. Anyway here is a list of the winners from our first season in 1993.

1993 – Doyle
1994 - Bob
1995 – Nick
1996 – Tony
1997 – (No winner, league folded, but Chuck would have won)
1998- Nick
1999 - Bob
2000 – Wally
2001 – Wally
2002 – Nick
2003 – Bob
2004 – Nick
2005 – Bob
2006 – Mike and Ryan
2007 – Tony

Myself, Wally, Bob and Chuck are the only four that have been in the league from year one. Dell, Mike and Ryan, Rob and Tony have pretty much been there since the early days when I used to do all the stats by hand. Joe and Jeff joined later on.

Like I said back before the internet, I used to do all the stats by hand. I would get baseball weekly, which had all the box scores and I would grab a calculator and every week, I would pour through them and create a word document with the standings. This was also a little before email was really prevalent, so I would have hard copies of the standings and hand them out when I saw the other team owners. It was kind of the dark days of fantasy baseball.

By 1997 I had, had enough of running the league so Rob took over in the ill fated 97 season. Chuck took over in 1998 and we moved onto TQstas. That used to be a great website but over the years it started to decline. Chuck ran the league from 1998 until he could not take it anymore and quit in 2004. So, I took over the reigns once again in ’05. Running the baseball league is not my favorite thing to do, but it keeps me busy. The website does most of the work nowadays, but I still have to check it daily for injuries and that includes when I go on vacation.

CBS Sportsline hosts our league now, and it is a very user friendly website. It is easy to customize it to our league’s scoring system. It is still no picnic to run the thing, but is much easier then back in the day. So, as a new season and new draft day approaches, I am pretty excited. Hopefully, I get a good draft pick and walk out of Rob’s basement with a pretty good team.