Before my true subject, I'd like to comment that I've been a lurker on Royals Review for the last couple seasons.  My best friend lives in Lenexa (I'm in West Plains myself) and I go up and catch a game or two at Kauffman every year and I try to keep up with the Royals via this blog and Gameday Audio... and by the way.. BEAUTIFUL stadium.  It has all the modern amenities yet remains cozy and almost has a minor league park homeyness to it.  Don't think there's a bad seat there.

Anyway, It really seems that the tone in the last 12 months on here has REALLY gotten black.  I mean last year, it seems nobody liked the moves but there was guarded optimism that things could conceivably fall together and a decent season might emerge from the chaos.  I mean, even the Second Law of Thermodynamics admits that  in a statistically freak circumstance, things can buck entropy and randomly become ordered.

This year it seems like people are expecting a 120 loss season.  I'm not saying the mood isn't warranted, it's just ... odd.  The two posts Dark Thoughts and Worst Decisions Possible are almost artistic pessimism.  It almost seems that your blogizens are anticipating witnessing something - first hand and in the neighborhood - a calamity of Olympic proportion.  Kind of like if you were in the suburbs of a city hit with a 10 MT thermonuclear device -you know you are doomed from the approaching shock wave, but damned if you can't keep staring at that mushroom cloud.

Anyway...

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We've created a yahoo fantasy baseball legue, named in honor of Reds offseason pickup Aaron Miles.  It's called the True Grit Baseball League, and is a retro league, if you will.  Full writeup of the thinking behind the league is in a fanpost over here. 

League settings summary: 12 team, NL only, 5x5 traditional roto scoring, auction draft at 9PM Eastern/10PM Central, Sunday, March 28.  

So if you have Sunday night and Monday morning off, got a league that is tailor-made for people... well... who have Sunday night and Monday mornings off.  Hope some of you folks from Reds Country will play with us.

True Grit Baseball League 

league ID: 273321

password:  grit

sign up here

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.