From Cole

Either I never saw this back in October or I was still in a champagne induced haze from the Lord of Nations epic locker room celebration.  If I can skip ahead to Cole's snippet about 10th member.  With the extensive research by the crack staff we employ here at The Backstop Boys Fantasy Baseball League, it has been determined that 10th member can get to the draft for roughly $400, or half an hour of billed work.  I check back on the league's message weekly just to make sure I'm still the reigning champ (spoiler alert: I am) and I just found Cole's message.  So in case you haven't seen it yet, without further ado,  Cole's message.

Due to the complexities of responding to the Horns of Construction email notification, I wanted to get a separate discussion started here so we can chat about the brilliance of what is the Chris Martel literature. Once again, I commend you good sir for your beautiful words. No doubt my favorite line from your acceptance speech were "I too was once a lowly peasant filtering through pig shit just hoping to find an undigested corn kernel". This sequence of words will be taken to the grave as one of the most motivating, captivating phrases that have ever entered my brain. Thank you Christopher.

To Martel's 2nd point, we really do need everyone at the draft next year. Although I was not at last year's draft due to some last minute unfortunate circumstances, I was at the 2012 draft. A draft, I might add, I remember only bits and pieces of. I mostly remember eating 8 lbs of sausage from the crawfish boil, chugging Tony Cachere's and getting some in my eye, and drafting Carl Crawford in the 3rd round for some terrible man-crush reason. But did that stop me from getting to the finals? No. I finished 2nd. What I'm trying to say is, we should all be at the draft. We all NEED to be at the draft.

I know there has been some speculation about whether 10th member really exists. We all know that Tod is a lawyer, which automatically makes his endless arguments regarding the authenticity of Patrick Cannon's true existence null and void. I may or may not have been in Baltimore last year and met this 10th member guy. I also may or may not have had, during this same Baltimore/DC trip, spent 6+ hours searching for our hotel room one night, having multiple automatic rifles pointed at me from within 10 feet while laying on the steps of the nation's capitol trying to navigate the fucked up streets of Washington DC, only to find out I was on the right path from the start but didn't go far enough due to the streets changing from numbers to letters to numbers to letters to numbers to letters and finally to Sesame Street character names. I knew I was close all along but never knew my peaceful sleep was just beyond Fonzo's alley. FUCK, i was so close! Regardless of what may or may not have happened during that magical trip to Baltimore, I want this mystery to be put to rest once and for all. Therefore, I am willing to post up some $$$$ to get this 10th member asshole to the live draft next year. If anybody else wants to join me, please speak up. If not, I guess I'll personally drive to Baltimore and drag this son of a bitch to Lake Chuck with me in March so we can get this draft done.

With all due respect, I love each and every one of you and look forward to taking your money yet again next year. Long live the Shitface Dickfarts! Good night sirs.

Love,

Shitface Dickfarts

A Draft Day Wrinkle?

     An interesting concept was brought up today.  In our league, you get 3 hold overs from the previous season.  Usually these are either high profile players or players that have extreme value after being dug up from the recycle bin known as the late rounds of the previous years' draft.  Everyone usually has a pretty good idea of which players will be holdovers on their respective teams, but there always seems to be 3-4 surprises.  Will the keeper declarations deplete the starting pitching pool, maybe 3 middle infielders are kept and some managers fill that Andrelton Simmons is now worthy of a Round 4 pick.  The thing is, with the current keeper declaration model people have a month to prepare with an advance look at what the draft pool looks like after 30 of the most valuable picks are off the board.  

     What if this wasn't the case?  Shouldn't the declaration of the 3 players each manager deems the most likely to propel their team to a world championship be met with a little more fanfare than an email chain.  Maybe something like people yelling their names with expletives peppered in for good measure.  Now, if you're anything like me, you love draft day all the way down to your kiwis.  Now imagine it with a double shot of drama.  Should you use your first pick on a power pitcher because you think 4 of the 5 best are being kept, or will 3 of those guys be there in round 4.  I don't know!  It's impossible to know!  If any man knows what will happen on draft day they should be burned at the stake.  Now imagine this.  You know that awesome feeling of euphoria you get when you draft someone and someone else in the room yells, "Fuck you! I've been waiting for that guy the last 6 picks!" (To 10th member:  Imagine when you do a draft and another human is also present, and said human interacts with you, its cool, trust me). Well that feeling of crushing another man's spirit would be amped up to 11 if the newly proposed model passes.  Let me paint a little picture for you.  The Pucketeers keeps yammering on and on about a guy he feels poised to have an uber breakout year.  Three rounds later he's squirming around like a 3 year old doing the pee-pee dance.  "Jean Segura!" he yells whilst fist pumps abound.  "Fuck you, I'm keepin him!" fires back Business and Leather.  How good did that feel?  Shit could get crazy.  Shit could get real.  Shit could get crazy real.

****Editor's Note:  Rather than edit the previous text, I decided to add this tidbit:  This is still in the proposal stage, but something fun to think about.  It would also render the use of an online Yahoo! draft impossible as we would have no way to remove keepers so that someone couldn't draft them if they were secretly being kept.  Also, the person keeping each player would have to pay attention to when their secret player's 2013 ADP is rolling around.  But an added caveat to the above mentioned chaotic fun would be, what if a drunken manager lets a players' ADP spot pass by?  That player is lost and available to the other 9 managers now.  What intensity that would bring in the middle rounds when scrotums are aplenty and distractions are as far as the eye can see?  Would people purposefully be running shell games trying to get people to not pay attention?  I say, if it adds to the madness that is Draft Day, we owe it to ourselves to at least give it a long hard ponder.