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Greenbears Update -- August 2000
GFL Now Open For Business In this month's issue:
------------------------------------------------------------- In With The OldAfter the usual anticipation, the time has finally arrived for the Greenbears Football League season to begin. This year, the Greenbears will use Yahoo Sports as our football stat provider for the first time. Yahoo has earned the honor, as they have done excellent work with our online leagues in other sports. If you haven't been active in Greenbears leagues for awhile (and unfortunately, some of you haven't been), your Yahoo IDs and passwords have not changed. Many are the same as or similar to the ones that you used on Sandbox. (If you don't remember them, ask the Commissioner for assistance, by writing to our league e-mail address, thegreenbears@hotmail.com .) To guarantee spots to our regular owners, the Commissioner has already entered teams for most of you (those whom he has helped sign up for Yahoo leagues previously.) Signups for the remaining owners are now open at Yahoo Sports. If you need to sign up, the league name is Greenbears Football League, and the password is "maximum". Although a couple of spots still remain to be filled, that should not be a problem. The league will not be open to outside players this year, but owners who have played before in Greenbears leagues are almost always welcome to participate. Since Yahoo allows customized rules, look for a scoring system that is very similar to ones we have used in previous non-Sandbox seasons. Having a live draft is always great, but unfortunately, that option will not be possible this season -- our owners just have too many conflicting schedules. So, an "autopick" draft will be held by Yahoo. That means all owners will have to rank their players online (in a single overall list), or submit a proxy list to the Commissioner. The league's draft status will be set to "ready" on August 25; so changes to your player lists must be complete by 8 a.m. on August 25. Yahoo Sports has rules, scoring, and other info online for you, so check it out. Sign up now if you aren't in yet; and if you are, feel free to start ranking your players. You can also change your team name or even your helmet color - they've thought of almost everything. We also have some important information for you on our own GFL rulebook page, so take a look, and good luck in the draft!
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College FB OpenDon't forget that your college football contest picksheets are also due by August 25. Please make your first half picks and return them to the Commissioner. We discussed how the contest games were selected in last month's newsletter. No major changes were made in the contest this year. You should visit the Greenbears Commissioner's college football website at About.com for the latest features, forums, and chat rooms, all through the off-season. This month, our season previews will continue. You might get some valuable contest tips by reading those.
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No Big Deal?The Greenbears Ultra Baseball League action continues to be exciting. We've had some great games this summer with Diamond Mind Baseball (DMB), and I hope all of you are checking out the weekly box scores online. In fact, we've had so many great games, that we can't leave all the best games online -- there's not enough room on our server for all the boxes. I have been removing unnecessary pages and photos from our league website, so that we can have more of the most current stuff. If you don't see something that should be on there, just let me know. Remember that the Ultra schedule will double up each week in August, so we can concentrate on football in September. The trading deadline passed by on July 31. As expected, a large number of talented players were not traded and will enter next spring's draft. The latest updated rosters (with current contract lengths) will be available online by the end of the season. There were only two trades that beat the deadline, but they were good ones. The Lions traded Pedro Martinez and Derek Jeter to the Blues for Randy Johnson and Juan Gonzalez. The Aces traded Rafael Palmeiro, Pat Hentgen, and Bret Saberhagen to the Chargers for Jason Giambi, Kevin Brown, and Dustin Hermanson. These two trades were (as usual) so each team could give two players new contracts, and give away two players who were going to be free agents unless traded. In the Greenbears single-season rotisserie league on Yahoo Sports, Jeff B. and your Commissioner are still battling back and forth for first place. Also, the other four owners are nearly even for third place. This would be a really good league if we could get the same level of enthusiasm for fantasy baseball that we have for fantasy football.
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Fantasy, Roto, or DMB?Continuing our baseball discussion, let's look at some recurring issues in our leagues. First, our trade situation is becoming even worse than NAFTA. The concept of trading players, in order to keep from completely losing your team's valuable assets, is still a good one (if it remains limited in scale). We have had this rule for several years, and until the last couple of summers, most trades were done in the offseason (usually right before the draft). But now, almost all trades occur in mid-season. As a result, this rule isn't working like it should. In DMB, mid-season trades force major changes to the teams' lineups; and even in a fantasy league, it can become hard to tell the players without a scorecard. Therefore, I am studying the rules in regard to trades and contract extensions, with the hope of finding a better solution for everyone. It is likely that there will be some type of rules change issued soon, concerning trading deadlines and related contract extensions, and becoming effective at the beginning of Hot Stove League. Next, I would like to know everyone's opinion about the single-season rotisserie league, in comparison to the ultra fantasy leagues that we used to have. Previously, we could not have an ultra fantasy league (with "keeper" players) online, unless we paid somebody big bucks. But with Yahoo, it is now possible for us to hold our own drafts offline and submit the results, and therefore have ultra rosters in an online fantasy league. Do we want to have an ultra fantasy league? We dropped it this year because we didn't expect we could have an ultra league online, and the enthusiasm for the offline leagues was waning. (It was no longer worth the effort to buy the software and stats packages.) I believed that trying the rotisserie-style (10 categories) league on Yahoo would be more interesting than continuing the fantasy (points) league offline. The roto format was something we hadn't tried before, and online leagues now seem to be more popular than offline contests. I also felt enthusiastic about taking the ultra league rosters to DMB. But the support has just not been there for DMB or the roto league, although I have enjoyed both. DMB is the world's closest thing to managing a real baseball franchise, but it's played entirely offline (although I have done everything possible to cover the results in detail on our website). Roto-style is a better format than I previously thought. But ours isn't an ultra league, and we've seen that you can still get knocked out of the race early in roto, just as in a fantasy league. I now wonder if we should be playing the DMB simulated games in addition to the ultra fantasy league (which is what we did last year), instead of as a replacement for it. (I just didn't want to do too much, but then we went ahead and started an online roto league anyway). It would not be difficult to take our current ultra rosters from Diamond Mind, and resume playing our ultra fantasy league in the spring. Here's the bottom line: we can go back to having an ultra fantasy league next year, or have another single-season roto league, but I don't think we can do both. I intend to continue playing DMB games, in any event; but I would like some feedback on whether or not other owners are following those results on our website. Another thing that has been discussed is opening up our leagues to outside players. There is now a website that helps match people to leagues that need owners, and vice versa. I would support this, if we can let some quality people in who would participate in the leagues. This would also apply to other sports. What do you think we should do next season? Let me know your thoughts, and let's have some more discussion of this topic.
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General NewsJeff B. is again leading the NASCAR contest, as your Commissioner continues to mismanage his drivers. Go to Yahoo Sports Racing to fix your starting lineup of race drivers and check the scores. Our features page has new links to stories about Reds Day at the Hall of Fame, the postponement of baseball realignment, and other baseball features as well. This page is updated periodically, and continues to be one of the best on our website. You can read about all the things we have discussed on our Greenbears website at:
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Well, that's all for this month. We'll have another newsletter in September, with ultra baseball playoff news and pro football draft results.
-The Commissioner
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