This will be the last year for the Draftday Fantasy League, formerly the Cardrunners League. At least as a publicly viewable experts' league and blog.

The league itself has been fantastic and hugely enjoyable, and I think it acheived many of the goals Bill and I had when we set out to create it three years ago. The level of play has been extremely high, and I'm thrilled to have met and competed against some of the best in the fantasy baseball community.  I hope to continue playing privately against many of these people, but as anyone in the community knows, the effort required in consistently creating interesting post content is high and that pales beside the effort required to grow an audience. With no one really devoted to either of those activities, it makes little sense to continue to ask Draftday to sponsor our league.

I look forward to experimenting with some new intresting formats and ideas for ways to possibly improve the game of fantasy baseball. If anyone is interested in participating in such a league, please drop me a line at eric@agmangames.com. 

As we approach the last month of our final season, it is with a very exciting finish. My Gimps currently lead the pack, but have only a few points lead over Clark Olson, Razzball, and Derek Carty. Bill is also in striking distance of a win. Particularly interesting is that Clark has been fielding a punt starting pitching team, and trying to come in just over the 1000 Innings minimum threshold with dominant finishes elsehwere, including in WHIP and ERA. Unfortunately for him, one of his last remaining starting pitchers was Bartolo Colon. Very curious to see if he can still get to 1000 Innings, and if he fails whether his moving to last in ERA and WHIP as a penalty (which gives every time but Razzball two points) winds up making the difference. 

I'd like to thank both Cardrunners and Draftday for hosting our league, without their generosity we would never have been able to get this group together in the first place.

I'd like to thank all the competitors who played over the three years, a number of these campaigns were amongst my most enjoyable fantasy competitions ever. 

Chris trades Adam Lind (recently sent to AAA) to Clark for Travis Hafner and 20 claim dollars

Gimps trade Josh Hamilton Kevin Youkilis and 56 FAAB to Chris Hill for Ian Kinsler, Andy Petite, and Ricky Romero.

I don't think I'm happy. What's fair value for Hamilton right now?

Bill sends Doubront and Kuroda to Trevor for Dustin Ackley

In a monster trade, the GImps send Jered Weaver and Daric Barton to Bill Phipps for Mark Teixera and Andrew Bailey. 

In a smaller deal, Gimps send Kyle Drabek and the remains of Brian Roberts to Derek for Alexi Casilla

Also, GIMPS ARE IN FIRST!

In what will either be a disaster or a prescient buy low, Gimps trade Ricky Romero and Grant Balfour to Chris Hill aka Perfect Fish for Max Scherzer and Jose Valverde.

We had our 10 team AL only auction on March 27th.  In many auctions I find lots of opportunities through either gross player misvaluation or poor money management. I also find people are generally too quick to write players off, and conversely too eager to pay up for the newest hyped possible stud to be. With this group however, I definitely see fewer plays I find fishy, and while I think there is still some propensity for the hyped guy here, the expert crowd seems far more reluctant to write players off as finished. 

I'm going to go team by team again, noting what I thought was good and what I thought was weak. This is not meant to make anyone look bad, but I think a critical analysis is valuable, and can only make us better fantasy managers. 

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Wasting no time as usual, the Gimps send Mark Teixera, Trevor Plouffe, and Doug Fister to Bill Phipps for Nick Swisher, Kyle Drabek, and David Price.

Check out the auction tab in the links to the right to see the 2012 auction. 

I am swamped at the moment, but I definitely had a number of thoughts I'll share when I get the chance.

Thanks to Cardrunners for hosting us these past two years, we have now switched sponsors to Draftday.com, which seems like a more natural home for us anyway.

I'm excited for the Draftday 2012 draft, which is coming up on tuesday. I'll try to have rosters up shortly thereafter.