ATL

FINALLY, my final 1L semester of law school is over, and I can return to making entries on the blog without countless reading and writing assignments looming over me (I'm not counting the law review write-on competition entry due in just over a week).

So I've been kicking around ideas to get this blog running with frequency that a) are not the personal posts that I post once in a while, and b) are more than merely repeating statistics that you could find elsewhere on the Internet. As much as I love the Pittsburgh Pirates, I don't feel like becoming another Pirate blogger, when there are countless other blogs that do a fantastic job of covering the Bucs.

Enter the All-Timers League (the ATL). The plan is to have a draft of all the great major league baseball players since 1901 (the American League's inception) and create teams, probably using their average per-season statistics. I hope a sufficient number of people have interest in this. The amount of in-season manager involvement will probably be minimal, and will most likely be limited to making lineup changes resulting from injury. Unlike other replay leagues that use games like Strat-O-Matic, I plan to use the highly-acclaimed computer baseball simulator Out of the Park Baseball to carry out this ultimate of fantasy leagues. The game length will be the classic 154 games. As was done before division play, the top two teams (if the teams are not broken into two leagues) will meet in a best-of-seven All-Time World Series. We would be using the current 25-man roster limit; the manager can split up the position player-pitcher ratio as he pleases. The only restriction I will make on the players being drafted (besides playing after 1901, obviously) is to not include those who played completely in the Negro Leagues, only because I am not sure if they are included at all in the computer simulation and I do not know how their stats would compare to their major league contemporaries.

I hope we can get a solid amount of willing participants and find a day we can draft players. I will fill you all in on everything that I have not included in this post if you are interested. I hope this can be fun on a number of levels for not only myself as the commissioner of the league, but also everyone else who wants to participate.