POSTED BY Coley Ward ON 5:13 pm, March 7, 2008 - POSTED IN Fantasy Spin, umpbump
2008 will go down in history as the year America elected its first African-American or woman president, the year the Coen Brothers finally won their “Best Picture” Oscar, and the year Umpbump finally took the plunge into fantasy baseball.
The Umpbump fantasy league will include 12 teams. It will be a head to head league. It’s also a Yahoo Premium league, which means lots of bells and whistles including prizes for the winning team. Each of the Umpbump writers (except Nick) — Paul, Sarah, Alejandro and I — will have teams. That leaves seven open spots. Entry is free.
The draft will be held on Wednesday, March 19 at 8 p.m. EST.
If you’re interested in participating in the Umpbump league, leave your name and qualifications in the comments section. We’ll pick the eight most worthy candidates.
Let the games begin!
J-Gao 
Kurt Hironimus 
Evan Hochschild 
Stephen Higdon 
Kyle Huffman 
fatguy 
Caitlin Grace 
Joel 
Larry P 
Michael Sullivan 
Bryan Inman 
dragonr 
Ryan 
soh_pioro 
I’ve been playing fantasy baseball since 2003, mostly on Yahoo! Sports, but also on ESPN CBS Sportsline, and MLB GameDay, so I’ve had to draft using different scoring and/or rankings settings. I’m primarily a redraft, 5×5 All-MLB player, meaning I don’t have any record (or sometimes even experience) to show of when it comes to rotisserie, keeper, league-only, or auction settings. I’m fairly obsessive about baseball, though, and read about 40 blogs/sites on a regular basis, participate on the Sons of Sam Horn (Red Sox) message board, and even have a blog of my own — though the latter is the most neglected of these practices, though competing with professional bloggers/writers (which I think I could) would give me a reason to upgrade my attention-level.
As far as baseball itself goes, I’m 22, I’ve been a Red Sox fan since Nomar first started playing in the big leagues, love baseball cards, and even got a chance to play varsity ball in high school. I watch a lot of games on MLBtv, including Spring Training when there’s an interesting matchup, and read advanced statistical research that catches my eye (Bill James is a good place to start). I develop player-crushes pretty frequently, too, and regardless of how they pan out as fantasy contributors, tend to keep up on them religiously (Jason Stokes, Billy Traber, and Josh Bard to name a few).
As for performance, I’ve played mostly public leagues, and out of the ones I took seriously (every year before last I’d have an all Red Sox public league team) I’ve had fairly good success: in the seven full-season leagues I played last year, I made the championship in four, won two, and finished third in the others). Before that, from ’03 to ’06, I won seven championships, and was runner-up six times (only 2/13 were private leagues — though those were arguably more competitive). I tend to have off-years after big winning years, though, so I’m trying to be as fresh and inventive as I can this year so not to overly trust habits that worked for me last season.
Finally, even though I might have seemed pretty boastful in this post, I was just trying to make a credible argument for myself. I’m really down-to-earth, love being sarcastic and good-natured in drafts and on message boards over the season, and love being in active leagues with girls/guys that like to have a good time.
My Yahoo! ID is ima_scab_baby (alternate co-account with a friend: ralent_entertainment), my AIM is lowesox, and my e-mail is lowesox@gmail.com (alternate: lowesox@hotmail.com). (I like alternates…)
Look forward to getting a chance to play with you, should I get it.