If you are interesting in pursuing this opportunity, send me an e-mail to joe@viewfromthebleachers.com

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This year we will setup a league on MLB.com’s Fantasy Open. There are a few reasons why I chose this platform to host the league.

1. As a user of Yahoo for all of my fantasy play, I have grown frustrated with the fact that a user has to pay to have the live scoring be part of the league experience. MLB.com offers that as part of the free game.
2. I have always enjoyed Fantasy Football because the decisions for the week can be made on one day. Fantasy Baseball has always required daily lineup changes, which can become cumbersome. MLB.com’s league uses the weekly lineup setting.
3. I can’t stand how people constantly add/drop starting pitchers each day to rack up K’s and Wins. This isn’t much of a strategy if you ask me. In this setup, a team does not draft individual pitchers, but rather a full team’s staff. For example, if you draft the Cubs pitching staff, you get the whole lot of them that week. It’s similar to the system used in fantasy football with defense.

The Fantasy Challenge this year will work as follows:

• Rays of Light will be represented by Scott Caruso, the site’s editor. He will choose five of his readers to compete for the Rays of Light squad.
• View From The Bleachers will be represented by myself. I will choose five of my readers to compete for the VFTB squad.
• Each team member will manage their team with the goal of winning the league. Points will be given based on order of finish with 12 points going for first place and so on down to 1 point for last.
• At the end of the season, the standings points earned by each team will be totaled up to determine which blog won. The winning blog will see it’s readers receive a book of their choice from the prize library.
• The league will begin with a live draft on March 24th (my birthday) at 9pm EDT.

If you are interested in representing our team, send me an e-mail and we’ll discuss why you might be worthy. You can contact me at

About a year-and-a-half ago, I spent a good number of hours trying to convince Dave Studeman that publishing book a year wasn’t enough, that in addition to The Hardball Times Annual, our annual review of the previous season, we needed to publish a second book that looked forward to the next season, and so The Hardball Times Season Preview was born.

This year’s effort includes 240 pages of team essays, player comments for almost 900 different players, projections, and other goodies. We’ve adopted Bill James’ “Team-in-a-Box” format for the essays and tried to maintain a similarly short and incisive style in the player comments.

The team chapters are written by bloggers and THT writers who follow their team every day, and the result is the kind of commentary you can’t get from just looking at the numbers or some news stories.

And if you want to look at numbers, we have plenty of those too. Chris Constancio and I spent thousands of hours revamping the THT projection system, and the results look really good. Besides projecting all the normal statistics, we’ve projected fielding performance for hitters and fantasy values for all players.

We also extended our projections three years into the future, so for each player (save for a few very old ones for whom projecting more than one year is an impossible exercise) we’ve listed their projected change in performance between 2008 and 2010. Reds fans will be heartened by those numbers.

By purchasing the Season Preview, you gain access to a spreadsheet with numbers for all the players included in the book, and many more. We’ll try to update that spreadsheet a couple times as the final free agents pick teams and spring training sorts out the depth charts.

We’ve also included a couple of essays in the back of the book. The first, by yours truly, attempts to predict career statistics and players’ odds of getting to various milestones—basically an attempt to improve on the Favorite Toy. We provide those predicted numbers for a few hundred players in the appendix, and purchasers can also download a spreadsheet containing that information for every player who appeared in the major leagues in 2007.

The second essay highlights prospective rookies, and makes for great reading for prospect watchers, fantasy players, and all those who just want to know which young players they should be watching in 2008.

And of course, since this is THT, we’ve scattered some graphics throughout the book. Tuck drew up a phenomenal series of his own predictions for the coming season in cartoon form, and we also have some graphs that will help fantasy players better understand which hitters provide value in which categories.

Since I’m afraid of leaving loose ends, I will also add that the book contains our projected standings and a player index to make it easy to track down which page your favorite player is listed on. Now I think I got it all, but honestly, there’s so much material in the Season Preview, I still might have missed something.

If this sounds all sounds like something that would interest you, please get on over to our publisher’s website, and pre-order it—the book will ship in a couple weeks (and please support THT by ordering from the publisher). If you feel like you want to learn more, go ahead and read my article previewing some of the more interesting projections in the Season Preview and see the sample pages we provided from the World Champion Red Sox’s section.

I think you’ll agree that two books are better than one.

References and Resources
In case you’re wondering who are authors are, here’s the rundown:

Jeff Sackmann of The Hardball Times
Ben Jacobs of The Hardball Times
Larry Mahnken of Replacement Level Yankees Weblog
Cork Gaines of Rays Index
John Brattain of The Hardball Times
Mike Pindelski of The Bard’s Room
Ryan Richards of Let’s Go Tribe
Brian Borawski of Tiger Blog
Bradford Doolittle of Kansas City Star
Will Young of Will’s Title is Too Long
Sean Smith of Anaheim Angels All the Way
Sal Baxamusa of The Hardball Times
Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing
Scott Lucas of The Ranger Rundown
John Beamer of Chop-n-Change
Craig Strain of FishStripes
Dave Studenmund of The Hardball Times
Jason Weitzel of Beer Leaguer
Chris Needham of Capitol Punishment
Joe Aiello of View From the Bleachers
Justin Inaz of On Baseball & the Reds
Lisa Gray of The Astros Dugout
Eric Johnson of Brew Crew Ball
Pat Lackey of Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke?
Larry Borowsky of Viva El Birdos
Jim McLennan of AZ Snakepit
Brandi Griffin of Purple Row
Aaron Sapiro of Rockin’ the Ravine
Geoff Young of Ducksnorts

Diaries are the newest addition to The View From The Bleachers in response to the widely successful system piloted on the Sports Blog Network. Diaries allow the community to blog their thoughts in posts of their own on the site. Essentially it’s a blog within the blog.

Why should I care about diaries?

The addition of diaries will serve two purposes to make the site better:

1. They will increase the amount of new content on the site each day.
2. They allow you to not only have a voice, but also to hear the voice of other very intelligent fans that read the site, but aren’t currently on staff.

What do I need to be able to post a diary?

The only requirement to be able to post a diary is that you are registered as a user of the site. You can sign up by clicking the “Contribute” icon located in the right sidebar. This will take you to the sign up screen where you will choose your login and enter your e-mail address. From there, we will send you an activation e-mail for you to activate your account. Doing so will send me an e-mail saying that you registered and will send you an e-mail with your temporary password. We have it set to default to marking you as a subscriber, which means no diary privileges. When I get notified of your sign up, I’ll contact you to assure you are not a spammer. Once you reply back to me, I will list you as a contributor and you will be free to post diaries as often as you like.

How do I post a diary?

Once you’re registered and listed as a diary contributor, you will want to login using the link in the navigation box at the top of the right sidebar. Once you login, you will be taken to a dashboard that looks like this:

From there, click on the option that says “Write a Post” and enter your title and post.

Once you’re all finished and have looked over the spelling and things of that nature, it’s time to post it to the site. Because we’re in the beginning stages of diaries, all of them are subject to moderation. By clicking the submit for review button, it posts it in the moderation queue for me to review, but it doesn’t send me any notification that it’s there. The easiest way to make sure your diary is review ASAP is to click the box that says “ready to post”

By checking this box, it sends me an e-mail instantly that a post is ready for me to look at. Once I approve the post, which is just to prevent spammers, it will be linked in the sidebar in the diaries section for all to ready and comment on.

Will my diary ever see its way to the front page?

Definitely. One of the things we’re most excited about is the ability to move high quality diary posts to the front page as featured posts. Consider it an audition for the show. Who knows, you may even find an e-mail in your box inviting you to join the staff.

Are there things I should focus on in my writing?

One of the best things to remember is to write things that people will want to read. For example, posting about something that is already on the front page may not be a great idea. Remember to keep the posts free of profanity and keep it focused on baseball or sports in general. The most important thing is to have fun with it. Talk it up to your friends. Get them to sign up and let’s start growing this community.

Do diaries show up in RSS feeds?

Yes, the diary entries show up in the regular RSS feed for the site. They also have their own feed which is linked in the left sidebar.

If you have any questions, send me an e-mail:

Happy Blogging!!!!

Also, our friend Phil Zuber caught up with Len Kasper in the latest edition of his podcast as part of Cubs Obsession. - (Source)

Reader Diary System - If you’re familiar with Bleed Cubbie Blue and other blogs on the Sports Blog Network, you’ve probably seen that the readers have the opportunity to create user accounts and then post what are called diaries. A diary is basically a blog within a blog, and allows their readers to post content of their own which is linked in the sidebar and available for other readers to read and comment on. We’re putting the final pieces in place to allow you guys to do that as well. In the next week or so, we should have the system in place to allow you to register for an account and contribute to the site. This has me excited because I know you have good things to say, but often no avenue with which to present them. You never know, you may even be featured on the homepage or even asked to join the staff.

Improved RSS capabilities - For some, this may not make sense at all, but if you are an RSS junkie like myself, you will probably be excited about this. We’re putting together the ability for readers to subscribe to a lot more content, but in a specialized way. You will have the ability to subscribe to individual authors (i.e. Rob, Matt, etc.), comments, individual categories, etc. It should make for good times. If you have no idea what RSS is, Problogger.net has a great explanation here. Go check it out.

Better Sorting Options - If you notice now, our posts are broken down into categories, which are hyper links. When you click that category, it takes you to an archive of all posts in that category. The “General” category is currently by far the largest, as most of our old posts were lumped into that one. Moving forward, we’ll be good about specializing them into correct categories. You’ll also notice that at the base of some posts are tags, which are certain hot topics contained in the post. These are also links that will take you to all posts containing those tags. This should allow you to quickly reference a post if you wanted to use it to refer back to a comment or something of that nature.

Misc. Other Additions - The other improvements are simple. Recent posts will be linked in the sidebar to eliminate the need to scroll down. We’ve also improved our comment spam filtering system.

One of the primary reasons behind these changes had to do with the reader survey we did late in the season. Your feedback is what prompted me to seek out a way to add the things you wanted to see. Feedback is very important, so don’t ever hesitate to give it. I hope you’re pleased with the new additions. I will be keeping my eye out for bugs, but if you notice something, let us know. Also, I am currently looking for a volunteer or two or three to moderate the diaries to prevent spammers from killing it. In addition, they would be our eyes for content that was either repetitive (i.e. 5 diaries about the Cubs trading Angel Pagan) or offensive. This is a person that is on the internet consistently. If you might be interested, let me know: