My first league has filled up. I started a second one, details on that one are at the bottom of this story.
My annual free Yahoo Fantasy baseball league is online. As in years past, I’ve asked folks from my site to come and play. If you’re interested, I’d love to have you, but please don’t join if you don’t want to stay the entire season. There’s nothing more fun than people who sign up and then are inactive.
We will be conducting a live draft again, and the date I’ve set is Friday March 11th at 8PM Central Time. I would have picked earlier, but my wife and I have family in for our baby shower the weekend before that. If too many people object, I’ll look at another time, but with this starting so late, there will likely not be a lot of slots available for drafts.
If you’re interested in joining the second league, here’s the info:
Fantasy URL: http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/b1
League ID: 53220
Password: cansecoroids
BTW, if you joined either of the leagues, please post something in the msg area of the fantasy league telling people who you are. In the first league I’m “Steroids Good!” (which I’ll explain later, it’s a joke), and in the second I’m “The Blalock Bunch”.

I just read tonight where Yahoo Fantasy Baseball lives! There’d normally be thousands of leagues drafted and many ready to go, but due to MLB.com’s attempt to make itself the center of all fantasy baseball (or so it seemed), the Yahoo fantasy baseball site looked closed. Indeed, until today, the message “The 2004 season is over, thanks for playing” was there. However, tonight, I read this:
Registration for the 2005 season will begin shortly after midnight (ET) on Thursday, February 17.
Yay! My Fantasy League lives on. As regular visitors of my site know, I’ve had a league I’ve done for the last 4 or 5 years or so, this means I’ll set something up on Thursday, so we can have a live draft for my league as usual. Hopefully those who sign up will stick around for the whole season (Hi Owen!). Anyway, I’ll have more details on this at the end of the week.

This afternoon, I have a few updates to the site.
First off, is a proper update to the 40 man roster and the spring training invites. The info I posted the other day came from the Dallas Morning News, who seemed to do a half assed job of getting the information together this year, as it was a direct copy from the Rangers Official Site. The problem with that is the Rangers site doesn’t have the complete information. I was informed by someone on my forums that the Ft Worth Star Telegram had the full spring training roster, including several non roster invites that weren’t listed on the Rangers site/DMN site. Additionally, it had uniform numbers for all the players, no matter how obscure they were. This is good, so I’ve updated my roster page and my uniform number history section with all the current numbers.
Second is the schedule. I noticed yesterday that I still did not have times or TV schedule information up for the regular season. Furthermore, the 3 or so TV games from spring training also weren’t listed. The Rangers site did list five spring training games on TV (3 by FSN, 2 by ESPN), so I added them to my site. However, their site did not list TV information for the regular season. I was informed again by someone on my forums that the 2005 Printable Schedule from the Rangers site has the full schedule information. So today I brought my 2005 schedule up to speed with all the TV channels and times for all the games. Check it out.
It is odd that the Rangers have the full schedule online via the printable schedule, but not the regular one. However, they don’t have their act together with the roster, so I guess I’m not surprised, really.

In my update from the other day I wrote about my annual fantasy baseball league being delayed, most likely. I had read where mlb.com had bought rights to stuff like this, and was looking to license out rights to some places.
Looks like the Yahoo league I use has been caught up in all this. The one thing that I always insisted upon is that the game be free. No way am I paying to do this. The moment I have to pay is the moment it’s no fun anymore.
Anyway, there’s more to this situation than I was aware of. Adam Morris wrote about this over on his Rangers blog, and since he’s essentially already invented the wheel on this writeup, I won’t try too – just go read his entry. An enlightening read.
UPDATE: There’s also another great read on rotoworld talking more about what’s going on, including some pretty scary bully tactics from MLB. Check it out.

This afternoon I made a few site changes. Nothing truly major, but I thought I’d point it out.
1) I eliminated the “Ballparks” section. It was something where I was going to have a page about all 30 ballparks, and some older ones. I started it like 4 years ago, and it never got anywhere, really. So I just up and deleted the minimal work I had done on it. You can find a ton of ballpark info here.
2) I updated the Links page to have some more current information, and reorganized it a bit.
3) I redid the Ballpark in Arlington Page, as I accidentally deleted it when I deleted the ballpark info in Item 1.
4) I rewrote all of the text on the intro page to my Seat Selector page, as I will be having another update to that hopefully before the season starts, with some more new pictures of non seating areas of the park.
5) Some miscelleanous background information relative to server operations – in other words, things you wouldn’t see. :)
Looking forward to the new season – pitchers and catchers report next week! Yay! :)

As regular visitors to my site know, I’ve run a fantasy baseball league for the last several years over at Yahoo’s baseball fantasy sports site. It was free, and for me, was a fun fantasy league (meaning it wasn’t deathly serious).
Anyway, a month or so ago, there was an announcement that MLB.com had gained the rights to MLBPA (or some such stuff, I forget the deal exactly now), but the bottom line is that it gave ’em a monopoly on fantasy baseball. They were allowed to sublicense the information back out to others so they could do their own things, though. An interesting thing is that the MLB Players website (which was http://www.bigleaguers.com will be taken over by MLB.com and will be called http://www.mlbplayers.com. Thing is, BigLeagers.com was run by Yahoo, so I’m not sure how all of this will play out.
I wrote Yahoo last week about this, and they responded back with their 2005 Fantasy offerings had not been set yet. Usually, they have the preliminaries set up so that folks can do their drafts and whatnot. I’m starting to think Yahoo might not have a league this year, which would stink, as I looked at MLB.com’s listed offerings, and none of them were like the league I used to run at Yahoo.
If I hear anything further on the matter, I’ll be sure and update.

This post doesn’t really have much to do with the Texas Rangers per se, but since this is my site, I thought I’d mention it here. :)
My wife and I just this week replaced all the blinds in our house, the old ones were pretty crappy. It looked like they were original equipment from when our house was built in 1986. Anyway, this week we have all brand new ones that look great. I took this opportunity to get a “mural blind” for my home office. It’s got a picture of the Texas Rangers logo on it.. Aw hell, just take a look. I think they look pretty cool (you can click on the pic for a larger version). :)

I’ve decided to stay out of commenting on Magglio Ordonez. After being teased with Carlos Delgado, I don’t see much possibility of Ordonez becoming a Ranger. I thought Delgado might, but I see little to no chance of Ordonez.
So I decided not to keep up with all the minuatue of that. :)

Didn’t pay much attention to baseball today. Today was a football day for me, and I have to say my hometown Iggles finally got it done, getting to the Super Bowl. So it was a good day for me. :)

Effective immediately, there’s a new look for my site. I’ve been looking for an easier way to do news, and it finally occurred to me. “Blogify it!” :) I’ve been running a personal blog for some time now, but until recently, it never occurred to me to update my various sites with blog software for news. So here I am. It took me a few days to get this all down, setting up the css and the templates so it mostly looked like the old site was hard, and then I had a display problem with Internet explorer. I finally got that fixed, so here it is! It was designed to work best with your screen resolution to be 1024×768 or higher. It mostly works with 800×600, but there’s a small display issue with some browsers there. And 640×480? Uh, get a video card, please. But if you’re 1024×768 or higher, you should not see any problems.
This new news system will allow people to search the news that I post, which wasn’t a real option before. However, it’s only going forward. I went backwards with my old news only till the end of this past season. I didn’t see the point in entering all my old news into the system (I first started this site in December of 1998), especially since I’d have to do it by hand (if I can get old news imported automatically, I might revisit this decision).
Additionally, this new system will allow you to comment on my news stories and whatnot without having to visit my forums (which are still very much open and alive). This is just another way of communicating. Plus, being blog software I get to be connected to other blogs of relevant content, when it’s appropriate.
But the bottom line is that it will make things easier for me, and I’m also trying to insert a little more of “myself” into things. In the past, I’ve made comments here and there, but on the whole, I haven’t said much about individual news stories. I hope to change that. I don’t think I’ll ever be anywhere NEAR as verbose as Jamey Newberg is, but I hope I can say something once in awhile that people might like.
Finally, I’ve removed a few options from the menu on the left. One is “News”. Given that the news page on the site comes up when you first hit the site, I’ve removed that option. If you want to get “Home” on here, click the baseball in the upper left hand corner. I’ve also removed the “From Joe’s Mind” option. Mostly because I’ve incorporated all the old entries from that location into this news system. I have categories here (if you look to the options to your right), so you can see all those that way if you want to. I’ll just be putting all the Joe’s Mind comments (which weren’t many anyway) into this new news layout, since it will also have commentary from me.
Let me know what you think of the new system by leaving a comment – you can do that right below this text by clicking on the Comments link – it’s between the time and the word “Trackback” (trackback is something used to connect blog entries to another blog’s entries).