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This Year: Pitching!Today was our annual fantasy baseball draft. I've now recruited two cow-orkers for the league: Subrata two years ago, and Syd this year. Syd's probably more of a baseball fan than I am: Season tickets to the Athletics, lifelong Astros fan, serious stathead. He's played fantasy ball before, but not in a number of years. He was pretty enthusiastic about joining the league, though, and apparently spent nearly as much time as I did preparing for it. Our host, Keith Woolner, always throws a good party for the draft. He puts up large sheets on the walls around his dining room (where we sit) to write all the players we draft on. He's got a DSL connection with an ethernet hub for those of us with our laptops with us to use. And he brings in sandwich food, drinks and assorted munchies for the day. The draft always starts around noon, but most of us show up earlier to set things up and hang around and chat. This is the first year I brought a laptop to draft with - my Titanium Powerbook. I set up most of my draft data in an Excel spreadsheet, with some ancillary files with extra info to keep track of. Plus, I got there early enough to use the ethernet hub (Subrata got there right at noon, and the 8-port hub was full). Of course, I spent the morning worrying that my laptop would suddenly go on the fritz and I'd be up the creek for the day. But as you know, I worry too much. Everything went fine. (By the way, Debbi was still feeling ill, having gone from being congested to being marginally less congested and having a cough. She was up every hour last night coughing - which I barely noticed since I was exhausted and slept soundly all night. She went home when I left for the draft, and I think pretty much rested and slept for the rest of the day, which is probably just what she needed.) Subrata had the first pick in the draft, and of course he took Barry Bonds. After accounting for all the players people held over from last year (according to our rules), there were three players I'd have been happy to take with my first pick: Bonds, Gary Sheffield, and Mike Mussina. I had the fourth pick overall (having finished 13th out of 16 last year), but fortunately the third pick was Jeff Bagwell, so I got to take Mussina. Well, I won't bore you with every detail of the draft. I'll only say that the draft is half of what makes the league fun every year, hanging out with knowledgeable friends and making snarky comments about the players drafted (or not drafted, as the case may be). We all got in plenty of good zingers, and had a good time, wrapping up a bit after 7:00, which is about when we usually end. Subrata and I hung outside of Keith's house for a while afterwards chatting about our teams and baseball generally. I'm reasonably happy with my team this year - I think my pitching could be absolutely great. This would be nice, as my pitching sucked last year and was my undoing. My offense needs some work, though. We'll see. Anyway, another fine and fun draft. This year, maybe I'll at least finish in the middle of the pack.
 Hard to complain about the weather these days. It was sunny and mild today - just perfect. Of course, we were inside all day. Usually I feel guilty staying inside on a lovely day (despite the fact that most days in the Bay Area are lovely), but not today. That's how much I love draft day.
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