Thirty years and counting

I have been in the same fantasy baseball league for thirty years.

The same league. Mostly the same men. Some of them I have known longer than I have known my wife. None of us are as good at this as we used to think we were, and none of us are as bad at this as the others think we are — which is, I suspect, the whole point.

What you’ll find in this section: dispatches from the season as it unfolds. Draft post-mortems. Trades that should not have happened. Trades that absolutely should have happened, but didn’t. The occasional in-memoriam for a wasted first-round pick. Long-running grievances adjudicated in slow motion across decades. The kind of small lore that accumulates when a group of grown men refuses to let go of a thing.

None of this is for general baseball fans. Plenty of better baseball writing exists. This is for anyone who finds the internal politics of a long-running league interesting — the way it warps over time, the way the same five jokes keep returning, the way the office of league commissioner is somehow both the most honored and the most thankless seat at the table.

No newsletter for this one. The fantasy baseball writing lives here for anyone who stumbles in. The newsletters are for the legal work and the fiction.