This season I am going to include you, the reader, on the journey of my NL-Only team “The Franchise”.  This series could be considered a team blog, but it will also be a tool to give insight on how to approach many aspects of fantasy baseball.  This will be my tenth year participating in this keeper/auction league, and is currently my longest consecutive tenure of any league I play in.  Honestly before I became a member of the State House League fantasy baseball was a mundane hobby of mine, but it soon turned into much, much more for me.

To give a short background on the league, it was started close to 20 years ago for Republican lobbyists, but has since evolved into an eclectic group of owners, ranging from college friends and work peers of current owners.  It is normally a 10 team league which rosters 24 active players (normal NFBC roster plus an extra pitcher).  Each team is allowed $270 on draft day and may keep up to three players from the previous year at their salary, but can only keep a player for one year.   Each team is allowed five reserve spots on their roster, but can only use them for players that are on the disabled list, or demoted to the minors.  A FAAB budget of $100 is used to acquire free agents, and players may only be acquired if they are currently active on a MLB roster at the time when waiver transactions are processed, and then rosters are set for the following week - pretty straight forward.

I think writing this series throughout the season will put me at a disadvantage to my league mates because I will discuss my thought process on waiver priorities, possible trade targets, draft/trade strategies, player evaluation and so on, but at the same time, with most members participating in this league for at least five seasons now, we all pretty much know each other’s tendencies.

Expect at least an article heading into every weekend discussing possible transaction moves, and probably throughout the week from time to time depending how much action among owners is happening.  I know in my next contribution I will be discussing the changing landscape in the NL player pool, which is dictating possible keepers in a different way for other league owners (and myself) heading into the league’s auction on March 31st.