Mike and John's Rebuilding Project, and How You Can Help by Drinking Free Beer in Boston!

As many of you know, my brother Mike and I have co-owned a fantasy baseball team for about ten years now. The team is called the Adirondack Black Dogs and they play in Mike's old work league when he was at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. The league is a keeper league in which you keep most of your team from year to year, and it only includes players from the American League. (This works just fine for us, since that includes all of the Red Sox and Tigers.)

The team has been a lot of fun over the years, and gives Mike and I a "virtual project" on which we can work together. If we lived within a thousand miles of one another, our joint project would probably be some money pit like restoring an old boat or car. So, our wives should realize that this baseball team has saved them tens of thousands of dollars over the years.

We've usually done pretty well in our league. We haven't won a title, but we finish in the money most years and have turned a bit of a profit overall. But last year was a disaster. We traded away all of our prospects, draft choices, and decent players to try to make a run at the title, only to have the team completely implode due to injuries over the last six weeks. We finished in fifth place out of 12 teams. Worst yet, we had nothing left to build with for 2009.

(I believe it was George Allen who said, "The future is now!" when he was coach of the Washington Redskins in the 1970s and traded away all of his draft picks for a bunch of the over-the-hill players who all got hurt, thus dooming the Redskins to years of cruddiness. Only now do I realize that perhaps he shouldn't have been my GM role model last year. But since my alternative local GM role model was Matt Millen, I guess I could've done worse, too.)

I won't drag any of you through the details of the team or the names on the roster, except to say that we still have Curtis Granderson, so at least we have one good player left to root for.

This is how those of you who have made it this far through a fantasy sports post can help. Mike and I need to get some new players at our annual player auction in Boston. Alas, neither Mike nor I can make it to Boston for our league auction on Sunday, April 5, from about 1 pm to 6 pm. If any of you reading this aren't too far from Boston, we'd gladly pay your bar and food tab for the afternoon if you would take a cell phone to our league auction and place a few bids for us under direction.

It's a pretty easy gig. Free food and drink for the afternoon for occasionally shouting out phrases like "Two dollars for Bonderman." It helps if you don't mind being laughed at when everybody else in the league points out that Bonderman's arm fell off last year, and that he had a rib removed over the winter. (This is true. He actually had one of his ribs removed so that he could pitch this year. Ugh!)

Ideally, you'd also have a laptop with wireless, so that we can set up a Skype call and chat with you directly during the auction. But a cell phone would do.

Let me know if you read this and are interested in being our bidding proxies. Or if you just want to make fun of us for bidding two bucks on a pitcher who had to have one of his ribs removed this winter. Thanks!