I'm 48, married with a 16 year old daughter, and own a very small machine shop with my brother and sister.  I've been working there since my dad started it in 1972 when I was a junior in high school.  I grew up in a house that had a machine shop in the basement and thought that people that had game rooms instead of lathes were oddballs.  My grandfather also had a machine shop in his basement, so you can see where I got that idea.  My brother and I are lifelong Pirates fans and share a season ticket at PNC Park, and it's a great seat right behind the plate.

I've been playing Strat since I sent in a dime and a page out of a comic book in 1968.  I was a subscriber to the Strat-O-Matic Review and Strat Fan from their first issues to their last ones and even drove from Pittsburgh to Kalamazoo to attend the first Strat convention in 1972.  I play in something like 9 leagues, and I like every one of them but the one I joined a month ago.  My brother conned me into joining this wacky current season league he's in that has some totally off the wall rules, a salary system, 3 maybe 4 separate drafts, and a bunch of managers who are almost evenly divided into predators and prey. That league is so weird that good players are bad and bad players are good.  Honestly.  The most valuable player you can have there is a utility infielder who plays 3 positions and bats 101 times.  Two of them would be even better.  Chone Figgins is an MVP there.  There have been drafts ongoing there since I joined and there is at least one more after the current one is done.  First there was the restricted free agent draft, which was actually some kind of an insane bidding war.  Then I joined in time for the unrestricted free agent draft, which was more of a 4-man bidding war because the other 12 had spent so much 'money' in the previous draft that they were bordering on bankruptcy.  Then came the rookie draft, and I had the first pick and took Joe Mauer.  After this there is a draft of everybody that wasn't drafted in the other drafts, then a contract buyout period, then I guess a draft of the bought out players.

This will be the first time I've participated in a league start-up draft since 1974, and I'm really looking forward to it.  I think I must have been smarter then, because I ended up with a team that had Schmidt, Stargell, Parker, Winfield, Monday, Cash, and Rooker.