The Official Pine Tar League Blog: Close to Mid Season Report

With 65 games in the book, I figured it's about time to do a little report. I'm not going to review each team, but this is more of a league wide news. I want to go over a few things and let everyone know what is going on as to what I'm thinking.

-The first thing I want to go over is the poll's that I put up last week. The polls were mainly about tanking and how everyone feels about it. The first poll was to see what everyone feels that tanking actually is. I have my opinion on what it is, and others have theirs. In the majors tanking happens quite often as teams are trying to rebuild and want to get their young stars playing time in the majors to bring them along. In HBD it doesn't quite work that way. It puts teams in a position to dominate in future seasons if done correctly. The top of the draft is usually a sure bet, and teams can save money for the big International free agents, which isn't how real life works. So my question was, what is tanking. It looks like the ones that cared enough to vote think that it's not putting a competitive team on the field and not keeping guys fresh. I'll agree. That is exactly what it is. The next question was whether rules should be made to prevent as in other worlds. The reason I asked this question was because while I was looking for new owners in the off season, one of the complaints was that we didn't stop tanking in our world and teams were tanking over the past few seasons. Part of the problem in past seasons, wasn't so much tanking as it was bad owners that weren't planning on sticking around once they realized how hard it was to win it all in one season. I'm against tanking myself, but like most that voted I can live with it. My problem is when it is done over multiple seasons. In my opinion if a team isn't turning things around over 3 seasons, then they are going out of their way to put themselves in position to win things for a long time. When trying to find paying customers to take over teams, they don't want to come into situations where they have little chance of winning, and I'm not sure that is healthy for the world over the long haul.

-The second thing I wanted to put out there for everyone to know about is that I'm putting together a league committee. I've already put together some good owners and am thinking about how to go about making it work. I originally only planned on doing a few owners, but the more I look at the owners in this league, it makes it hard to leave some out. We have a great group of owners and not much turnover in the last 10 seasons. So what I'm going to do is have a league committee that is made up of the majority owners that care enough to be on it. If I have not sent you a trade chat and asked you to be a part of it, and this is something you want to be a part of then let me know via trade chat. The duties of this will be to help discuss things for the league to vote on as far as rules(if any are needed), vote on things such as a league hall of fame for the blog, vote on league rankings during the season, and be active in trying to keep this league as good as it is.

-Our league ranks as one of the top listening leagues for Knucklebones radio show that he does. Actually one of the top 4. For those of you that haven't checked it out or the web page dedicated to HBD click the link http://hbdnews.blogspot.com/. It's really good stuff. He works really hard at it and it's pretty cool. I've listened to a few of the shows, but they were for another world that I'm in. He says he'll be doing a review of our world soon. There is a chat room that you can get on while he is doing it and discuss things or you can call in. Tomorrow night Tom James, who does the rankings, is ranking all the private worlds that have done 10 seasons. He hinted that we were a top 100 which is disappointing to me since I would have thought it was at least a top 50.

-Here are my Pine Tar power rankings(done on my own) and AL dominated:
1.