It is the morning after and I am finally collected enough to reflect on the draft yesterday. I have already started to pour over the data to see what kind of interesting nuggets available to uncover. However, before sharing those with you I wanted to take a second to talk about yesterday’s draft and the entire Dynasty Grinders experience as a whole.
This league was born out of a few ideas with some added inspiration in November. We started recruiting for teams after Christmas. We were filled before the second week of January. Each team in the league voted in the first ever rules voting before the polling deadline. Each team paid their first two years of league dues, up front, well prior to the deadline.
It may not seem like much, but everything in that paragraph is a huge relief for any commissioner. But, it gets better.
The minor league snake draft, which started at the beginning of February, was done within two weeks. 240 minor league baseball players were selected and nobody missed their eight hour time window. Incredible participation. There was never a reason to speed up the time clock or pressure people into making picks. In fact, I stopped sending email notification updates after the 3rd or 4th round, because everyone was paying attention on their own.
Thirteen trades of one kind or another have occurred already. Our Slack chat has had over 27,000 messages posted between our slack channels or direct messages. That kind of participation exceeds my wildest and highest expectations.
Finally yesterday happened. We geared up for a 480 pick auction draft. We set out to do it in one day, broken into 2-hour sessions with 20-minute breaks squeezed in to make sure nobody died. The picks went fast and furious. And all said and done we were done in 8 hours and 12 minutes.
The draft came and went without a hitch.
Every owner was available and ready 10 minutes prior to the draft, many of us chatting in the Google Hangout as early as an hour prior to the draft.
Everyone seemed to be very prepared and were very aware of what was going on and for the first time as a commissioner in any sense of the form, I was truly able to participate and focus more as an owner and leave my commissioner hat hanging on the hook for a day.
It does not get better than that. Hours, days and weeks of preparation by myself and everyone in the league is what allowed yesterday to breeze through. Now, I cannot say how everyone feels about their teams today, but I got so many positive notes and interactions post draft, that I believe everyone had fun and is even more excited going forward.
Baseball is still a few weeks away, but I cannot wait to fill the time with trade speculation, predictions, fluff, and other non-sense. Thank you everyone, I truly appreciate your participation!