The Twenty-Fifth

About this date 24 years ago (give or take a week or two), a little green paperback made its appearance on bookstore shelves. From that time on, the lives of baseball fans everywhere -- and two of them in particular -- would never be the same.

That book was the first edition of Rotisserie League Baseball, and your truly was one of those fans intrigued enough by the tag line "The Greatest Game for Baseball Fans Since Baseball" to pick the book up up in Kroch's and Brentano's. A quick browse through it was enough to hook me, and I bought the book, little realizing what I was letting myself in for.

Of course, one can't experience Rotisserie baseball alone, so I lent the book to my best friend, Rich Bentel, who became equally intrigued by the concept. We quickly decided we had to start a league, and scraped together four other baseball fans who agreed to join us in the endeavor (yes, we freely admit that we were such nerds that four were all we could find -- Dave Holian has never forgiven Rich for not inviting him in for the inaugural season).

Now, nearly a quarter of a century later Rich and I are preparing for our 25th season of CFCL baseball. I'm sure Rich will agree that neither one of us imagined back in 1984 that we'd still be playing this game in our 40s, with wives and kids in tow.

We didn't want this occasion to pass without some kind of commemoration, so we asked the CFCL's resident graphics expert, Nick Hansen to cook up a logo to help up celebrate our 25th season, and I think you'll agree that Nick did a bang-up job:

You too can join in this historic celebration. We've taken Nick's designs (there's a square version of the logo as well), slapped them on some products at Cafe Press, and made them available for purchase.

Visit the CFCL Souvenir Stand at http://www.cafepress.com/cfcl and browse through the selection of apparel, mugs, and assorted other goodies. If you see something you kind of like but would prefer a slight variation (for example, a shirt with a small logo over the heart rather than the large logo centered), let me know and I might be able to set that up for you.

Order soon to get your goodies in time for Draft Day!

NOTE: We certainly don't want to trivialize our 25th season by commercializing it. We did want to make things things available to those who might want to partake, but there's no pressure to participate. Tempted as I was to add a mark-up to the items and make a little cash on the side, the prices listed are the base price of having the items made -- neither I nor the CFCL will be making any cash on this deal.