A New Type of Baseball League?

In sitting around the office yesterday, thinking about random baseball things, I came up with what might be a revolutionary idea in fantasy baseball fun leagues. I say "fun leagues" because this idea would never fly in a money league or any league you would want to take even remotely seriously. And I say "might" because it could either be a stupid idea or an idea that loads of other people have already thought of and it still hasn't caught on. But I still think it could be pretty fun.

The idea is essentially drawn from the concept of a "shopping spree." You set up a Yahoo league with an offline draft, and set undrafted players to be free agents right away. Then, you get your whole league together in your chat room of choice (I use AIM, but Yahoo or gmail chat will probably work fine). Once everyone's in the chat room and ready, have your commissioner submit draft results and start the league. What draft results, you ask? None. All teams will have empty rosters when the league starts, and all players will be free agents when the league starts. Then it's a mad dash for all players.

The frantic pace of player acquisition has got to be insane, not unlike that of a shopping spree. You'll grab a guy, go through the process of attempting to add him, and suddenly you'll get an error message indicating that the player is on a team. Bam! Slap in the face, but no time to be pissed or find out who took him, you gotta move and grab someone else before they're gone, too.

So do you go for the top tier guys and trust that you'll get at least a couple of them, even though you'll likely miss out on several? Or do you go down the list a little bit with the belief that you're more likely to be able to grab them and give yourself a team that's deep? Do you forego hitting early on, knowing that most people will be targeting hitters, and try to solidify a great pitching staff? WHAT DO YOU DO?

We're planning on doing this in a fun league sometime in the fairly near future. I'll give you guys a run down on what happened after we do it. If you're interested in joining us, just send an email to Joe & Joe Sports.