Stats Redux

I'm just gonna go ahead and build off of Pete's post again:

"we will have pretty much the same league, except i will suck less because i will pay attention and prepare and not have two drafts on one day."
This seems like it might be on the whole good for the league but not so good for me trying to not finish in last again.

"can we just not do the classic 5x5? some kind of modified 5x5. we should at least use this system for voting or something."
This seems to be something everyone is in favor of. Or, at least I am. But can I make a plea to used a modification without "stupid" stats? I guess this doesn't get us anywhere at all. I like Omar's idea of having some sort of voting booth on this site. Everyone votes for their top 5 stats and then we work from there. Someone get on that.

"keepers/contracts, with caveats. i think contracts makes more sense than keepers, unless we do a ceiling on how many years you can "keep" the same guy. like, for instance, i don't want whoever drafts Felix Hernandez this year to just have him for his entire career. that sort of defeats fantasy baseball, or at least makes it more like real, reserve-clause era baseball."
Although isn't that part of the fun of having a keeper league? Getting rookies and then watching them produce for you year after year, tank occasionally and make you consider trading them? I'd much rather that this resembled the gave before free agents, when owners could buy and sell players like cattle. I mean, isn't that the whole idea of fantasy baseball anyway? I would be in favor of entertaining the possibility that players kept must a) be drafted or b) be traded. Although that sort of limits the fun of a Ryan Howard style pickup. Not to sound all fantasy-baseball-libertarian here, but shouldn't we allow people to construct their teams as they choose? It seems to me that if we place a limit on the number of players chosen to be kept, things will work out fine.

"also, if we have keepers, we should probably stop having a random draft order and just have it go in reverse order of finish. we can't do that this year, since there are not keepers yet, but you see what i mean."
Yeah, beginning next year let's draft in reverse order to the winning season (if we don't do an auction).

"this all ties into another hobby horse of mine, which is an auction. an auction will take at least four hours from start to finish, though, which might disqualify it automatically."
I'd be willing to give this a try, although I have a feeling some people (namely me) are going to get completely fucked over. But that's part of the game too, I suppose.

What do other people think? Carter? Moacir? What the hell have you been doing that's so important that you can't jump into the fray?