Ahh, message 100, this was really the start of the draft of the league rules. 2001 was a fun season, all kinds of arguments about how things worked... because they hadn't had to work before. For the 2001 draft we just selected from a list of players with a round after them. At any rate this was the birth of the definition of R used in the league rules posts (that is R = "original drafted" = "that is he was drafted in the live draft and was not kept from the previous year") so that's siginificant.
Well, I suppose Z's message from earlier that day (the memorably titled An Unambiguous (RE)Telling of the Keeper Rules for the 2002 Draft) could be considered a precursor - it goes over most of the basic league rules but fails to use ornate terminology - but well, maybe not. The tone is different, less of a "this is ridiculous and we're going to acknowledge it every so slightly but we're still going to go all the way, suckers" to it.
But it doesn't matter, they're both from August 7, 2001. I am going to call this the birthday of the league rules (not bad for a league that had it's birth in early 2000 - or, one could very convincingly aruge, in early 1999 for our non-keeper, pre-ranked by position draft-type league... OK, since I'm counting those posts as the same as the recent league rules bits then I should count 1999 as the birth year for the league. If anyone has a date for Brian's initial email on the subject let me know. The best I've got now is when first got a Yahoo! account... which, well, I guess they don't have a "memeber since..." bit anywhere I can find so that doesn't help any) which means every August 7th we need to find some way to celebrate. Yes, the league rules didn't really exist as a semi-cohesive document until they were two and a half, but how much did you accomplish in your first 30 months?
Anyway more errors have been found so I'm going to change stuff (the Parker/Clark/Bell/Boggs situation was handleded incorrectly.)
Reading through the old messages for background was entertaining, but only rarely groin grabbingly so.
