Welcome to the Rodewire Fantasy Baseball Podcast, brought to you by Underdog Fantasy and Fan Tracks.

My guest today is the legend, Steve Gardner, from USA Today, who commissions the

leagues of alternative baseball reality, of which we were both obviously participating in this

past weekend.

Steve, thanks so much for joining me.

You're so welcome and a pleasure to be here and talk about labor and everything else.

I think I'm still on kind of a high from the entire weekend.

It was just a great time with everybody, seeing everybody and getting back to live drafting, that it's still giving me a real good feeling.

Yeah, I agree.

It was just, it was such a kind of a positive atmosphere.

Everyone was having fun.

Everyone was catching up and, you know, telling stories and sharing, you know, how the personal lives are going you know lots of good fantasy baseball conversations as well so that was that was definitely

a weekend to remember how how much i mean you mentioned just kind of getting to see everybody

just how much fun was it for you to finally get back to these auctions, you know,

being in person, everyone being in the same room? Were there any sort of memories or moments

that really stand out that as you look back? Well, obviously, having not done this since the 2020

season and having to do all of our labor drafts online, it was great to just get back in the room, get used to, you know, having an auctioneer, a little bit of personality, you know, spilling out from everyone.

And I think we all like to, you know, think back on things we could have done differently, things that

worked, things that didn't work. And when you talk about moments or anything like that, I think

anytime you're in a bidding war with somebody, I remember I was bidding on Shohei Otani

pretty early in the AL draft. And Colton and the Wolfman were going up and I had it like 31.

And I was like, I can't let them have it for that.

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