Welcome to Rates and barrels.

It is Friday, November 22nd.

Derek Van Riper, Eno Seris, and a good friend of ours, John Henry Strader joins the show today.

Today, we are focusing on draft and hold leagues, leagues with no in-season pickups.

Over at the NFBC, we get the draft champions format we'll talk about.

They've got gladiator leagues running right now, and our buddy, J.H.

is as deep into those leagues as anybody we know, but he also plays everything else. So we thought he'd be a great resource for us to talk to about what's really different. What do you do tactically in the league that does not have in-season pickups? J.H., thanks for joining us today. Glad to be here, guys.

A lot of fun. So, J.H. has been a friend of ours for a few years now, and we actually co-managed some teams. Eno has talked about having a co-manager in the NFBC main event. This is J.H. He is the co-manager. We've co-managed some teams in the online championship as well. so we all know each other pretty well tactically have a lot of, I think, general agreements of how we want to play fantasy baseball.

And I have found J.H. is even more rigorous at Fab than I've ever been by a few miles.

So I learn a lot from him, which is great.

I think that's a good part of a partnership is if you can learn something with the person along the way that adds a ton of value. J.H., what's your relationship with baseball, though? How long have you played fantasy baseball? What formats do you like the most? Just tell the listeners a little bit more about your background and kind of how did you get to this point where this hobby is such a big part of your life? I probably have a similar story to a lot of people our age.

Red Moneyball sort of right when it came out, loved it.

I did my first Yahoo League in, I think 2004, freshman year at college.

And it was just sort of hooked from there.

I really wanted to work in baseball.

I actually did sort of work in and around it for a few years.

I worked for a large agency in Chicago. We represented about 400 players. It did mostly arbitration

work for them. I was a video guy at Sports Info Solutions, which anyone who's worked there knows

that's sort of a grinding job, but you're, you know,

you're working with baseball every day. And then sort of probably the coolest thing I did is I worked

in player development from Dodgers for a year, basically as a minor league video guy. I was also

a lot of fun. I was very heavy into Yahoo Leagues for a long time and sort of just getting tired of

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