I do not often get a chance to review the discussion section of this great game we play, but I had some time this morning.

I see that there has been a plethora of discussion on cheating and game crashes, as well as the trading issue. As the owner of twenty-seven franchises as well as a participant in several launch leagues I can address some of these issues from experience.

Trading: We must have a Commissioner to oversee trades. The game would be destroyed without someone serving in this capacity. We may not have the best situation now because our Commissioner is a participant in several leagues, but it's the best we can do considering the circumstances (this is still a fledgling enterprise). I'm in four of the five leagues that Mike Bravard participates in and I have seen no instances where his interests have interfered with a trade. I often joke with him about how well his teams do but that is another issue. So my fellow managers, bear with the current situation until something better comes along.

Cheating: I must admit that the concept of cheating in the current game format never occurred to me until I read some of the pieces on this board. Since games could always be restarted from purebaseball.exe I didn't think it was possible. Please don't consider me naive though. I've always realized that until a game is reported to the host, it resides on your hard drive. Therefore, deleting the RSIBB folder will eliminate it and it will be lost. I always thought that anyone who would attempt this (often) would be pegged fairly quickly and severely reprimanded and dismissed if the infraction continued. I'm also aware that a "hacker" can probably manipulate files within RSIBB before submitting the game and change a result that way - but, there is no way to stop that save the new policy. So you have to be in favor of the new no re-start policy for a game already started even if you fall victim. You have to wonder about the mentality of someone who would do this in a game playing situation. I personally feel sorry for these individuals - they are not having fun and in some ways are "sick".

Crashes: I do not believe that I have had a game crash (crash while playing game) ever in the history of PB. It may have happened once during a lightning storm when power either went down or there was a brownout. But then again, what does it say about me if I'm on my computer during a lightning storm? I have though had numerous "deadlock" situations while trying to upload a game. These are not affected by the new policy though and can now be fixed from the purebaseball.exe icon. The other kind of problem I've had (once this weekend with one game) is upon clicking the start game command, the game doesn't start and the new dreaded "game played by robot" message pops up on the screen. As mentioned, this happened to me three times with one game this weekend. Each time I reported to MB and technical and they tried to fix the problem. I never found out what the real problem was and I suspect it was lineup related but in any case I got to play the game and the rest of the series was normal.

Potpourri: Since I rarely get the time to express myself on this forum, let me just mention some other things - statements and questions.

Why don't more managers trade during the off-season? Some seem to shutdown when the season ends? I have found that the best time to trade is during these periods.

I can usually tell if I've had a bad away series or if I'm having a good away series by looking at the pattern of how the games are played. I do this by looking at the status page to see how many games have been played. If all five have been played by Friday evening, e.g., then I can assume I lost most of them. If two have been played then I either won both or one the first and lost