Mike and Dwight,

First let me say that I do believe that this is an unique product and one of the more entertaining ways to enjoy baseball as a hobby as I have ever been associated with. I too would love to see Pure Baseball grow into something more than it currently is. BUT, there are some serious problems that, if they are not addressed, likely will spell the demise of Pure Baseball. And all the flowery words about 'being pioneers' and helping to develop 'the future of competitive baseball gaming on line' are not going to solve these problems. These problems, IMHO, are as follows:

1) Current owners are leaving, and not returning. As a result, lots of teams are unmanaged, and the briantrust of PB has to do extra work to minimally manage these teams. And this problem in increasing. The number of available teams has grown to 110 teams for 37 non-launch leagues. That's about three per league. While that is not exorbanant in an of itself, it should be an area of concern, as the number of vacant teams has grown a lot in the last year. When I joined PB about two years ago, there were less than 40 unmanaged teams to choose from. Currently, six leagues (Champ, PB 98 Traditional 2, PB 99 Traditional 1, PB 99 RealTime 1, PB 99 RealTime 4 and PB 2000 Traditional 1) have at least six vacancies. If I owned only one PB team, and it was in one of these leagues, I would be concerned about the viability of that particular league. These 110 teams aren't necessarily the weak sisters, either. The AVERAGE available team PB value is 87.06 (the things you can do in two minutes with Excel are
amazing!). That's higher than two of the five non-launch PB teams that I own. All that I can gleam from this is that 1) the weak sister teams are already being run by other PB owners (probably at a reduced rate, or for free) to help you try and manage the workload and 2) if this is the case, then this problem is worse that it first appears. One hundred and ten teams that are WORTH OWNING are unable to locate owners. That speaks volumes.