[SandMan]

When STATS first came out with their Diamond Legends and later was also on ESPN I spent over $3000 to play the game. Basically it was the PTP(Diamond Mind) game but with career players, the game was developed by Tom Tippett the original creator of PTP. Back then the game was $99.95 a season plus $1.00 per transactions......very costly. I then found OOTP and never paid to be in a league again..... I havent played in 5 years or so.....

I had this same idea in the late 80's and early 90's. I created a simulation that was accurate but not to much fun to play. Players stats were very accurate and I even normalized players across the many eras of baseball. So I was going to start this type of business, but the costs were high for sites then and very few people were actually on line. Pages were text based and most communications were done via bulletin boards....so that tells you how long ago it was. Hell I had a 300kb external Hayes modem...... A few years later I found the STATS site and started playing the game then my wife bitched about the $100-200 a month I was spending on a sim.....

But I do believe that paid leagues, if at a minimal cost are a good idea. This keeps the ownership to people that are dedicated to the league. But my idea of a paid league was like $20.00 a year (not season) per team and this was just to basically cover the commissioners cost of a website. But with sites being so cheap now a days this may even be too much - because there are so many free leagues out there......