i had a weird draw, first two rounds are same region - Carribean, or as I call it - The Steroid Islands

A quick breakdown of how many times I drew each region:  

Appalachia	2
Rest of World	2
Texarkana	3
New York	5
Dixie	1
New England	2
Cal- pre-1990	4
Illinois	4
Ohio	2
Caribbean	2
Cal 1990+	2
Stagecoach	1
Atlantic Coast	1

my big complaint, heh, such as it is, is the region names

if geography is the theme then midwestern progressivism is a terrible name. as is stagecoach. far west and northwest would do for me, or west and north, or mountain and lakes, whatever

you have a dan'el boone hat in your closet. decide on physical geography, political geography, or history and get this sh*t straight



my big compliment is you did a GREAT job of divvying up the numbers by region and making them more or less even. TREMENDOUS numerically. i have no idea if it will prove to be tremendous geographically. my guess is The Rest Of The World is like getting dealt a deuce

no limit...25

grayfoxx the answer to both your questions is Yes. 

I will be happy to run the random tables early enough that we know before hand where we are drafting from and yes, the overwhelming vote is no limits on keepers. 

You can stop voting now, I concede the point. 

bagchucker, your complaint is legit and for next time I can try to change these names to strictly utilitarian ones like "The West" or whatever. I accept the criticism. 

As for the quality balance, I think you are right: a few regions stand out for depth and a few are thin. But each owner had had an equal chance to be dealt each one each round. I will try to see if anyone got slammed by having Rest of World too often, though there are a lot of good Japanese players there and a few gems in the mix. But I couldn't figure out a way to make them come out to 16 and be roughly numerically balanced and also balanced for quality, in part because researching every player ever was beyond me. 

A quick bit of advice - to do research you want to use the page that lists states and country birthplaces for players:

www.baseball-reference.com/bio

Don't start with individual players and try to guess their birthplaces or whatever. 

That page above lists the states and countries of birth. You click on the name of the state or country you want to draft from and it lists first all batter and below all pitchers born there. 

You then can get a rough idea of the hierarchy of drafting quality by clicking on one of the stats above the names, as it will reorder the list of players by that stat from highest to lowest number: HRs will give you a quick idea of who played a long time and hit homers. AB who played a lot of seasons. BA by career batting average - tricky in that some players who played one game and went two for five will be at .400 but you will see that in their ABs. For pitchers I would start with W - wins, as it shows who pitched a lot of seasons and was of some quality, but scroll down - Koufax for example is not at the top of the list for Ws career wise in his state. 

The rest of the research, once you have narrowed down a certain number of possible draftees I would suggest doing in the WIS DC as you can get a lot more data there and the baseball-reference site is not really set up for that kind of individual player research. 

I'll begin with George Sisler, 1b-1915.

Atlantic Coast - P/OF Babe Ruth(1915)

1986 Barry Bonds OF -  California retired after 1989
 

Texarkana - SS Ernie Banks - 1954

Guess I misunderstood. The California thing (pre & post 1990). I thought the dates were for the rookie years. Is that for retirement years?

By the way about the geographic region names - first I needed reasonable ways to identify the regions including the states that were in them (Middle Atlantic excludes NY which it technically should include but which has so many players on its own), I might have used Ohio River Valley for example, but Pennsylvania and Ohio are both huge in the numbers of players on their own. 

Stagecoach is one of my very favorite movies - the first great John Ford Western with John Wayne, a masterpiece, so no offense is intended to those in the West (though I will change it next season if anyone insists). My sister lives in Denver and would not live anywhere else and I love that city as well and have many friends there. 

Texarkana may be a bit too cute, but is the name of an actual town that sits on the border between the two states that comprise the region. 

Down the Mississippi is Mark Twain-ish in inspiration. 

Appalachia is a region I have lived in at various times in different parts of it (NY - the northern most town of Appalachia is Binghamton, New York where I did my Ph.D. - Pennsylvania (where I lived in the woods), and Kentucky, and I have many close friends from West Virginia. It is a region where people still know things: what plants heal you or make you sick, how to grow stuff, what good music sounds like, what community means, why mountains are beautiful and coal companies not to be trusted. 

I could see taking some umbrage at Midwestern Progressive if you are not one. Here I may have gone overboard: my political roots, the people I admire most except for the abolitionists of the 19th century (Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips etc.) are the progressives from that region in the early 20th Century: Eugene Debs (Indiana), Robert LaFollette (Wisconsin), the Farm-Labor Party (Minnesota), and so on. So in trying to think of an identity that linked them all (Midwest alone is a gigantic region, stretching arguably from Ohio to Nebraska and the Dakotas, like four Western Europes), this tradition seemed nice to latch onto. But again, I can just change the names to something more innocuous I guess (Northern Midwest ? Great Lakes? - I will think about it). 

Yes, exactly. 

4)    4.  California Careers ended before 1990 – 1,067  Players

 

5)    5.  California Careers ended from 1990 on – 1,017 players

So while we are drafting their rookie years, if they played at all from 1990 on (this is easy to search for on the state page on baseball-reference.com/bio) then they are in one region (of time-space in this case, thank you Mr. Einstein with a nod to Dr. Kant), if they finished their careers before 1990 they are in the other. 

This has them come out nearly even in numbers of players. So the pick of Bonds is good, no problem. 

A request: can everyone now delete your votes on the keepers limit question? We have a lot of text to scroll through and I have deleted mine and some extraneous comments as well, and have deleted the random.com results leaving only the matchups now each round so that people can get to the draft info sooner. Thanks. 

Once that is done by you all this message will self-destruct within 10 seconds (am I the only one old enough to get the reference?).