My publisher thought so much of the idea that he didn't respond for almost a year. WCOFF took my rules and started baseball and in the Fall of 2003 my publisher finally said he thought the idea was worthwhile and to give it a go. I made my official announcement about the National Fantasy Baseball Championship at the 2002 Arizona Fall League Symposium (thanks Ron Shandler) and the dream became reality.
Gene McCaffrey and John Menna came up to me after that announcement and said they were in. They loved the idea. Perry Van Hook said the same thing. Hmmm, I thought, I might have something here. Two teams and I only need 300? This seems easy.
Well, it wasn't. I had to hire STATS to build our web site and update existing software they had (it was for a Turner fantasy baseball game) for us to launch. We got our first official NFBC signup when Rey Diaz of Miami, Florida signed up for the 2004 Main Event mainly because I was giving away a free Alex Rodgriguez signed baseball. But we were off and running!!! And Rey still plays baseball and football today with us, which is pretty damn cool.
Anyway, we struggled to get 195 Main Event teams and three full AL and NL Auction Leagues between Las Vegas, New York and Chicago. We lost our ass that first year, but our division was above budget with our magazine publishing thanks to a custom publishing deal we started that year with other industry partners and because the Fantasy Sports Trade Conference was growing so fast. So we played a shell game with the NFBC finances and I was told I had "one more year" to make this NFBC/NFFC thing profitable.
Got it boss.
We went on to sell out the 2005 NFBC Main Event and had a good 2005 NFFC season and we've never looked back since. We have sold out the NFBC Main Event for 18 straight seasons and had over 21,000 teams in 2022. We expect another record season in 2023.
This upcoming season will be our 20th anniversary season and we'll announce the new record grand prize that we'll have in the NFBC Main Event once budgets are approved. We're excited about our 20th anniversary season and we are going to have all kinds of cool events around it. I want to reminisce about the early years with a lot of our veteran players and will do that on podcasts during the next several months. We also want to commemorate the year with a special logo and special apparel.
I posted this on another thread, but here's the info about the apparel:
We created NFBC 5th Anniversary baseball hats in 2008 and provided one to each of our original NFBC members. I still have mine today. We also created NFBC 10th anniversary baseball jerseys in 2013 and gave those to our remaining original NFBC members, while allowing others to purchase that model themselves if they wanted. I'm working with our vendor now to see if we can get some NFBC 20th anniversary apparel on our NFBC store website before the start of this season, so stay tuned. I hope we can get some nice product available for sale soon.
Anyway, this is our first unveiling of our 20th anniversary logo, using the original red-white-blue national colors we had in 2004. This will be our logo for the 2023 season:
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Please get on this. I'm planning on coming in extra buff and motivated this year. 
And can anyone wear the royal blue, or is this just reserved for the elitist 20 year member club since I miss the cut off by a few years? 
