We attended an Arizona Fall League night game as part of this year's Baseball Headquarters' Fantasy Baseball Symposium in Phoenix two weeks ago. While watching a bunch of good hitting prospects send speeding liners all around the field against a few not so good pitching prospects, we began noticing several familiar faces seated nearby.

During last year's symposium, the Chicago White Sox conducted their yearly organization meetings in the adjacent conference room at the hotel. Jerry Manuel, Ken Williams, and others all wound up mingling (to their obvious displeasure) with fantasy baseball diehards. Among the people we observed at the AFL games was Ed Lynch, recently deposed GM of the Cubs and now a Special Assistant to the GM.

Mr. Lynch was back at a few of the games we attended this year, and this evening he was joined by Andy MacPhail, current Cubs President and GM, as well as Manager Don Baylor. Several dozen scouts and front office personnel also were scattered throughout the park, most notably 2001 National League Manager of the Year Larry Bowa.

One of our Rotohelp.com marketing campaigns was to hand out Official Rotohelp ballpoint pens at the conference to fellow fantasy participants. Several of you reading this quite likely spoke to one of us in Arizona, hopefully confirming the success of this strategy. (If you'd like a Rotohelp pen, please mail a SAE to the address at the bottom of the page, and we'll be happy to send you one.)

Seeing much of the current Cubs regime seated together, we decided that there would be no harm in introducing ourselves to them as long-time Cub Fans, and maybe also mentioning that we were soon opening a website with a Chicago Sports article. After debating how to approach them for several minutes, Jess eventually wandered over, introduced herself, and gave pens to the three of them. Mr. MacPhail immediately asked if "roto" stood for "rotisserie", which she grudgingly admitted while emphasizing that the site would also feature a straight Chicago sports article. Mr. Baylor quietly querried, "Good Chicago Sports?" Unsure of exactly what he meant, Jess dodged the question, and merely thanked them for their time and returned to where we were watching the game.

After over a week of deliberation, we've decided what "Good Chicago Sports" means to us, and we're going to base our article around these sports. As Cub fans, we wanted a forum to discuss both the Cubs and Sox as baseball remains our specialty, but we also always watch the Bears' game while reading the Sunday paper. We pay more attention to the Bulls than they likely currently warrant, and even read the occasional Blackhawk article. Athletes from the Chicagoland area who achieve significant recognition, such as Cammi Granato of the U.S. Women's Olympic Hockey team also deserve discussion, and we'll discuss when someone peaks our interest.

"Bad Chicago Sports" will not be discussed here. Most racing sports (auto, dog, and horse) hold little interest for us, we prefer to play soccer instead of watching it, and events like golf tournaments and tennis exhibitions won't receive much coverage here.

We do intend to write two or three times a week about the teams we like, the teams we hate, and the ever-enduring monstrosity that is the Bears' current Solider Field Renovation Plan.

So welcome to our article, thank you to Don Baylor for the column title, thanks to Rob Neyer and Rany Jazayerli for inspiring this column with Rob and Rany on the Royals (on robneyer.com), and we hope you enjoy reading about the problems of our local teams and how they should fix them.