Back when I started playing rotisserie baseball, more than twenty years ago, leagues tended to be limited to a group of friends in close geographic proximity. Transactions were generally done over the phone through a single commissioner, who was also in charge of calculating the stats and standings.

This made trading easy, because just about everyone in the league knew each other, and the simple process of running the team brought one in contact with the other owners. Sure, some owners were more interested than others, and there were trading cliques that sometimes formed, but by and large trading was part of the fun and easy to do.

In the nineties, things started to get more complex with the advent of stat services that could impartially handle many of the commissioner's responsibilities. Suddenly it became possible to play an entire season after the draft without any contact with anyone. I played a number of leagues where I never spoke to a soul after the draft.

The rise of internet leagues improved the situation markedly, as it provided easy access and a platform for trade discussion, even for teams in faraway places. However, that very connectiveness also brought some new impediments to trading -- most importantly, leagues consisting of owners who did not know each other became much more common.

I've had a couple of difficult experiences with this. A few years back, I had worked out a trade for Randy Johnson, who was injured and struggling at the time, only to have the trade blocked by another team in the league, who then made an equal trade for Johnson before I even discovered that my trade had been rejected. In my experience, that's not the sort of thing that usually happens when the competitors know each other and have open lines of communication.

This year, I've been having comical difficulty getting a stranger to do a trade that seems to me to be inarguably logical for him. In my NL-only roto league, one of the teams has the market cornered in stolen bases. He has Felipe Lopez, Ryan Freel, Juan Pierre, and Horacio Ramirez, among others. With that group he has a lead over the second place team in steals that is so large that you could remove Lopez, the league leader from his stats entirely, and he would still have a big lead. However, he's woefully short in most other categories, so he's limping along in eighth place.

So I've been trying to convince him to trade me some steals, through a series of trade proposals with comments on our league website. So far, I've experienced nothing but unexplained rejection. I started out by offering a trade of shortstops: Nomar Garciaparra for Lopez. I explained both what I was looking for (steals) and why the trade would help him as well (Nomar has greater position flexibility and provides more in the other offensive categories). I can understand rejecting that one, but I tried to make it clear that I was open to alternatives. Nothing.

So next I offered Adam LaRoche for Ryan Freel. In this case, I offered a big gain in homers and RBI in exchange for a guy who only beats LaRoche in steals. I tried to be as honest as possible, explaining that Ken Griffey's return may impact Freel's playing time, but nonetheless acknowledging that I thought he would play enough to provide me with the speed I was looking for. Again, nothing but a decline with no explanation.

And again, I tried to convey my openness to negotiate. With no means of communication with this person other than the website's trade offer feature, I can't even figure out whether he's trying to drive a hard bargain. So I continue to flail blindly about in the dark. Maybe he thinks the market will get even tighter. Maybe he ultimately wants to deal multiple speed guys. There's no way to know.

Ultimately the purpose of all this venting is as follows: Does anyone know the owner of the Spamalopes? If so, tell him I'm trying to get in touch with him.