Winter Waivers, The End ... for now

Winter Waivers
And with a wimper, another year's Winter Waivers comes to an end. Or does it?

We have a unique situation this year, in which three new owners joined us mid-waivers. This meant a couple things: 1) the new owners, not having any players yet, did not participate in Winter Waivers, and 2) the rosters of the teams that left after the 2007 season still stand at 35-40 players. Here's how we'll handle these circumstances:

1. The three new teams will hold a Dispersement Draft from the rosters of the Lambchops, Meisters, and Splinters. Each team will acquire up to 23 players in this Draft. The players who go unselected will be set aside for the moment.


2. The three new teams will then go through a single period of Winter Waivers in which they will have the opportunity to select from among those players who went unclaimed during the full-league Winter Waivers session. For each player they select, they must waive one of their newly-drafted players.


3. The players they waive will then be combined with the players left over after the Dispersement Draft (see Step 1), and this group will form the pool for yet another round of Winter Waivers. All 12 teams will be free to participate in these waivers, which will then continue as Winter Waivers usually does - running until we have a period (like this current one) where no players are claimed.

So that's what's down the road. Once we have a schedule in place for the Dispersement Draft, we'll let everyone know so you'll all be prepared to pick through the scrapy left-overs of the Meisters, Splinters, and Chops.

Since we're just taking a small break in Winter Waivers, I'll forgo the usual recap and wait until we're completely through. That'll allow us to move on to more important stuff...

CFCL Draft Day 2008
There were no objections voiced to Sunday March 30 as Draft Day, so we're ready to call it official. This will allow our out-of-town owners to make their travel plans.

For now, you can assume that the rest of the details will be the same as usual -- Draft Day Headquarters at Rich's office in Oak Brook, arrival time between 7:30-7:45 AM, and nomination of the first player by the Ruffins at about 8:00 AM. We'll let you know if any of that changes.

Progress With The New Guys
We've been slowly working to bring Michael, Tim, and Michael on board. They're currently pondering team names and we're in the process of identifying a date and location for their Dispersement Draft. I've encouraged them all to register at the Forums, so hopefully they'll start popping up there. Once we set a date and location for the Dispersement Draft, we'll let everyone know - it'd be a great chance to welcome the new guys if you're available.


X Contracts Explained
Usually I post this explanation a little closer to roster cut time, but with three new members who will be looking at CFCL contracts for the first time, I thought it would be good to cover it now.

As a brief introduction, we developed the X contract concept in order to give teams that had drafted players as minor leaguers a little longer time to evaluate those players before deciding whether to sign them to a long term contract.

A few years ago I wrote a long explanation of how everything works and the reasoning behind it, and since that explanation still holds true, I'll just point you to to it: X Contracts Explained. If I get basic questions about X-contracts via e-mail, I generally just respond with the link above. Most questions are already answered in that explanation.

In terms of this year, here are the players currently on X contracts and the MINIMUM salary/contract they must be signed to in order to be retained. These contracts would be through 2009. They can, of course, be signed longer than that, for an additional .05 per year.

Player	Current	2008 Minimum
Chris Burke	.12	.20E
Zach Duke	.07	.15E
Jeff Francouer	.07	.15E
JJ Hardy	.04	.12E
Bruce McCann	.07	.15E
Ian Snell	.04	.12E

Note that the 2008 salaries and contracts are exactly the same as they would have been had the player been signed to a long-term contract of 3 or more years in 2007 instead of an X contract. The X option gave their owners an additional season to evaluate the player and decide about committing to him long-term. The trade-off for that benefit was relinquishing the chance to sign the player to a shorter contract through 2008.

In the coming weeks, I'll write about those players who are eligible to be signed to X contracts this year and the various options available to their owners.


New and Improved
Never let it be said that the CFCL Front Office doesn't respond to the unhappy owners out there. Nick recently went public with a previously private gripe regarding the Excel roster sheet and its lack of first names. This has cropped up as troublesome in the front office from time to time as well, but it took an outsider to finally spur me to action. So, thanks to Nick, I'm now happy to present you with New and Improved rosters, now with Stain Defender, errrr, now with First Names! You can get them in the Download Center or at the Excel Rosters link in the upper right corner of this page.


Some Nice Things You May Have Missed
Since this report has moved to this blog format, it will give me a little more flexibility in posting things -- now I won't have to save stuff up for one big report at the end of the week. Instead, I'll be able to post things as I think of them and they'll just be added to the flow and eventually get archived.

I imagine - especially during the season - that I'll eventually fall into the routine of just posting things when they come to me, and we won't have the usual full report with transactions and other details. Posting of transactions be fairly regular, but other items will probably be more sporadic, but at the same time, more timely.

Now, that doesn't mean I expect everyone to visit the blog once or twice a day just on the off-chance that I've posted something, but I also wouldn't want you to miss any of my pearls of wisdom or important announcements because you just check in once a week.

In order to give full visibility to announcements, I plan on running this "Nice Things..." section at least once a week, probably along with the results of the weekly Free Agent bidding. The section will include links to posts from the previous week - something like this:

• Sportsline Rosters

That said, I do encourage you to stop by and check for new posts periodically. I know there are all kinds of cool things you can do with blogs such as subscribing to a feed with a newsreader and possibly even have all posts sent to your e-mail address, but that's all beyond me at the moment. Perhaps Nick might have some hints or suggestions (though he's probably boycotting me because I sunk to using Blogger rather than coding something in HTML myself - what can I say, Nick, I'm a techie-wimp).