Happy New Year!

Ok, par for the course lately, these New Year's greetings are a tad late as you'll have noticed that the business of the New Year has already begun with Winter Waivers. But nonetheless, welcome to the CFCL 2009!

As far as the CFCL goes 2009 will be a "new year" indeed, as many changes are afoot in the league, mostly from an administrative standpoint.

The biggest change, which has already gone into effect, is that I'll be taking more of a backseat when it comes to the day-to-day operations of the league. My "mid-career crisis", "fantasy nervous breakdown", or whatever you want to call it had me on the brink of complete retirement from the hobby. Thanks to Rich, however, I'll be on hiatus -- though as this posting shows, I'm not leaving the Front Office altogether. As Rich and I started to work on transition plans, we discovered there were some things that I'd still need to control -- mostly related to web publishing, etc (such as the Home Town Discount info Rich mentioned earlier).

As Rich also recently noted, we've relocated the Excel roster sheets to a new home, the the way you access them will be exactly the same -- via the link over on the right, or in the Download Center. The new home simply allows Rich to update and publish them himself without involving me as a middle man.

With my mostly-retirement, there will be some things that fall by the wayside, most notably the NL Spring Training Rosters and therefore the Draft Pool Lists on Draft Day. At this point I do not plan on compiling the Spring Training rosters and tracking them up to Opening Day. The Executive Commitee (congrats to Michael and Matt, by the way) will be determining what that means in terms of bidding and posiitonal eligibility for Draft Day and announce that as we near D-Day.

One thing I'll still be responsible for is renewing our membership with CBS Sportsline. You may have recieved an e-mail from Sportsline about this recently. What the e-mail didn't tell you is that they're increasing the renewal fee by $20 per league this year (that's after the $30 earlybird fee is applied). That, combined with the reduction in the number of teams this year, means that we may need to take a look at restructuring our fees and/or prize pool. Watch for more info on this soon. Along with that, I may be asking for fees to be paid sooner rather than later so my credit card doesn't have to bear the full brunt of the Sportsline renewal. Stay tuned...