HEADS UP: Positional Error at Sportsline

This problem with CBS Sportsline was noted in a posting on a fantasy baseball forum, and it will be an issue for our league.

It appears Sportsline is not determining eligibility correctly for the "combo" infield positions: Middle Infielder (MI) and Corner Infielder (CI). According to our rules (and those of most other leagues), players qualify for MI if they had played 20 games or more at 2B or SS the previous season, and qualify for CI if they had played 20 game or more at 1B or 3B last year.

Sportsline is correctly determining eligibility under those rules, however they are ALSO qualifying players for the "combo" positions if they played a total of 20 games at the two individual positions combined, which should not be the case.

For example, Rich Aurilia had the following Games Played counts last year:

1B - 55
2B - 9
SS - 12
3B - 22

Under our rules, Aurilia should qualify at 1B, 3B, and CI on Draft Day.

At Sportsline, however, he is also listed under MI because he played a combined 21 games at 2B and SS. He does not qualify at either 2B or SS, but Sportsline would allow him to be placed at the MI position. Our rules do not currently allow this - Aurilia would need to qualify at either 2B or SS to be placed at MI.

This won't be a huge deal for Draft Day, as we'll use the position eligibilty information in the Draft Pool listing (see the 2008 Position Eligibilty or 2008 NL Spring Training Rosters files in the Download Center if you have elgibility questions). It might be a problem if you're using the free agent listings at Sportsline to do draft prep -- keep in mind that the listings for MI and CI may include players who do not actually qualify there.

Where it WILL become an issue is during the season when owners will be making their own roster moves at Sportsline. You'll need to be extra careful when assigning players to the CI or MI positions to make sure they actually qualify for one of the individual positions under that combo umbrella.

It sounds like a number of leagues have already contacted Sportsline about this error, so hopefully it will be straightened out before it causes problems.

IMPORTANT: CBS Sportsline News

A few important notes about CFCL happenings at our stat service:

• I have moved all players on each team to the Reserve List. I've read in various forums that unless this is done prior to a new season position eligibility won't be updated for the new season. In other words guys who qualified at a position in 2007 based on 2006 games played would still be allowed there even if they didn't play the required 20 games at the position in 2007. Just to be safe, I thought it would be best to reserve everyone and hopefully reset position eligibility for 2008.
• This moving of players to reserve has an additional benefit -- it will allow a kind of Spring Training for each of you. With the new transaction processes, you will each be responsible for making your own active/reserve moves each Monday and Friday. I know many of you have never done this before, so this will give you some practice and moving guys between Active and Reserve and setting positions. You should all have access to do this on your team page at Sportsline, and it should be pretty intuitive -- on my view there are simply drop-down boxes at the far right for each player: one to set Active or Reserve, and the other to set positions. Give it a try and let me know if you have any questions.
• I've also turned off the ability to set keepers at Sportsline - we'll be using the traditional (for the CFCL) method of the Excel cut sheets. There are a couple reasons for this - first, as Commissioner at Sportsline, I'd be able to see your keepers and cuts prior to the cut deadline, which wouldn't be fair. Also, there seems to be a pretty hard and fast number of keepers, and we allow more flexibility than Sportsline does (variable number of minor league keepers, etc). While I originally thought using Sportsline for keepers would save me a ton of administrative overhead, it now looks like it would be a lot more trouble than help.

Sportsline Rosters

I've renewed the league at CBS Sportsline an updated the rosters to reflect B-contract releases from the end of the season and recent waiver activity. Be sure to take a look at your roster at some point and verify it's correct.

Things Are Heating Up!

Not only are we nearing the end of our new owner search, finalzing rule changes, and coming up on the end of the first round of Winter Waivers, but I just got notification that Sportsline has updated our site for the 2008 season. If I renew in the next few weeks, not only do we get a $20 discount, but we supposedly also get a bobble head trophy for the league champion.

I'll be sending payment in the next few days, but it looks like we can access the site now. Feel free to poke around, but please don't play around with the rosters at all until I get things updated.

Hey Rich, how many days until pitchers and catchers report?