CRL News

March 28, 2017

“There’s no crying in baseball”

--Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own.

Unless your name is Jim Fraser. I get to take a dig at my partner for, as he termed it, poor planning on his part. He will not be joining us in Vegas this year so I hope all of you will join me in emailing him what a great time we had once we get back.

Anyway, we draft in 10 days, so I needed to get out some news and notes.

Roster freeze day is this Friday (3/31). Since I will be working that night, no need to worry about a 10 pm central time cutoff. Just get your keepers in by midnight – that way they were in on March 31.

My vacation starts on Saturday, so when I get in sometime between 9:30 and 11 am, I’ll sit down and put in all the keepers, contracts, etc. before heading to bed. I should have everything in by noon.

We had one trade – Ken shipped Mark Melancon to the Rons for Odubel Herrera.

BTW, wondering if Scott is ever going to come up with a team name.

I will be printing out a copy of the CRL addresses page on the website and passing it around for everybody to update it.

Draft order is: 11 / 3 / 4 / 7 / 5 / 10 / 2 / 8 / 6 / 1 / 9

ML draft order is: 2 / 10 / 5 / 7 / 4 / 3 / 8 / 6 / 1 / 9 / 11

If you need a refresher on the rules surrounding long-term contracts, they are here: http://www.c-r-l.org/rules/crlconst.htm#XVI

The guys you need to concern yourself with are the ones that have an “O” in the contract column.

If you don’t feel like reading the entire article, here is the rule in a nutshell:

Mr. Fraser and myself have Randall Grichuck of the Cardinals entering his option year at $0.50. (I don’t think I’m tipping our hand by saying we’re protecting him.) Grichuck hit 24 dingers last year in just over 400 ABs. If we do nothing, we keep him at 50-cents this season and then have to throw him back next year. Call me crazy, but I think 20+ dingers might be worth a little more than four bits. Signing him to a contract adds $2.50 to his salary for each additional year he is signed. So, if we do a two-year contract, he’ll cost us $3 both this year and next. If we sign him for three years, he’ll be $5.50. Additionally, we will have to pay a signing bonus equal to half the value of the total contract – if we go two years, that signing bonus would be $3 (half of $3 X 2 years = $6). If we opt for a three-year deal, then the signing bonus would be $8.25 (half of $16.50).

Signing bonuses do not count against the $130 salary cap.

Draft

Since we are drafting after opening day for the first time in a while, here are a few ground rules:

Positional eligibility for the draft is based completely on last season. It does not matter if someone plays a position between opening day and the draft, positional eligibility is based solely on last year (again, using my team as an example, Trea Turner does not qualify at short, even though he’s the starting shortstop and should play several games there before the draft).

Players who are not on the opening-day roster but are called up after opening day, but before the draft, may not be drafted. They may, of course, be selected in the minor-league draft.

Since we are submitting our roster freezes before opening day, but drafting several days after opening day, there are a couple of situations some of you will probably run into:

You may protect a guy that doesn’t make the opening day roster. In that case, the frozen player is still on you roster for purposes of the draft. He may be reserved and replaced once the draft is completed.

You may protect a farm guy that makes the opening day roster. If that happens, the farm guy opens the season on your farm roster and cannot be activated until the first reporting period (Monday, April 10). What that means is you get to draft a guy for 50-cents (that you have no desire to keep) that you’ll jettison on Monday and activate your farm guy. Glenn did a very good job of this one year – I don’t remember who the farm guy was that made his team, but he scoured the box scores the first few days of the season and drafted some scrub for 50-cents that had actually hit one homer.

I have not gotten a confirmation from Steve Farabee as to whether he’ll be hosting us again this year at the Cosmo. I’ll leave it to him to send out yea or nay on that.

I also have not heard from Glenn which room we will be drafting in. I only know that it is at Harrah’s. We’ll all have ample opportunity to catch up with Glenn once we are in Vegas. If you miss him, text me (361) 793-8686 and I’ll give you the info.

I get in mid-afternoon Wednesday (no Weve, not playing golf – wanted to, but I haven’t picked up my sticks since I started working at Walmart almost three years ago. Don’t want to pay over $100 to play even worse than I normally do).

See ya in Vegas.

Jim