MetroWest ABL 2005 Grapevine


February 21, 2005
Here are notes from our manager meeting on February 21th, 2005.

We had attendees from 8 of the 10 teams. Carlo was sick and couldn't attend from the Os and Lionel's sub had a last second cancellation and was unable to attend. Chris Shea had to leave early to visit his mom in Whittier, our thoughts are with Chris and his mom. I hope she's recovering well Chris.

We discussed financials from last year. Our league account has $50.51 left over. We talked about the 2005 dues and I just sent a separate note including what each team owes.
$45 per case of balls
$155 for insurance
$50 webmaster
$30 web hosting
$30 winner share
$20 umpire stipend
$25 miscellaneous
This works out to $310 per team plus $45 per case of balls ordered.

It is critical that every team send in at least $200 as quickly as possible so we can pay the $1550 to Frazier for our insurance. Once we can pay for the insurance, then we can get the insurance binder which will allow for teams to secure their home fields.

We talked about several options for a preseason or inseason banquet/cookout/bash/jamboree. Ultimately we decided to not do anything this season.

John Masiello agreed to take on the treasurer role for this season. We will work together to add John as a signer to the league Citizen's Bank account that Tom Galvani set up for us last year. I've spoken with John since and we hope to have John added to the account as an authorized signer on Tuesday 3/1.

Spoke about HOF stuff and if people are still interested. I have a plaque for Will Kitching from last year. Not sure if we know how to get in touch with him. Didn't someone say they would try to track him down? Sorry but I can't remember. I have spoken to Stan since the meeting and he is willing to continue to serve as HOF administrator which is awesome. Thanks Stan!

We are up to almost 50 recruits now. Since the Sox won the World Series I think everyone wants to play ball now. We discussed how we would split up the recruits. It is taking me way too long to create the spreadsheet of all the recruits. I am going to send the managers all 50ish recruits E-mails I received and let the managers contact players as needed. I'm also going to send an E-mail to all 50ish recruits telling them to contact managers of teams they'd like to play for. I hope to do this later this weekend.

Steve Saraceno is going to see if he can secure a field for Wednesday June 28 for the All-Star game. We decided this event needed to be moved to the middle of the season instead of the end of the year.

We also briefly discussed the same rule changes we discuss every year:

pitchouts, intentional walks and composite bats

We didn't change any rules. For composite bats, it was agreed to continue to allow Brett bats, but that's it, no other composites.

We briefly discussed reserving a field for the playoffs, but I don't remember if anything was decided. Did we do anyting about this? Everybody seems to like Bowditch.

I brought up a point to discuss potentially adding non managers to the meetings. I realized at the meeting that this was silly since our meetings are open to everyone anyway, so there really wasn't a point to this. The reasons I had thought about adding this was because many of of have been managers of our teams for many years and we end up discussing the same things every year. I'm getting concerned that our board may be getting a bit stale and maybe adding some new people might get us some fresh ideas and breathe new life into us. Obviously the recent additions of Steve and Carlo have already helped in that regard. Personally, I sometimes feel like I'm out of touch with what even everyone on my team feels about issues let alone the rest of the teams/league. I'd like to hear more from the players in the league to get a better feel for the pulse on how things really are going for us.

That's it for notes on the 2/21/05 league meeting.

November 13, 2004
This meeting had one purpose. We needed to decide if we would grow the league to 12 teams. We had requests from 1.5 teams to enter plus lots of recruits yet to find teams. We discussed this seriously but decided that 2005 wasn't the right time for the league to expand. We could potentially expand sometime in the future, but not in 2005.


View the 2004 Grapevine.
View the 2003 Grapevine.
View the 2002 Grapevine.
View the 2001 Grapevine.
View the 2000 Grapevine.
View the 1999 Grapevine.


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Last updated: 04/20/2005