MetroWest ABL 2008 Grapevine

January 27, 2008
Thanks to everyone who braved the lousy weather to attend our 2008 League meeting on Sunday 1/27/08.

Here are the meeting notes I have from the meeting. Please feel free to respond if I've left anything out. Also, I know this is a long message, but please read through it because we decided to change 3 or so fairly important rules.

We have a balance of $8.51 in our account (not counting the $380 credits owed to the Dodgers and White Sox from their $1000 deposits last year).

Assuming the insurance and tryout costs stay the same this year, I expect the league dues will be $300 per team which is a $20 reduction from last year. This of course does not include the cost of baseballs which were $50 per dozen last year. The fees break down like this:

Insurance	$1860
Emergency Fund	$150
Winner's Share	$300
Web Hosting	$300
Web Master	$500
Umpire Stipend	$200
March Tryout	$300

The key thing about fees is that we agreed to put payment deadlines in place for this season. The $300 depoit will be due by 3/1. The total dues (including cost of baseballs) will be due by 4/15.

We decided we would hold a draft and try to use the Sudbury facility we used two years ago because it set up better for the tryout with the turf and pitcher areas available. I will call the facility to see if they still are open for such a thing, see what the cost is and set a date for mid March.

We picked teams for the scheduling template:

AL	NL
A - Orioles	1 - Brewers
B - White Sox	2 - Phillies
C - Tigers	3 - Braves
D - Indians	4 - Dodgers
E - Red Sox	5 - Cubs
F - Mariners	6 - Cardinals

For items we voted on, we changed a few things.

All 3 rounds of playoffs will be best 2 of 3 with the same format as last year, 2 games in weekend 1 followed by a deciding 9 inning game on a second weekend if the first weekend DH is split.

We decided playoff double headers would be 7 innings for the first two rounds and the championship round would be 9 inning games.

We also decided that if one league split and the other league swept, that the league with the sweep did not have to wait for the league that split to complete, they would start the next series right away.

We decided to have a set time to start the playoffs. The season will start on 4/20. We will have Mothers Day Weekend off (5/11), Memorial Day Weekend off (5/25), July 4th weekend off (7/6) and Labor Day off (8/31).

The regular season will end on 8/10 with a rainout makeup weekend on 8/17. Playoff will start on 8/24.

We decided to add 2 double headers (DHs) to the schedule if possible so we ended up back at the 18 game schedule we had been playing the last few years before last season. These DHs will have to be AL versus NL and will cause an unbalanced schedule so every team will play all teams in their own division twice, 2 teams from the other division twice and 4 teams from the other division once. I will work on the schedule template to see what our options are. I can't promise that this is even possible to do since we are keeping the 14 weekends and we have limitations on what we can do with the other scheduling parameters already in place.

We will require IDs for all new players. We will check the IDs of all players that attend our draft. For players that are added to teams without going to the draft, it will be the managers responsibility to get a copy of the players ID to prove age. If a manager has a concern about a players age, the issue must be raised the day of the game between the teams (same rule holds for playoff games). The manager can not wait for 5 weeks to challenge an ID. The challenge can occur later that game day (does not have to be during or before the game) but must occur on that same day. The challenge would be made to the manager with the player in question and the league president needs to be notified. The manager has a week to provide verification of the players age. If the player is proved to be ineligible, all games that player has played in that season will have to be forfeited. The player is not allowed to play again that season until a valid age check can be made.

If teams are rained out early in the season and they are set to play again on the schedule at a later date, that rainout must be made up as DH on that second scheduled date. The only exception to this is if both managers agree to a different date, time and location within one week of the rainout.

Please continue to send Tim Hays umpiring comments both positive and negative to help him assigning umps for regular season and playoff games.

I need to document the grievance board policy more clearly. The main thing is that grievance board decisions are final and both manager must abide by the decision of the grievance board if the issue is raised to that board. Right now the grievance board is Rick Huckins, Chris Shea and Rich Schwarz.

We decided to keep using the same baseballs after some discussion about using raised seem balls. We decided our existing balls are the Major League specification (ROML) and we should continue to use those balls.

We're going to continue to use the same supplemental draft process for people who register after the tryout draft on March which is I will send the E-mail out to all managers and they will have 3 days to put in a claim. The team with the highest draft position will get the rights to the player and that team will drop to the bottom of the cliam position. We are changing what we do with the collection of players who are not drafted/don’t show up to the tryout. It took us a couple months to get through those players last year. This year, we will give each team 48 hours to claim a player. We will go through the teams in draft order. This process is only in place until that pool of players is eliminated or no more teams want players. This should allow us to get through that part of the process much quicker.

We also decided to not change the existing rule about a professional players having to wait three years before entering our league.


View the 2007 Grapevine.
View the 2006 Grapevine.
View the 2005 Grapevine.
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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