Wheeling and dealing at the spring meeting

First off, congrats to Mike and his repeat WS victory, now we can retire those stinking '04 cards and get on with the juicy '05 cards.

Sunday night we held an impromptu Beer Cap League meeting at Doug's place. Unfortunately nobody invited the two Nicks.

Doug and Norm traded catchers, Doug sending Michael Barrett and $5 to Norm's Braves for Yadier "the gun" Molina. After that two blockbuster deals between me and Norm went down.

First we made a deal sending the MVP champ, Albert Pujols along with Roy Oswalt and Felipe Lopez from the Dodgers to Norm's Braves for Cy Young winner, Rocket Clemens, Todd Helton and Marcus Giles, plus $5.

But the madness didn't end there. Norm, pissed off with A-Rod's performance in his two seasons, offered him up on the trading (chopping?) block. I took him up on it and we ending up with a deal that sent former MVP, Vlad Guerrero, and the ever versatile Chone Figgins along with an '06 #4 draft pick for the aforementioned Alex Rodriguez, Norm's #1 '06 pick and $10.

There were a couple of league rule modifications agreed upon. First was in regards to the prospect pick (non-card players). We flipped around so many times that I'm not sure what we settled on. We did decide on the following changes:

• The new cards will not be opened until the trade deadline has passed. This is to avoid owners making trades during the current season based on the next season’s cards.

• After this year, the draft will take place at the end of our scheduled season instead of prior to the beginning of the next season. This will stop us from knowing the results of the next MLB season while drafting the previous MLB season's cards (we would know only the results for April of the current MLB season). So now the only sure thing when deciding on contract lengths will be for the season we have the cards for, the second and third seasons of a two or three year contract will be a bit of a crap shoot. And if we do have prospect picks we will not know their stats (except for that first month) - make's those picks a challenge and no longer a sure thing.

For at least the '06 season we will stay with the mixed card and computer game. We will evaluate whether to continue in the mixed format or switch to computer-only after next season is complete.

We also held the random draw to complete next year's schedule. I will re-post the finished schedule in the next couple of days.

When we next convene for our draft in August, we will need to decide on a statistician for the NL and one for the AL. We should also formalize other league positions (League commissioner, AL & NL presidents, treasurer).

Finally, rosters must be finalized by June 30th -all extensions and drops must be completed by that date.

Update: We will allow one optional prospect pick this year that can be taken in the 10th round. Next year we will allow 2 prospect picks that can be taken at any point in the 10 round draft.