Baseball is back — for now.
With the agreement struck Tuesday night, the JLB is back in spring training mode. We already had a long wait after our “slow draft” went too quick and left us with nearly 20 days to prepare for the regular season.
Now, we have another 31 days until the new start of the regular season.
It will be a sprint in the majors, but in the JLB, with only six weeks to play with, it’s going to be more like a 10-yard dash.
But, we’re going to make the most of it. And with that, let’s start with the schedule.
2020 SCHEDULE
The official schedule when it comes to dates will come out in a few days. I need to see what MLB does with its schedule and how it places in the off-days. With the season starting on a Friday, I can already tell you, we are likely to shift our seven-day matchups to a Friday-to-Thursday setup to maximize the days.
The playoffs will remain the same and the World Series will have a few extra days built in to go to Sept. 27 — so looking at a 10- or 11-day matchup.
In the six-week regular season, we will have six weeks of double-headers, meaning you’ll have two matchups going on simultaneously every week. This will allow for five weeks of doubled-up divisional play, resulting in a total of 10 divisional matchups by season’s end, and one week of interleague play where you will play two teams that match up with you based on last year’s standings (1st and 2nd place in NL and AL will pair up for two matchups, 3rd and 4th, and 5th and 6th).
This will give us a total of 12 matchups to decide the playoff field. It’s nine short of our usual 21, but it’s certainly better than six matchups, and it will greatly help with the chance of having a great week but being devastated by a team that had a better week.
TRADES
Yes, as of the point I post this Jargon, you can begin trading (except you, Crox).
Actually, though, there is one thing that would keep teams from trading, and that would be any team that drafted 11 or more green minor leaguers with the expectation that they’d be up Opening Day. Those rosters are currently illegal — but OK by rule until Opening Day. I have to uphold that rule, so in order to trade before Opening Day, you’d have to start off-loading greens — and it must start in order of last green drafted. (Example, if you drafted 12 green minor leaguers, and you want to drop 2 to get trade eligible, you must drop the 11th and 12th green minor leaguers selected in the draft.)
The trade deadline will be 11:59 p.m. on July 23. We will have no trades in season.
MINOR LEAGUERS
No green minor leaguers can be picked up at any point this season (one exception below). We are placing a hold on any minor leaguer who has the green ‘M’ label.
If you have a minor leaguer in your system get called up, you must leave that green spot vacant and cannot replace in season.
Same applies for trades or if you decide that you are done with that particular minor leaguer.
Upon season’s end, we will set up an “on-paper” amateur draft to fill any openings you are left with after the season. If you have one opening, you’ll have a first-round pick; if you have two, you’ll have a first and second (and so on up to 10 rounds). The draft order will be the same order we had for the 2020 JLB draft and it will not snake.
** For any minor leaguer with the ‘M’ label who isn’t on a JLB roster and about to get a call-up to play can be picked up but the JLB owner must be aware of the following:
(1) You must immediately after the pickup contact JLB commissioners and inform them of your move so they can monitor.
(2) The player picked up and the last drafted minor leaguer on your team (two players here) will be dropped by the commissioner if:
a. The free agent player fails to get the call-up and placed on roster at first pitch within 24 hours of pickup (a rainout can extend this to 48 hours or 72 hours depending on the next scheduled game).
b. The free agent player gets called up but fails to collect an at-bat or an inning of work before being sent back down (no matter how many days spent on the MLB roster).
c. The JLB owner does not notify the commissioners after the pickup.
Extra minor leaguers selected in draft must make opening day roster or else we will follow the preseason rule of last green minor league players drafted having to be forcibly dropped to make room.
Note, you can still fill a void in green via trade.
POSITION ELIGIBILITY
After a long discussion among commissioners, it was decided that it’d be best to keep position eligibility numbers the same. We will in the offseason take petitions for players to gain eligibility in cases where it makes sense and it will take two-thirds commissioners vote to earn the exception.
We will look at SP, RP cases, as well as any fielding position that can have a strong argument made for it — example: “Player A played 16 games in RF and 25 in CF during the 2020 season. He is reported to be splitting time again, so he should have RF and CF.” We will review cases and make changes if accepted.
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