CRL NEWS

March 4, 2021

-- "If we're close, but in my heart I know we can't do it, I would make that decision to sell."

-- Dave Dombrowski, Phillies GM, talking about his time with the Red Sox

Fraser and myself know the feeling. We made a few trades at the end of 2019 to set us up for 2020. But that season never happened and we now have a scratch draft this year. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how our strategy would have played out.

It’s been a little over a week since our last communication. I was going to do this via email, because it’s quicker, but I just found out about a half-hour ago that I have to stay up all night – so I might as well post it online to have a record of the tail end of this screwed up year – and I have time to update all of the links embedded on the web site.

I have worked eight days in a row since I put out the last newsletter. Two of those were overnight shifts because someone was out. Normally, you get a couple of days to switch your sleep schedule, but in the emergency, I worked a closing shift on Sunday (2/28) and had to come back and work overnight Monday and Tuesday nights. I was supposed to go back to days tomorrow and had adjusted my sleep schedule accordingly, but just found out 30 minutes ago that I have to go back overnight starting tomorrow (Friday, 3/5) through Tuesday night. Ironically, my two days off this week were yesterday and today, but it’s hard to call yesterday a day off when I worked from midnight until almost 9 am.

So, since I have to be up all night so I can sleep during the day, I thought I’d put this in out as a regular newsletter instead of an email.

Anyway, an update on teams that will be in Vegas:

1 – Yes

2 – No

3 – No

4 – Yes

5 – Yes

6 – Yes

7 – Yes

8 – No

9 – Yes

10 – Yes

So Zoom will definitely be a part of the draft. Ken has generously offered to set up the Zoom portion of the draft from Vegas. But I am still asking for volunteers to assist because he still has to draft his team. BTW, for Ken, if your Zoom is not a business account, it is supposed to time out after 40 minutes or so from what I hear and everyone has to “call” back in. Torrens has indicated that he has access to a business Zoom account which is unlimited.

BTW, for you remote folks, here is a note from Ken:

“As an aside, I've flown over 40 times since the pandemic began, many of them prior to the mask mandate.  No ill effects.  You're more likely to catch Covid at your neighbor's house than in an airport or plane.  It's all about ventilation.  Planes and airports have good ventilation.  Your neighbor … not so much. My 2 cents.”

The draft will be at Caesar’s this year. All of the Harrah’s meeting rooms are closed due to COVID, but they are giving us a room at Caesar’s for the same price. It also seems, per Glenn, that they are willing to be accommodating if you have reservations at Harrah’s – they will give you a room at Caesar’s for the same price. Just let me or Glenn know so that we can set it up. Along those lines, we must have an accurate count of exactly how many people will be in the draft room – Caesar’s will assign us a conference room according to our count and they will strictly enforce the social distancing mandate. So, I need to know how many owners from each team will attend. Not only that, but I need to know about significant others, friends, groupies (I’d put little “d” into that group, but I don’t know that he will be there since Glenn will be drafting from Craig’s place in Seattle), etc.

On another note, Ken, Farabee and myself are planning on golf somewhere Thursday in Vegas. We need a fourth. Any takers? (BTW, I haven’t played since two years ago in Vegas. I need to get my woods regripped, because they were deteriorating. So, if you agree to play, keep your head up or wear a helmet).

I still need votes from teams on Otis’ proposed scoring category changes by March 15. If any of you need a refresher on the proposals, they are in the last newsletter, which can be found here:

www.c-r-l.org/news/2021news/21news2.htm

When discussing these proposals, I suggest that everyone is included. I did include a link to everyone’s email address in the last newsletter, but it was embedded in my regular verbose prose. Everyone’s email address is here:

www.c-r-l.org/images/crladdys.jpg

I am so ready to get back to normalcy.

Jim

There should be discussion on these proposals. There are a couple of ways to do this: You cold utilize the message board feature of the stat service, or we can do it by email. Here are the league email addresses (doing this in jpg format so the addresses can’t be harvested by webcrawlers):