A lot happening in recent weeks at PGB World Headquarters. As mentioned previously, I offered a window for managers interested in a "refresh" to swap out their roster for an existing team, either the recently abandoned Warwick Warriors or even one of the mothballed teams, Havana or Newark.
The Ladner Alouettes will be assuming Warwick's roster and making the existing LAD roster available for future drafts or selection by a new, incoming manager. They will maintain their current draft slotting--only the active roster is changing.
In an unorthodox move, the El Dorado Burros will be cashing in their historic lineup in exchange for the active players still rostered in Havana. Again, they'll maintain their existing draft assets that will help rebuild a team that has been dormant since 2019.
Again, these moves will affect only their active roster and not their draft positioning, assets or liabilities. These transactions leave our draft inventory with players from LAD, NEW, and ELD. How we release those remaining players is very much a work in progress, and a committee will be forming soon to address those complexities.
We are also pursuing an 18th manager, and hope to have some resolution on that in the days and weeks ahead, pending the confirmation that all current Groundouts will be returning in 2022. In the interest of fairness, I'm not making ELD available to a potential new manager, so should it come to pass, they'll choose between LAD and NEW.
Good questions from all. Here's a quickie re-cap:
2022 draft is 100% unchanged. Port Aransas will be the team folded in, as agreed to during last winter's meetings.
2023 draft may look a little different; original plan was to include both remaining teams, HAV and NEW. I'll be forming a committee to work through the revised plan.
Paul Johnson will be using the WAR roster, and Chuck Tinkler will be using the HAV roster for the R5 draft. Both teams will maintain their existing draft positions and assets/liabilities.
A new manager will take control of the LAD franchise, to be announced soon.
Yes, I firmly believe that Chuck will hold on to (and even add to) the collection of catchers in Havana.
What roster are Paul and Chuck using in the rule 5 draft?
The plan was to add the Port Aransas roster to this year's draft.
I appreciate the guts it takes to drop the top team and restart! That is a real part of the fun of this is building (I'm certainly there).
One concern for me is that we are changing the content of the draft by removing Havana. If I remember we were adding both of the remaining dormant teams to the draft pool this year (had my eye on some of Havana catching). I agree that we should freeze ELD for at least one draft cycle but taking HAV out of the draft does have some repercussions. I'm not against the move but if would like to see something added back as a holder of 8 picks in the first 4 rounds.
It's been too long since someone aggressively horded catching in this league