Baseball pool fine details:

This is a brief information post giving a highlight of the 3rd Edge of the Sword Baseball Pool:

First off a reminder that you can click here to join the league using your Yahoo ID.

League I.D.: 48452
Password: anncoulter

It's a full-season league, using both the American and National leagues as pool fodder.

Head-to-head competition format, meaning that every week you're paired with a new opposing team to do battle with, making each week an individually competitive period (especially if you're up against a team who's blogger you hate...lol). Every category you win is a win, a loss is a loss, and a tie is a tie: using this system we amass win-loss records of winning similar to how the NHL does it (Wins=1 point, Ties=1/2 point).

Up to 15 teams will be permitted to join (naturally I'm one of them). I truely hope we fill it up both to insure a competitive draft and also because if there are say 13 teams at draft time then the last signed up team will be eliminated to make an even number. Cross your fingers everyone. (Current number of teams at 4:30pm on February 23rd? Zero.)

There are no maximum number of trades, but only 30 player adds allowed. The trade deadline will be August 27th. Waivers will be in place for 3 days. Yahoo waiver rules, for those unfamiliar, starts out the reverse of the draft order. However, every time you successfully pick up a player on waivers you are bumped to the last spot again. So if the first place guy on day 1 never picks up a single player off the waiver wire, you can only advance up to 2nd place.

The Commissioner (well that's...that's me! yeah) has authority to veto trades, but I'll try to be fair with it. I'll set up a complaint-based system, where a certain number of complaints will trigger a trade reversal. We'll hope there are no Ovechkins this year, because Post-Draft players will follow waiver rules, which really hurt our hockey pool.

The teams can be adjusted daily, which should encourage people to pay close attention to their teams and notice things like park factors and opposing pitchers as opposed to playing hot streaks.

The teams will consist of:

1. a catcher
2. 1st baseman
3. 2nd baseman
4. 3rd baseman
5. shortstop
6. 3 outfielders (which field is irrelevent)
7. 2 utility players
8. 4 starting pitchers
9. 3 relief pitchers
10. a utility pitcher
11. 6 bench spots
12. 2 Disabled-List spots for the multitude of injuries to be sustained in the post-steroid era.

Stats categories shall be:

1. Runs
2. Hits
3. Home Runs
4. Runs Batted In
5. Stolen Bases
6. Assists (contact with the ball after it has been hit before a putout occurs)
7. OPS (On-base percentage plus slugging percentage
8. Wins
9. Saves
10. Strikeouts
11. HLD
12. ERA (Earned Run Average)
13. WHIP (Walks + Hits / Innings Pitched)
14. K/BB (Strikeouts per base-on-balls)

Scoring will commence starting Week 1 (all weeks start on Monday), and continue until September 3rd. On September 4th, head-to-head playoffs will commence. This page gives some more details.

There is a minimum number of innings (six) that each team must pitch weekly in order to receive any pitching credit for the week. This means you can't just have Mariano Rivera on your team and screw wins in favour for mucho saves/WHIP/ERA/etc.

That's about it for details on the league. Again, feel free to click here and enter the league information to sign up!

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I apologize in advance for not being able to use the following stats which I would have liked to have used:

For pitchers: Saves divided by save opportunities (to encourage choosing more efficient closers rather than closers who have better job security) and Opposing Batters OPS or OBP instead of ERA (its a far more reliable stat).

For batters, a lot of changes: H/AB instead of pure hits, again to choose more efficient batters as opposed to Tampa Bay or St. Louis players who simply receive a lot of at-bats, Stolen Bases minus caught stealing divided by stolen bases plus caught stealing (a stat which allows us to determine who's actually good at base stealing versus who just has a lot of go-aheads from desperate managers), park-adjusted OPS or OBP (really make people look at those stat sheets and list of common opposing stadiums), and Linear Weights (if it wasn't a head-to-head league... LW is too long-term a stat to be using over a 6-11 game period).