Owners' League News

Published November 16, 1997
Updated December 20


Prediction Time

PREVIOUS BULLETINS
12/20/96
The Ghiotto meeting: Candies spend!
(with trade rules)
12/23/96
Flowers: The Mob Visited My House!
(in Italian)
01/05/97
The Loan Auction
01/19/97
The Trades Deadline
02/01/97
Brokers Win !!!
02/23/97
Freeze Time Coming
03/10/97
Keepers Submitted
05/05/97
Draft Time!
After six months of relentless trades (you can see an updated list courtesy of the Flowers' statistic service), the October 3 deadline is history. It should be noted that this year the trading deadline has been pulled three months in order to address the main problem experienced in previous season: teams feeling out of contention were encouraged to deal away their best players during the winter (particularly the ones dealt to the National League in the meantime), for money or prospects, thus making the strong stronger and the weak weaker. Some rules were implemented to limit those trades, the main being stopping the trading season in coincidence with the real regular season. From now on, any player acquired must be protected for next season, providing everything is not messed up by the still pending proposed leagues and teams realignments.

December Update !

Just one team switched leagues, as you know. It looks like Bud Selig put up all this mess just to allow his own team to go elsewhere...
Anyway, considering the impact it had on our teams, the Christians looked like the most damaged team, losing Jeromy Burnitz and Jeff D'Amico (two of their projected keepers for next season).
On the other hand, the expansion draft deprived the Candies of Jeff Suppan and Bob Wolcott, both drafted by the Diamondbacks of the NL.
Anyway, as it was eventually considered, these four players weren't credited of such an impact to justify reducing keepers to seven. So, the league decided to reduce the number of keepers to EIGHT for everybody, just for this year.




We can now try to wrap up the season with some predictions on the best chances to win this year.

East Division
It looks like the East Division, like the Central last year, will be won by default.
No contender for the Finals here. It could be a two-way race among the Topos and the Christians (in order of preference), with the Burberries a distant third. The Bidons did not trade Jeff Fassero away, as it had been predicted, but they did trade away everybody else.

Central Division
No contest here. The Flowers will win hands down (a first time for them), both because they're a very good team and because there's no real contention within the division. A disappointing season for the Pachos (very promising out of the draft), and substantially bad trading decisions by the Candies make the race for second place the only interesting thing here. Improvements in the Fatties team, but probably worth no more than another fourth place.

West Division
The big guns are here again. Before the late surge of the Flowers, it looked like the 1996 Champions Brokers and the perennial challenger Mikes were bound for the Finals again. Still, you've got two locks here: a finalist (at least), and a wild card.
Also, we have good news from the Sniffers clubhouse: the worst team in history will improve from the past, but not enough to rob third place from the Bucks.

You can check a team-by-team roster analysis, along with a bit of history, in the Teams page.




Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Mail me at r.caramelli@bo.nettuno.it.
Thank you.

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