2017 Finals Vote for CAP/DH/Draft Order

This is my first Barnstormers, and I am thoroughly impressed by your management of the thing, Moose. You are truly a badass and I implore you not even to consider retirement. Great event.

This will be an uphill climb, as it will be my first live draft and whatever drafting is left to do on Valentine's day will have to be done by proxy (19 mo. old kid + 9 months pregnant wife + Valentine's day = my draft is screwed).

No excuses though, especially for this cap. In fact I fail to see a correlation between my success with the autodraft at $60-$100m and the end result of my teams. Hopefully what I like to think is my deft hand at post-draft roster construction will make me respectable.

This whole thing has been a delicious challenge: I won my division for every season counted towards the total yet I still had to win the title in event #6 to squeak into the top 9.

Good luck everyone I'm looking forward to it! -matt

Labrat checking in.
I wanted to let everyone know I have a sales meeting Tuesday-Thursday. I will do my best to keep up with the draft and set proxies during longer stretches of unavailability.
If someone needs to skip me, I won't complain (unless it's round 1-5).

The finals live draft will have the clock set for 3 hours, AFTER we get through the first round. This is just to be sure that all players are in place. Once I turn the clock on for 3 hours, it will also turn off by itself “EVENINGS and WEEKENDS” – we don’t know the exact times. What this means to you is this…..

If a players clock has run out and he has not picked yet, he may be skipped. This is not done automatically. In order to skip a player to move the draft along, the player up AFTER the expired clock player must cast a MANUAL (“DRAFT”) PICK. Then and only then will the draft continue to move along firing off proxies. There is one exception to this. If you are ON THE TURN meaning you are at #1 or #12 in a place where two picks will be made, then skipping a player does not seem to work. Adrian knows about this and does not care to fix it. Nothing we can do, and for this reason – LIVE DRAFTS were removed from being a part of a regular Barnstormers tour event. – We simply cannot have a flawed live draft application affecting us in this way.

The above is from Mighty Moose's Tip Sheet for Diamond Dope drafts. So I guess it is okay to not have have a live draft application flaw affect the tour but it is okay for it to affect the Finals Championship.

This raises some serious concerns for me I am not trying to be difficult here or to revise the tournament rules although it appears likely that will be how this post gets construed. However, this situation requires clarification. I will not accept being skipped on a pick that occurs because we have no idea when Diamond Dope's clock is on or off. That is the antithesis of a level playing field, and should that happen to me, I will immediately withdraw from the tournament. One might think that a simple solution to this would be to ask Adrian Gabriel precisely when the clock is on or off, so we can monitor the draft accordingly and not be subject to being skipped but that hasn't happened Apparently that ambiguity is acceptable to the board of directors but it is not okay with me. This may be a moot point since I am on "THE TURN" but it is not clear to me if the person on "THE TURN" can't be skipped or can't skip the person before him. If I cannot be skipped then I'm good, although I wouldn't be if I were someone else and get skipped because we don't know when the 3 hour clock is on or off. Another, no doubt unwanted suggestion, since it comes from me, would be for the Board to set times that the clock is off so that no one skips a person because of this ambiguous flaw. For example we could agree that the clock goes "off" at 10 p.m. EST and goes back on the next morning at 11 a.m. EST (8 a.m. PST) and that no skips are possible during this period. Thus there appear to be at least two easy fixes to this dilemma. I have no plans to not check the draft at least hourly while I am awake and share Bernie's view of proxies, but I need to be able to sleep at night without having to worry about being skipped.

I will not accept being skipped on a pick that occurs because we have no idea when Diamond Dope's clock is on or off. This may be a moot point since I am on "THE TURN" but it is not clear to me if the person on "THE TURN" can't be skipped or can't skip the person before him. If I cannot be skipped then I'm good,

You are good. A draft pick can only be skipped by the person picking next. Since you have two consecutive picks, you could only be skipped by yourself.
In any event, I pick after your second pick, and on HAL's honor, I won't skip you.

As I also will not skip anyone. So we are both good. Thanks Labratory!!

Based on the import of this event, I don't think anyone will skip anyone. I've only seldom seen it done, and that only when someone was continuing to abuse the process and not pick in a timely manner.

Druid, it's one thing to use a flawed app for 160+ players in an entire EVENT but something else entirely for 12 players who are mostly skilled with the Dope Draft app to use it when the only other CHOICE is SOM's LD. My wording was to enforce that we won't use Diamond Dope draft for an EVENT as 160+ players hitting it would just completely bring it to it's knees.

Yeah I'd love for Adrian to fix it but it's all we have and it's still SPLENDID for the Finals Draft.

I've listed the limitations of the site with all the information I have collected over the years. They're MINOR in the grand scheme of things. As has been said, very seldom do people play skips. I could even keep the clock off for SEVERAL rounds, but I have never found it to be necessary.

In the e-mail that will go out, I'll tell everyone to check with me before playing a skip. My approval would depend on what round we are in, how long their clock has been expired, whether I have had any success at contacting them. (are they answering my e-mails ? I have a phone # for many players).

If there are any disputes, we have an excellent board who will make a fair ruling. I don't think you'll have any problems getting to sleep at night.

We could always just agree to no skips. Really the worst that could possibly mean is that the league starts one Monday later than it otherwise would. Doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.

If we aren't skipping in the early rounds anyway, why don't we get this draft started? I am really really really excited to see who Luckyman picks with the first pick overall.

I can see that you are a bit anxious to learn the first pick, Chrissie.

One interesting question is how well the cherished strategy widely used in the finals of 4 ace pitchers and no bullpen holds up. It is one of your favorites isn't it Chrissie? One that you copied from Bruce Foster during his run a few years back. Or will you go with the non* starting staff that you purloined from me and slavishly used in the 100M events this tour? So much depends on the parks chosen and divisional assignments. Ironic though that none of our colleagues seem to care about this, anyone could have spoken up after I raised the issue and you seconded it. Oh well.

Just to allay your anxiety a bit I will reveal this: the first pick will be a pitcher.

Proper pitcher or Babe Ruth? Is it Monday yet?