New Players and Transaction Order - Start of Season

Checking in on a couple of questions that have come up already...and I'm sure others are wondering or about to ask:

1. Transaction order for the start of the season....

In the off-season, we use a somewhat modified approach to weekly transaction order - partly to let people not have to be involved every week. Once a team picks a player, that team goes to the end of the waiver order - and the order is maintained from week to week.

This changes when we hit Week 1 (deadline April 10).
For returning leagues - the order reverts back to the Redistribution Draft order (reverse order of the 2008 record).
For new leagues - After Week Zero we order the teams by total salary (lowest total salary goes to the top).

In either situation, we do not change the order at all between Weeks 1 & 2. Starting with Week 3, we reorder every week based on reverse W-L records.

So - you can pick players in Week Zero and it doesn't affect the transaction order in Week One (other than team salary changes for new leagues).

2. New Players - when do they arrive on the list?

In BWB, after the December winter meetings, players do not get put on the BWB player list until they play a major league game (then later we add the 1st-round draft picks).

So - for those of you wanting to pick up Tommy Hanson (for example) - since he went back to the minors, you'll need to wait.

What about Elvis Andrus and players like that who will make the majors? As soon as we find they play in a game, we'll add them to our list - BUT, we only post the list of new players once per week, when we run transactions. BWB is a game for baseball addicts, but you don't have to be tied to your computer to hit that 24-hour window when a player is first available.

Although there may be some stats available by the time we run the Week Zero transactions, we will NOT add any players in that first week. Assuming the new guys play at least once before April 10, the deadline for Week 1, they will first show up in the BWB player lists as eligible for the Week 2 transactions (Deadline April 17. That's the one you don't want to miss then).