BWB Primer #2 - Weekly Deadlines

The BWB Primer is a series of commentaries to provide rule interpretations and hints - something a bit more than you get out of the rules. See the Primer Index for the entire series.

Weekly Deadlines and the effect on game scoring

This goes back to Primer #1 and what MLB games are used for scoring BWB games.

As a quick review, ML Game #6 stats are used for the hitters in BWB Game #1.

Thus, in order to score the game, all major league teams must have played 6 games. In 2009, that's going to occur for most teams somewhere on or near April 11-12. That's the reason why we don't need lineups on the Opening Day of the major league season. (We used to do it that way, but for much of the season teams needed to submit their weekly lineups far in advance of when the games would actually be considered - making it tough to be responsive to slumps, trades, and injuries).

Rainouts and such also play havoc in getting all the teams at the same point, so quite often it will appear early in the season that it takes forever to get game results. I'll try to get them done as soon as I can. Be happy this is the Internet age and that you don't have to wait for U.S. Mail to deliver you the results as was done by the predecessors to Benchwarmer Baseball.

Eventually, most teams get into a groove where they end up playing 6-7 games per calendar week, so in order to make sure that by the end of the season you are still submitting lineups before the major league games are really played, we instituted a sliding deadline schedule in 2003. Every 5 weeks, the weekly transaction day advances one day earlier. So at the beginning of the season, transactions and lineups are due on Fridays and by the end of the year it's Monday. This has worked out pretty well.

For many of you who just joined, the never-ending (and irregular) deadlines to get your draft done may have been confusing and overwhelming. From this point, everything is regular. Once a week - the same day every week - the same time (midnight Pacific). Then, once every five weeks we shift the day forward to better match the MLB schedule. Occasionally, we'll shift a day or two - but almost always that's to give more time rather than less time (like this current Week #1 to push back to Saturday due to a drafting league).