The July 7 FAAB Report

Mastersball does its usually fine job reporting and analyzing the moves this week in the four Tout leagues, as they do every week.

We had another transaction-deadline kerfuffle this week in the leagues. As you surely know, the Cubs and Athletics made a big interleague trade on Saturday. The trade was processed on Saturday and Jeff Samarzdija and Jason Hammel were available in the AL Bidmeister this week, and Dan Straily was entered into the minor league list of the NL.

Then, on Sunday morning, the Yankees and Diamondbacks made a trade of Vidal Nuno for Brandon McCarthy. Whatever the merits of the deal, it clearly took place sometime around noon ET Sunday officially. That’s when the Dbacks tweeted that the deal was done.

The wrinkle was that some enterprising Tout Warriors were able to find McCarthy’s and Nuno’s names in the list of “Minor Leaguers” that our stat provider adds in addition to our regularly eligible list, because Tout Wars allows teams to buy minor league players on waivers (provided they keep them on their active roster for one week afterwards). It turns out the minor league list is actually a list of all ineligible players, so other-league guys like McCarthy and Nuno were listed though they clearly weren’t eligible.

The claims were unravelled. A note has been sent to all Tout Leagues about who is legal and who is not.

Just to clarify one thing: The reason Tout Wars determines eligibility based on the previous day’s legal ML rosters is because these are reliable and vetted and available to everyone via the MLB website. In-day moves are subject to lots of interpretation, misleading tweets and timing issues that cannot be regularly and fairly applied.

We know that some leagues approach the transaction wire like a stream of info to be acted on immediately, which is great fun if you choose to play that way, but for Tout Wars purposes a more orderly process has been chosen instead. Alas, this means that Brandon McCarthy and Vidal Nuno are free agents all week, this week.