Update

It's February and the cards are here. I made a copy of the league (for use with the new V12 computer game) with our current rosters. If you would like it, e-mail me and I'll send it to you. This is NOT the league to use once the season starts. It's just one you can use to play practice games or see what's available... that sort of thing.

I also have an Excel spreadsheet of updated rosters and another for the Draft grid. Plus, there's a Word document listing every trade made since last year's Draft. E-mail me for any or all of these.

Speaking of trades... If I counted correctly, there were 28 trades made during January. Those trades involved the movement of 63 players, 23 picks/taxi spots from the 2007 Draft, and 7 picks/taxi spots from the 2008 Draft.

A couple of observations about the cards... There haven't been too many surprises. As always, some looked a little worse than I thought; some better. Mike Mussina got a really good card. The Sidewinders will win 120 games and earn the #1 seed again this year before underachieving in the playoffs, losing a 2nd round series with the [fill in team here]. For the Warpigs, Garrett Atkins' card is almost as good as the Snakes' Miguel Cabrera, and should provide a good complement to Hafner/Pujols/Ramirez; but the Pig pitchers are middle of the road. The Oilers' Freddy Sanchez has a complete column of singles - not even a ballpark single to mess it up. That's pretty impressive. He has another column filled with extra base hit chances. And there was STILL room on that side of the card to gain 12 more points of clutch singles. Yikes!

I can't remember this many top of the line relievers. Papelbon (Fungoes), Nathan (Drillers), Ryan (Sidewinders), Rivera and Rodriguez (FFTs)... I wish I had one.

Starting pitching will be a hot commodity in the Draft, as there just aren't that many good ones. There are, however, a lot of good relief cards available.

So, who will go first in the Draft? Will it be a starting pitcher? Anibal Sanchez? Cole Hamels? Scott Olsen? Josh Johnson? Nate Robertson? With the Nads having a good rotation already, maybe the first pick is a reliever. Takashi Saito? Joel Zumaya? J.J. Putz? Or maybe a hitter. Dan Uggla? Luke Scott? Josh Willingham? Or hell, maybe it'll be an uncarded player. The computer game suggests Eric Brynes as the best player available for the Nads.

There has been some talk lately about possible changes for NASOMA. Among the things to consider are:

• How many players to keep prior to the Draft. The only thing I would consider other than keeping it the way it is, is to just not make any cuts before the draft and make as many draft selections as we own. THEN, cut back to 30(+2). For one icy day, this was discussed in depth; but i think it makes more sense to stay with the current system.
  
• What to do about the uncarded players. Keep it the same? Get rid of them altogether? I think I would prefer we keep being able to draft them, but limit the number you can own at any time to the number of taxi spots you own. In other words, making it illegal to have an uncarded player on your 30-man roster. So if you already have uncarded players equal to the number of taxi spots, you cannot draft any more of them.
  
• Division alignments. Keep them the same? Change them? Do away with them? I like the idea of changing our divisions along roommate lines:
  

1. Warpigs, FFTs, Wahoos, DVs
   
2. Fungoes, Rhinos, Inmates, Nads
   
3. Buckeyes, Mavs, Tweeners, Oilers
   
4. Zaps, Drillers, Sidewinders, Killer Bees

• Number of teams in the post-season. Keep it at 6? Expand it to 8? At 6, the top two seeds get a huge advantage with the byes (all evidence to the contrary last year), but 8 teams would cost more for travel purposes.

Are there other issues to discuss?

Tomorrow is Super Bowl. Gee, I sure hope they do another story on how these are the first two black head coaches to make it to the Super Bowl. I don't know about you, but I can't get enough of that.