Some people I know

Today was our annual APBA baseball draft. This is an eight-team continuous ownership league, so there are a lot of very good players on the existing teams. We also have a cap on quality starting pitching, so there's a good big of jockeying for the starters available under the cap. This year, the cap was going to limit us to five or six starters.

I was drafting last, which means that the team was successful last year, a good thing. My starting lineup and bench were largely solid and hard to improve upon given what was available in the draft. My starting pitching was strong, but could always use some help. My bullpen had completely disintegrated, aided by Emmanuel Clase's foray into illegal collusion with sports betters, so it had to be completely rebuilt.

I would have liked to collect another outfielder, but the only one who really suited my needs, given that I have Juan Soto, Julio Rodriguez, Byron Buxton, and Ronald Acuna, was Roman Anthony. And he was available to me with the eighth pick of the draft, but I decided that I really needed Hunter Brown, a quality starter from the Astros, instead.

Roman Anthony was drafted with the next pick. I was not surprised.

It was now time to rebuild the bullpen, starting with a couple of strong relievers with control, Adrian Morejon and Randy Rodriguez. There was no great hurry to draft the rest of the bullpen, as there were a lot of similar relievers available, so on the fourth round, I collected catching prospect Samuel Basallo from the Orioles. He is not allowed to play this year due to limited at bats, but since I already have Moreno and Herrera at catch, that was not a problem.

In the fifth round, I drafted promising Brewers pitcher Jacob Misiorowski -- in this case, one pick before the fellow drafting after me was prepared to take him. Yay, me!

In the sixth round, I continued collecting Jacobs. No teams really needed a shortstop which meant that talented A's rookie Jacob Wilson had gone into freefall in the draft. I stopped that fall.

The seventh and eighth rounds added two more quality relievers, Bryan Abreu and Brad Keller.

In the ninth round, I picked up Sandy Alcantara as a pitching prospect, hoping that he is now completely recovered from his surgeries.

And for my final draft pick in the tenth round, I grabbed reliever Garrett Whitlock to finish rebuilding the pen.

With the exception of Jacob Wilson, this was what I will refer to as my "Duracell Draft", as there were nothing but the two sides of the battery, pitchers and catchers.

This was largely a draft which relied on going with the flow and seeing what came my way. Overall, I'm quite happy with it.

Now, let's see how the team does. :)

The itsy bitsy project that I was working on seems to be successful. More testing is required, of course, but the right things seem to be happening, which is good.

I have a whole bunch of projects that need to be completed tomorrow, because Sunday is the annual APBA baseball draft for our league.

Time to get to work!

The bug list having cleared, I've embarked on a small side project at work. It's already had one useful result, which I've checked into the code base which will eventually get merged and shipped. Now, I'm going to use that useful result to see if I can make the side project work in a short period of time, like a couple of days.

Naturally, a new bug came in during the middle of this, but I fixed it and dispatched it back to the reporter, so I hope to be able to continue on that side project tomorrow. :)