A Note About Rule V Players

Back in the 2005 season, we had a problem with the game where some players would mysteriously disappear from the game. They would show up on the website in the "All Players" listing, and you could go their page on the site, but they did not exist in the game.

One such player is Andrew Merriweather. If you look at his page, you'll see that he was drafted in the 3rd round of the 2005 amateur draft by New York. Since then, he hasn't done anything.

What happened was that the player disappeared before the start of the season. To the best of my knowledge, there was no way to get this player back. The best I could do was create a "new" Andrew Merriweather for New York, who went on to play the 2005 season for New York's A and AA teams before being traded to me before the start of 2006.

Unfortunately, there is no way to remove the "old" Andrew from the game's reports (unless I go in and start mucking with the game generated HTML myself). However, Merriweather is protected on my 40 man roster and cannot be drafted. You cannot draft the "old" Merriweather, since he doesn't really exist.

So, how can you tell if a player is real or not? Unfortunately, there are only two ways to know for sure. The first way is to see if he actually exists in the game. If he's actually in the game, then he's real. The other way is to look at the guy's stats on the website. If he's listed as an active player but hasn't played a game at any level in the last few years, then he's probably a goner.

Zev