Forming A More Perfect Union

James Madison, Dan Okrent, Glen Waggoner . .  . David Mahlan.  What do these brilliant minds have in common?  They are all authors of a Constitution.  Not THE Constitution, I think we can give Madison credit for that, but depending on how impacted you are by fantasy baseball you may just feel compelled to acknowledge they all authored THE Constitution.

Okrent and Waggoner drew up the rules for Rotisserie Baseball back in 1980.  David used that as a template to form the Constitution for the CFCL in 1984.  But from there David has crafted a masterpiece.  Saying our Constitution is the same as the Original Rotisserie’s and that David just cut and pasted where necessary is like saying the map of the Original 13 colonies and the current map of the United States is the same thing.  The origins come from the same place but the two are most definitely not the same.

The CFCL expanded to Ultra and so the basic game we were playing needed revised, very detailed rules.  We changed scoring categories.  We moved to an Internet based stat service which affected how we made transactions during the season.  We added Winter Waivers.  We had owners (i.e. Bald Eagles) who LOVED to jump through loopholes.  We had to acknowledge the Ruffins their Privilege.  We added X contracts.  We’ve done a lot to make running a CFCL baseball team as realistic as possible to running a National League team.  All of that needed to be documented with the abiding rules.

It’s easy enough to take the Original Constitution, keep all their rules and then simply insert “CFCL” where ever you see “Rotisserie”.  But David has done so much more than that.  He has kept the original voice while adding all the specific needs and rules of the CFCL.  Obviously his career as Technical Writer has served him well for the really important things in life.

On a side note, David and I as co-founders, and going forward the Executive Committee (voted on each year) has understood, much like our forefathers felt with our country, that the league is constantly growing and changing and thus the Constitution has to be fluid.  In order to make changes, the Executive Committee will discuss a point and then bring it to the league for a vote.  If the league has a majority vote to change a rule, then and only then does the Constitution get changed and David once again puts his writing skills to the test.  David may have resigned from the CFCL as an owner in 2010, but we won't let him leave.

Some of our non-owner readers may have been confused by some of my rule references in previous posts.  Well that problem is about to be corrected.  Here is the link to the CFCL Constitution.  The rules that govern the operation of the CFCL and the teams therein.  Nineteen pages of pure baseball goodness!!  Enjoy.

http://home.comcast.net/~dmahlan/constitution/const.pdf