Sneak Peek: Chicago Sports Depot

Rotowire.com, the web’s premier fantasy news and information resource, is pleased to present the 2011 Dick Martin Award. The Dick Martin Award, named for the former Minnesota Twins athletic trainer, is designed to recognize the athletic trainers and medical professionals within Major League Baseball that continually strive to improve the health of their athletes by preventing, identifying, and treating injuries.

The work of these individuals often goes unnoticed but without their hard work and dedication in the offseason, spring training, and throughout the grind of the regular season, players would be unable to play at the highest of levels. This award is based on one-year totals for days and dollars lost to injuries, as well as a proprietary formula known as Injury Cost.

It’s our privilege to present this year’s award to the Kansas City Royals medical staff led by head athletic trainer Nick Kenney.

http://www.rotowire.com/baseball/showArticle.htm?id=14243

savages.

All remaining Type A relievers – Madson, K-Rod, Bell – will NOT be subject to draft-pick compensation this off-season.Teams that sign those relievers, and certain other Type As, will not forfeit picks. Teams that lose those players will still get them. Top Type As – Pujols, Fielder, Reyes, plus former MVPs Ortiz, Rollins and others – still will carry draft-pick compensation this year.

-rosenthal

After the 2012 season, about five to six additional major leaguers will become eligible for salary arbitration each year. The group of players with at least two but less than three years of major league service lost the right to arbitration in the 1985 agreement, but players regained it for the top 17 percent of 2-3-year players by service time in the 1990 deal. That will rise to 22 percent following the 2012 season.

Blood testing for human growth hormone will start when players report to spring training in February, putting MLB ahead of the NFL.

As part of the deal, baseball’s minimum salary will go from $414,000 this year to $480,000 in 2012 and $500,000 later in the deal — matching what the average salary was in 1989.

Owners gained one of their chief objectives: a restraint on the bonuses paid to amateur free agents, both those entering professional baseball from high schools and colleges and those coming to MLB organizations from abroad.

A tax of 75 percent to 100 percent will be imposed on the amount a team exceeds a threshold, and teams exceeding the threshold by higher amounts could lose first- and second-round draft picks.

For international free agents, such as players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, there will be a separate threshold and tax with penalties, and there will be a study committee that could put a new system in place later during the agreement.

Starting next year, teams will have to make a “qualifying offer” of a one-year guaranteed contract to their players eligible to become free agents in order to receive compensation if the player signs with another club. That amount will be at least $12.4 million and could rise by next year, depending on a formula. The new “qualifying offer” does away with the statistical formula for ranking free agents that has existed since the 1981 strike settlement.

http://www.nj.com/yankees/index.ssf/2011/11/mlb_labor_deal_includes_hgh_te.html

Doesn’t sound easy.