Changes to the league this season to make it more fun, fair, & competitive
1) We will an auction draft format with some kind of keeper component to it. Like football, each team will have a certain budget to bid with and construct a full roster.
2) Salary Cap (to prevent extreme dump trades)
2) Contract length of keepers (1-3 years), with inflation
3) Bidding system for free agent pickups
4) Keeper rules for players on current rosters or a complete roster reset?
37 comments:
You can ask Spencer for football, but unless a bidding system is integrated into Yahoo it may be an incredible amount of work. It might be easier just to have the free for all again. If you want to keep a free agent pick up just have them be $10...
Yeah, trust me, you don't want to deal with a bidding system on free agents. Particularly in baseball where my guess is there are more moves with roster spots. You could either say you can't keep Free Agents or there's some minimum keeper value.
Not being able to keep a free agent doesn't seem right. If you pick up someone that no one else wants and he is good enough to keep, that should be rewarded.
Probably establishing a minimum level is best.
These changes sound good to me.
Regarding free agents pickups, is there any way to only allow pickups once a week, maybe by making all free agents go on week-long waivers each week? It would make it easier to compete without having to scramble for new closers and other suddenly desirable players.
Alternatively, we could get rid of saves :)
I like the idea of week long waivers. It would make waiver priority valuable, and actually used. It would also avoid the whole "quick draw" aspect when it comes to snagging closers, which is a plus. The one thing we need to make sure of is that waivers are done with sufficient time for a team to grab a player at the last minute and plug them in for that week, so maybe players go on waivers Monday AM, and come off them Sunday AM? What do people think of that?
We looked into this last year, but unless Yahoo has changed the way their system works then there is not a possibility to have weekly waivers.
Also, with more teams and larger rosters I feel like there wasn't as much of a closer scramble as previous years. Guys who were potential closers were already on rosters, even when the decision was unclear. For example, after Devine went down, Wuertz and Ziegler were already rostered and Mark took a flyer on Bailey. It wasn't that Mark was the fastest, it was that he had the free roster spot to use on someone who might get a save or two. Pretty much the same deal with Aardsma, if I remember correctly.
yeah, the week long waivers option was not available last year. that would be the best option. maybe they have it this year. not sure if ESPN has that option or not.
Looks like we can do Free Agent Bidding with ESPN...
http://sports.espn.go.com/fantasy/baseball/flb/story?page=mlbdk2k10faabprimer
that also opens up the possibility of allowing players coming over from the NL..,
Wait, what??? Mark wants to use ESPN? What about his plea last year???
Free agent bidding would be awfully nice, and would solve our issues with the waiver wire. I think I'd lean towards ESPN, unless someone has a good reason not to.
I have a feeling that as soon as we switch to ESPN we're gonna find it has a feature that we really don't want and can't get rid of, or lacks something that we really want. Or is, you know, completely baffling and hard to work with. I'm not saying it's not worth a try, just making a prediction.
This all sounds fine to me, for the most part.
One thing about a switch to ESPN is that if we want some of their features (FAB, eg), now is the time to do it. ESPN has their eligibility rules set in stone (20 games), so they're different from Yahoo, for example, Zobrist qualifies at SS in Yahoo, but not ESPN. With no keepers that isn't as big of a deal.
I will miss Yahoo's stat tracker though. That marvelous old Java-powered piece of crap. I wonder how much money that made Yahoo over the years.
And, according to something Andrew told me (which means it's probably wrong), Stat Tracker will be free this year.
Look like Yahoo has FAAB too this year AND free stat tracker.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/sports/fantasysports/baseball/whatsnew/whatsnew.html;_ylt=Ao_NhVjmB7v9FXslx8bWArZLIHlG
Oooh, and you can undo picks in Live Drafts. That'll be great for me.
I set up a test league in Yahoo (I can send an invite to anyone who wants to poke around) and it looks like Yahoo can actually do everything we want EXCEPT the weekly waiver system. Yahoo would allow bids for players who go on to waivers (which would allow players coming over from the NL), but they don't have weekly waivers set up - a player is only on waivers when they are cut or when they are added to the system.
Here is the link if someone wants to check it out and make sure I'm understanding this right.
I wonder, could the commissioner manually set waiver status, say every Monday, and have it for 6 days? That would allow everyone to be on waivers and would make bidding work. Or is that too much work?
Maybe, but doing that every week for 6 months seems like an awful lot of work...
If we can have free-agent bidding, is there any reason why we would need the weekly waivers thing?
I like the sound of an auction draft. Never done one before, but it seems like it'd be fun.
What do you mean by a salary cap? How would this work? We would all start the season with the same amount of money, right? Are you saying that a player keeps his dollar value the entire season, so if I got a guy for 20$ I couldn't trade him for someone worth 25$? If that's the case I don't like the sound of it, seems like it would make trading really really hard.
With regard to the free agent budget, you'd have to set some period of time you'd be taking in bids. With Yahoo, you can only do that when a player gets cut or added, so most players would still be a free for all. With ESPN you can place ALL players on waivers for a certain period of time, then resolve the bids Sunday morning, for example.
As for the salary cap, you're right, a cap of $260 would make it very difficult to have trades. The goal would be to limit the dump trades, not make every deal "fair" relative to preseason values, which don't necessarily mean much by the middle of the season. It would be higher than our initial budget of $260, so maybe a cap of $300?
And yes, you're right, Luke. Auction drafts are the shit.
So what you're saying is that Yahoo's FAB system only works for cut or added players?
We could try just doing the waivers on our own through email, but I bet it would get pretty complicated.
It's hard for me to make a good estimate without having done an auction league before, but $300 over $260 seems like it still might be a little difficult. It just might really screw someone over if they draft a top player who ends up losing tremendous value due to an injury or decreased performance. How expensive do you think the top players will be?
Didn't we discuss making some roster size changes too at the end of last season? I can't quite remember, as the years get mixed up in my head.
The top players according to ESPN's values are $30-$35. At CBS Sportsline (whose projections seem a little nutty - Mauer at 30 HR, for example) they're substantially higher ($40-$45). By top players I mean top 5-10, so first round picks. It is really hard to say how the draft will shake out though - depending on the order players get nominated, general bidding strategies, and how people want to spend.
While I totally get the desire to blow up the league and start totally from scratch, I do kind of wonder if it would be worthwhile to make some kind of arrangement so that we can still do the auction draft but hold on to our current keepers, or at least get some kind of discount on them.
Or maybe I just want dibs on Gordon Beckham, I'm not sure.
I think we need the weekly waiver option, which means we should use ESPN. I'm not going to want to manually change it every week.
I think we should use a salary cap. Once the season is underway, you end up cutting a lot of fat of your team too. On my team last year:
6round pick cut (Meche)
7round pick traded to NL (DeRosa)
9round pick cut (Shoppach)
10round pick cut (percival)
...etc.
In an auction league, those players would all have gone for some $ (well, maybe not percival, not sure what I was thinking there) so it should give you room to add an underperforming high $ player - especially if we increase the salary cap by $40-50 over base.
Haven't thought this idea through, but just read about it as an idea of how we can incorporate our old rosters into the new format.
"Topper Rights"
In the auction, the previous owner of a player can "top" the highest bid if he/she wants to.
So, if Evan Longoria is "SOLD!" at $40, Andrew could top it for $41.
Not sure how that would screw with the auction prices, but something to consider.
Also, not sure if that is even feasible to do in ESPN, but I think the commish might have tools to pause and edit.
"So, if Evan Longoria is "SOLD!" at $40, Andrew could top it for $41."
I guess I don't really understand this. Is it not like an Ebay auction where everybody just enters in their max bid and then whoever has the highest bid gets it at just above the 2nd highest bid?
Another thing, I think we should get rid of the CI and MI spots and replace them with just 1 INF spot. Last year things were just stretched too thin; it was hard to make trades and hard to even have a lineup of actual everyday players.
I agree with Luke on that last bit, strongly.
Luke, it's not really like an Ebay auction. It's more like a cow auction (something I went to a lot of but I'm not sure you ever did). Auction software is used that starts the bidding and then with every subsequent bid gives the rest of the league 5 seconds to submit a higher bid. It's fast and furious, usually. "Topper" would be interesting - the manager who owned the player last year could essentially sit it out and then decide whether or not they want the player for a dollar more, without anyone else being able to overbid them. Very interesting.
I don't think we'd be able to do it for every player...we'd have to select our five "keepers" before hand, and they'd be the only one we'd be able to go over top on. It's an intriguing option.
"Topper rights" are intriguing, but they also sound complicated and messy as hell. I don't know, my feeling is this: If we're blowing up the league and starting over, we ought to do it right. Having a player sit out of the bidding could really screw with the process.
Yeah, the "topper rights" are interesting, but they would only really work in either a live auction or a site with that function built in. I have NO idea how we could make it work within ESPN or Yahoo's auction draft software.
What if we calculated prices for our players based on what their keeper round would be if we were still doing that kind of draft? Then we would keep who we wanted and subtract their "price" from our overall budget. It would be easy to fit in to the auction process if there wasn't a way to do it automatically. We could just all bid the price up to whatever it is supposed to be and then the person who is keeping the player will make the last bid and get him at that price. We could do it at the beginning of the draft and get it out of the way.
Maybe 1st rounders would be 28$ or so, and we'd go down from there? Free-agent pickups would be free or 1$?
I like the idea that we can now have a shot at NL players that come to the AL. How about the flip side: If one of your players goes over to the NL, you get his salary back.
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