I'm still not sure a salary cap is a good solution to the dump trade problem. I could still pull off a vicious deal with a $310 or $320 cap, giving up a marginal keeper for two or three great players.
If we really want to avoid unfair dump trades, what about having a special system that gives other owners a chance to make a better offer? So if Spencer agrees to trade Youk and Ichiro to me for Michael Brantley, then we have a 2 day window where other owners get to make Spencer whatever offer they want for Youk and Ichiro. At the end of the 2 days, Spencer has to pick one of the offers.
That way nobody can really complain about a lopsided deal.
I could still pull off a vicious deal with a $310 or $320 cap, giving up a marginal keeper for two or three great players.
I think it's important to note that this has never happened in this league (in football it has, but that's something else entirely), and that no one in this league would ever make such a deal with you. They'd be a complete fool to not shop around themselves and see what they can get for their three great players instead of just a marginal keeper. And if they can't get anything better, than either a) the great players aren't that great or b)that's the market value of the players, and there's nothing unfair about it. While I don't hate your idea, I think it would be horribly awkward to implement, and if any of us are making major trades without listening and considering other options first, we're not playing very well.
we always don't do it, but there is also the financial incentive idea to help people want to place higher in the middle part of the standings (3rd instead of 8th, etc.).
I do think that the salary cap will be pretty effective though. And no one in this league has done the Brantley for Youk and Ichiro type trades...but the more likely one is say, Bobby Abreu for Michael Brantley or something like that. As is, if I was in last place again, there's no incentive not to do that deal since there's no chance I'll keep Abreu and a 0.2% chance I'd keep Brantley. Generally, people in our league haven't done those deals but it's just sort of because we've decided not to.
To address Caleb's last sentence, if somebody dumps a lot of talent on the team that I'm competing with for first place, it's no consolation to me that they're not playing well. I would definitely feel like that was unfair.
If you guys don't think that lopsided dump trades could happen in this league, then why even have a salary cap?
It may become more prevalent now that there is a cap though; teams won't be able to do massive dump trades now. It does happen every once in awhile in football (F. Jones for a WR, I forget who). Of course, I failed to make the playoffs and then Felix Jones emerged as the #1 back for the Cowboys.
The other thing to keep in mind is that 3 great players would have to be $90, otherwise they'd have keeper value. PLUS, if they're great players, they can be kept for 1 year at the exact same salary. I think if you're offering up two great players you'll get a better return than one marginal keeper.
I agree with Caleb here - I think it is silly to make this system formal. We all know each other and there isn't any collusion - everyone is looking out for the best interests of their team and they will be shopping their players. Plus, don't we want to have some reward for players who actually take the initiative and put in the leg work to get the deal done? Finally, you might hamstring the negotiating ability of the weaker team by having the offers completely in the open. Sometimes you can leverage a better deal by saying, "Well Caleb, that's a pretty good deal, but I think I like the one from Andrew, your main competitor better..."
And finally, do we really need that kind of regulation and hand holding? Think you would have offered a better deal for players? Well shit, why didn't you? No one stopped you.
The salary cap was initiated to limit the magnitude of the dump trades. I don't think there was an issue with the fairness, where someone felt that they offered a lot more than what the trading team settled for.
Very free-market of you Bill. Anything that minimizes regulation and hand-holding sounds good to me. I don't want to have to jump through a hoop (which in this case is essentially a waiting period) to get a trade approved.
The reason for a salary cap, for me, is more to add a strategic element to trading and team creation than it is to limit dump trades. I've never really cared about limiting dump trades, because I've never seen and unfair one made and can't imagine one of us making an "unfair" one, and think that a certain level of dump trades should be allowed and are good for the league.
I would be deadset against a system where we did a majority vote on each trade to approve or deny, but what would people think about a system where the league could reject a trade if there was a unanimous vote against it?
There are a number of issues here, but mostly I still don't have a clear understanding of why we want a salary cap. Can anyone answer the following questions:
Is there something that needs to be regulated or not?
If so, what is it? And how will a salary cap regulate it effectively?
The goal is to prevent "wholesale dumping of an entire teams talent to another team"? That's more realistic than trading one great player for a marginal keeper?
I must still be missing something here, but don't have time for a longer response now.
Well, it is fairly free market of me to an extent. I did suggest the cap in the first place, and am generally in favor of a cap on the lower end. But I just think that Taylor is misunderstanding the purpose of the cap in the first place. The intent was never to regulate the value of one offer to another, I think that was always relatively fair, and often a manager could spin off parts of their team to multiple contenders. The goal was to limit wholesale dumping of an entire teams talent to another team.
I'm also a bit frustrated because I feel like we've already had this argument. While it would be in a manager's best interest to trade away any non-keeper assets, the desire of contending teams to acquire top tier talent keeps the hypothetical situation that Taylor brings up (and has brought up in the past) a strict hypothetical. There has never been a case where a marginal keeper has yielded one, let alone multiple great players.
Also, by establishing a set of rules we take any kind of personal interest out of it, which can never really happen in a vote. We have a set of rules and we all have to follow them. There isn't any interpretation needed, there isn't any delay to wait for a vote, and there isn't the possibility of acrimony because there are no personal decisions to make.
Taylor, when you say “realistic” do you mean more common? If that is the case, then trades that strip a team of all its talent are more common than trading a marginal keeper for a great player. If that is the case, then yes, that has happened several times in our league.
Spencer essentially traded his entire team (Teixeira, Felix, and several other players) to Luke for Aaron Hill, Nelson Cruz, and another late round, high value keeper (can't remember off the top of my head). I traded Kinsler and BJ Upton, two high value keepers, for most of the talent on Kate's team - Lester, Sabathia, Cano, and some outfielders.
Here is where I’m not free market at all – I don’t think the title should be decided by who can best consolidate the talent of another team into their own. The dump trade is a good thing for the overall health of a league – it weakens the strong teams and gives weaker teams a chance to rebuild. However, and you touched on this Taylor, there is a sense of unfairness when one team is able to acquire an incredible amount of one year talent at once. In order to limit the wholesale swapping of players, I proposed a salary cap. I don’t know how exactly it will work, after all, we’ve never done this before, but I think it will limit the magnitude of these swaps.
That all makes sense to me, Bill. While those are often fair trades in that teams are trading equal value, they do sometimes strike me as unfair to the other teams in the league. And when they're not unfair, I always find them generally annoying because they rearrange the league to such a great extent. Those trades WOULD still be possible, of course, but it would be a lot more complicated to pull them off.
Is one possible solution to this an earlier trade deadline? In that case, I think we'd see fewer dump trades, simply because more people would be in the running. Maybe have it be the 2nd Sunday in August or something, to give teams a chance to adjust after the real baseball trade deadline?
23 comments:
Oh man, I totally forgot about the cap.
$310? $320? that leaves plenty of room to add a top tier player or two...
I'm still not sure a salary cap is a good solution to the dump trade problem. I could still pull off a vicious deal with a $310 or $320 cap, giving up a marginal keeper for two or three great players.
If we really want to avoid unfair dump trades, what about having a special system that gives other owners a chance to make a better offer? So if Spencer agrees to trade Youk and Ichiro to me for Michael Brantley, then we have a 2 day window where other owners get to make Spencer whatever offer they want for Youk and Ichiro. At the end of the 2 days, Spencer has to pick one of the offers.
That way nobody can really complain about a lopsided deal.
I could still pull off a vicious deal with a $310 or $320 cap, giving up a marginal keeper for two or three great players.
I think it's important to note that this has never happened in this league (in football it has, but that's something else entirely), and that no one in this league would ever make such a deal with you. They'd be a complete fool to not shop around themselves and see what they can get for their three great players instead of just a marginal keeper. And if they can't get anything better, than either a) the great players aren't that great or b)that's the market value of the players, and there's nothing unfair about it. While I don't hate your idea, I think it would be horribly awkward to implement, and if any of us are making major trades without listening and considering other options first, we're not playing very well.
we always don't do it, but there is also the financial incentive idea to help people want to place higher in the middle part of the standings (3rd instead of 8th, etc.).
I do think that the salary cap will be pretty effective though. And no one in this league has done the Brantley for Youk and Ichiro type trades...but the more likely one is say, Bobby Abreu for Michael Brantley or something like that. As is, if I was in last place again, there's no incentive not to do that deal since there's no chance I'll keep Abreu and a 0.2% chance I'd keep Brantley. Generally, people in our league haven't done those deals but it's just sort of because we've decided not to.
To address Caleb's last sentence, if somebody dumps a lot of talent on the team that I'm competing with for first place, it's no consolation to me that they're not playing well. I would definitely feel like that was unfair.
If you guys don't think that lopsided dump trades could happen in this league, then why even have a salary cap?
It may become more prevalent now that there is a cap though; teams won't be able to do massive dump trades now. It does happen every once in awhile in football (F. Jones for a WR, I forget who). Of course, I failed to make the playoffs and then Felix Jones emerged as the #1 back for the Cowboys.
The other thing to keep in mind is that 3 great players would have to be $90, otherwise they'd have keeper value. PLUS, if they're great players, they can be kept for 1 year at the exact same salary. I think if you're offering up two great players you'll get a better return than one marginal keeper.
I agree with Caleb here - I think it is silly to make this system formal. We all know each other and there isn't any collusion - everyone is looking out for the best interests of their team and they will be shopping their players. Plus, don't we want to have some reward for players who actually take the initiative and put in the leg work to get the deal done? Finally, you might hamstring the negotiating ability of the weaker team by having the offers completely in the open. Sometimes you can leverage a better deal by saying, "Well Caleb, that's a pretty good deal, but I think I like the one from Andrew, your main competitor better..."
And finally, do we really need that kind of regulation and hand holding? Think you would have offered a better deal for players? Well shit, why didn't you? No one stopped you.
The salary cap was initiated to limit the magnitude of the dump trades. I don't think there was an issue with the fairness, where someone felt that they offered a lot more than what the trading team settled for.
Very free-market of you Bill. Anything that minimizes regulation and hand-holding sounds good to me. I don't want to have to jump through a hoop (which in this case is essentially a waiting period) to get a trade approved.
The reason for a salary cap, for me, is more to add a strategic element to trading and team creation than it is to limit dump trades. I've never really cared about limiting dump trades, because I've never seen and unfair one made and can't imagine one of us making an "unfair" one, and think that a certain level of dump trades should be allowed and are good for the league.
I would be deadset against a system where we did a majority vote on each trade to approve or deny, but what would people think about a system where the league could reject a trade if there was a unanimous vote against it?
There are a number of issues here, but mostly I still don't have a clear understanding of why we want a salary cap. Can anyone answer the following questions:
Is there something that needs to be regulated or not?
If so, what is it? And how will a salary cap regulate it effectively?
If not, why have a salary cap?
Didn't see Bill's post before I posted mine.
The goal is to prevent "wholesale dumping of an entire teams talent to another team"? That's more realistic than trading one great player for a marginal keeper?
I must still be missing something here, but don't have time for a longer response now.
Well, it is fairly free market of me to an extent. I did suggest the cap in the first place, and am generally in favor of a cap on the lower end. But I just think that Taylor is misunderstanding the purpose of the cap in the first place. The intent was never to regulate the value of one offer to another, I think that was always relatively fair, and often a manager could spin off parts of their team to multiple contenders. The goal was to limit wholesale dumping of an entire teams talent to another team.
I'm also a bit frustrated because I feel like we've already had this argument. While it would be in a manager's best interest to trade away any non-keeper assets, the desire of contending teams to acquire top tier talent keeps the hypothetical situation that Taylor brings up (and has brought up in the past) a strict hypothetical. There has never been a case where a marginal keeper has yielded one, let alone multiple great players.
Also, by establishing a set of rules we take any kind of personal interest out of it, which can never really happen in a vote. We have a set of rules and we all have to follow them. There isn't any interpretation needed, there isn't any delay to wait for a vote, and there isn't the possibility of acrimony because there are no personal decisions to make.
Taylor, when you say “realistic” do you mean more common? If that is the case, then trades that strip a team of all its talent are more common than trading a marginal keeper for a great player. If that is the case, then yes, that has happened several times in our league.
Spencer essentially traded his entire team (Teixeira, Felix, and several other players) to Luke for Aaron Hill, Nelson Cruz, and another late round, high value keeper (can't remember off the top of my head). I traded Kinsler and BJ Upton, two high value keepers, for most of the talent on Kate's team - Lester, Sabathia, Cano, and some outfielders.
Here is where I’m not free market at all – I don’t think the title should be decided by who can best consolidate the talent of another team into their own. The dump trade is a good thing for the overall health of a league – it weakens the strong teams and gives weaker teams a chance to rebuild. However, and you touched on this Taylor, there is a sense of unfairness when one team is able to acquire an incredible amount of one year talent at once. In order to limit the wholesale swapping of players, I proposed a salary cap. I don’t know how exactly it will work, after all, we’ve never done this before, but I think it will limit the magnitude of these swaps.
That all makes sense to me, Bill. While those are often fair trades in that teams are trading equal value, they do sometimes strike me as unfair to the other teams in the league. And when they're not unfair, I always find them generally annoying because they rearrange the league to such a great extent. Those trades WOULD still be possible, of course, but it would be a lot more complicated to pull them off.
Is one possible solution to this an earlier trade deadline? In that case, I think we'd see fewer dump trades, simply because more people would be in the running. Maybe have it be the 2nd Sunday in August or something, to give teams a chance to adjust after the real baseball trade deadline?
Okay, I get it now. Thanks for the extended explanation. 310 or 320 sounds about right.
I vote $310. No real reason for it.
I vote $310 as well.
What happened to our commissioner?
I guess I vote $310.
I'm ok with 310- I think that's a bit on the high side actually. We can always change it next year if need be.
Honestly, I'd be in favor of a $300 cap if folks would be willing to go that low.
That said, I'd say there is more downside to screwing up the league by setting it too low than too high.
I think it is best to err on the high side for this season. $310.
Post a Comment