And in response to your edit.. Agreed it would be a dick move... And i think against spirit of league/ie commish should force you to make the necessary cuts.

That would be an interesting compromise. One tweak may be to allow them to trade for picks, but they can still only use five total. For example, if a team at 20+ prospects trades for an extra 1st rd. pick, they can decline to use their 5th rd. pick instead.

Oh, absolutely. I was just playing devil's advocate and tossing the worst case scenario out there.

So I assuming Karak is done, shouldn't we start on finding a replacement?

Yes, feel free to recruit for a replacement around 2+2. We need to get that settled.

We could lift the cap on minor leaguers, they aren't totally free, they cost $4 right?

In the Pecota situation I feel like if he keeps his roster at 20 his picks are his to trade. Just like a person that has over 30 players on their big league roster is free to trade.

Agree. It would just be built into cost. would be an intersting game of chicken

Hey I am gonna start collecting Buy Ins. Everyone owes $100 for 2016 except the following

NDFan - Already bought in last week
Exit - Owes $75
Pecota - Owes $50
Karak - Owes whatever last place tax was

My Paypal is the same, please PM me if you need a refresher.

What is it? Football and drinking makes fun. It shold also make trades

Alek is paid

Payment sent, thanks Rack.

Payments are coming in fast and furious.

I don't mind uncapping. The $4 cost, while pretty marginal, at least provides some incentive to manage your minor-league roster. And it would be kinda hard to get many more than 20 guys anyway, despite getting a full five picks per year, unless you trade really aggressively for rookies. In which case fine.

If I were doing it again, I think the only thing I'd tweak is contract structure, at least initially. Our contracts are asymmetric: they're one-year guaranteed with team options for up to four years after that, with just a 5% raise YOY. Really good for the teams. So even if everyone goes for fair value in the auction, the guys who turn out to be a little better than we thought get kept, often for the full five years, whereas the guys who disappoint get dropped.

So what this means is that for the first five years the only guys entering the auction pool are the let-downs (undrafted rookies aside). Since they turned out to be overpaid, there's a lot of money getting freed up but not that much talent. So our free agent prices skyrocketed in years 3-5, which I didn't see coming, though maybe a more savvy team did. Even since you joined I'm sure you saw the chatter about how the talent pool in the auction was kinda thin.

In this pool, we're past the five-year mark, so the players in the auction pools will be the let-downs, as before, but also the good players whose contracts have expired, whether they were signed as free agents or rookies. So our auction pool will be much deeper from now on. Also, we rectified some of the asymmetry of contracts by bumping pay raises from 5% to 10% YOY. This will tilt the keep/cut decision a little further toward cut, and thus deepen the auction pool a little further.

But that's us. If I were starting this again from scratch, I'd consider a couple of solutions:

1) The really interesting one is guaranteeing more than one year and not having options. So someone bids 1/20 and another team bids 2/35. Of course, then you have to decide which contract "the player" would accept, which is some combination of overall value and AAV that hinges on the player's risk tolerance and all that. Probably too complex, but it would be pretty interesting if you were willing to put the effort in.

2) A simpler solution is just to arbitrarily limit the number of option years on some contracts signed in the early years. So players born in January or February don't get any option years, players born in March or April get one option year, etc. Or you could randomize the number of options after the auction. That way you get contracts expiring every year.

3) Radically increase the YOY raises players get in the first few years. So players get 25% raises after year 1, 20% raises after year 2, etc., all the way down to 10% or whatever your eventual goal is. This just increases the number of "let-down" players who voluntarily get thrown back into the auction.

Or maybe you don't think it's a problem, I dunno. I think we handled rookies really well in this league. I'd consider the recent proposals for unlimited rookie rosters, or maybe capped at 30 or something. And you can draft as many as you think is worthwhile given the $4 cost.

9 out of 13 people have paid for 2016 so far.

Wade Davis on a rookie contract?

Hmmm, that's weird. Not sure why he's listed that way. Good news is it was like that on last years too, so it wasn't a problem with the conversion to new sheet/updated sals and shouldnt have affected anyone else.

Fixed now.

Cool. Just being nitty.

Nit me over some offers

Man, the more I think about this ... just consider it for a moment. Imagine there are three kinds of players: risk-adverse, risk-neutral, and risk-loving. Their risk tolerance determines how much they value security, and how much they'd be willing to discount their future earnings for a guarantee. So for a risk-neutral guy, he might value his future earnings like so:

Future value = Current value * 0.5 ^ (Contract year - current year)

So an example: someone bids $100 for I dunno, David Wright. Right now all another owner can do is up that bid to $101, buying one guaranteed year and four years of team options. But under the formula, we know that if Wright values this year at $100, he'd value the year after at $50 ($100 * 0.5 ^ (2016 - 2015)). So instead of bidding $100 for one year, an owner could bid $150 for 2. The player would break a tie by taking the longer contract.

Then someone comes along and figures **** it, and offers Wright $175 over 3 years. He'd take that. Or he'd take $101 for 1 year if an owner wanted to offer that. That offer could be bested by $192 over 4 years. Or $198 over 5. But I doubt anyone would go that long on Wright. Essentially, these are precisely the calculations that real teams make. Different players would express their risk tolerances with different numbers between 0 and 1 in place of the 0.5, by the way. We could just randomly assign the risk tolerances when players hit free agency.

Right now the only downside to a bad contract is eating it for one year, whereas the upside to a good one is four more years off $$$. It's asymmetric. It's not necessarily bad for the game, but it's pretty unrealistic, whereas this way you can get stuck with ****ty contracts for too many years, RAJ-style.

Anyway, this is way too much to consider right now, and probably will never happen, but I dunno, just putting it out there. It's kind of interesting.

Without too many boring details, I'm in a home league with a combination of a few keep-forever guys and then some contracts. Basically you can have up to a certain number of guys under contract, and we set it up so you can offer a contract from anywhere between 1-3 years. Main difference being you can't drop contract players (just keep until end of contract or trade to someone else).

It is amazing how many bad contracts there already are and we're only in year two of our current system. By no means is it the same dynamics (it's a snake draft where you keep a guy at the round he was drafted, no minor league system, etc) but it's just really hard to project players.

For example I have Mookie Betts. And he's not even a great example because his skill set generally gives him a higher floor than other prospects. Plus he obviously has MLB experience. It's easy to say .. yeah I like this guy I'm giving him three years, but the guy who saw Profar get his cup of coffee said the same thing. Wil Myers is stuck on a team as a top 10 or top 12 round guy. And that's not even getting to the pitchers who break on a weekly basis. You can really get yourself into trouble especially with younger players.

I agree this league may be a bit TOO far on the asymmetric side, but I can tell you from experience having the flip side where everyone is saddled by a couple of bad contracts can really make things annoying, especially if you have casual owners who get frustrated having to carry Player X.

I dont think we could work multiple years into a bidding process (i.e. having 1yr 10M competeing vs 2yr 15M), but i think we could eventually do something that works to fix the asymmetry. Some kind of penalty based % of remaining money owed for cutting before contract is up. Just hypothetical:

Player A, Year 1 $100.
After..
Year 1, he would have $510 remaining on his contract.
Year 2, $400
Year 3, $279
Year 4, $146

From here i'm not sure what would make sense. Flat 10% of salary remaining? Increasing % so that the fee to cut him is the same for every year? Decreasing % so that the biggest penalty is year 1? Maybe no penalty after year 4 i.e. Year 5 is a Team Option.

I think some form of that is a good idea.. Would put more emphasis on team building/planning and would discourage going all-in on a player intending on only keeping him for one year, which has happened a few times (I remember doing this for Matt Carpenter at $75. and then he somehow managed to be worth keeping, Mark Reynolds going for $108 also comes to mind).

--

another option would be similar to what alekhine said, maybe the first X players auction off are on guaranteed contracts for some amount of years with option years after? I think that's slightly trickier to implement/keep track of, a straight penalty is easy.

That would really depress the market for older guys. Who's going to sign David Ortiz if they get penalised for dropping him before five years are up?

Well, depressing the market for old guys vs. young guys is kind of a feature and not a bug, since that's a real-life effect. You'd probably see 1 year deals for the Bartolo Colons of the world with no one going 2, whereas when rookie-deal guys hit the market I'm sure you'd see the bidding mostly on the 4- and 5-year margins.

It's true that having bad contracts could be annoying, though that's all part of the skill of it. Obviously if it dissuades owners then that's going too far. But everyone is going to end up with some dead money on their books, so it's not necessarily a killer.

A cut penalty is interesting ... don't have super well formed thoughts on that. You wouldn't want to assume five-year though; that's pretty onerous. It could be combined with my proposal to alleviate some of alekhine's concerns.

I'm not too fond on changing anything to be honest. Some interesting discussion and stuff I'll definitely consider if/when I get a league started. Although finding enough interest for a dynasty home league seems real tough these days

If you wanted just a little more turnover you could always just shorten the length of players won through the auction process (say 3-4 years max) and keep minor league players at 6 to reward that route.