So what minor league rules are we using?

Does seem like something we need to decide on very quickly.

Options:
1) As is
2) 5 rookie draft picks regardless of size, more if needed to get to 10, no cap on minors.
3) ?

I think 2 is good. And i think most people that have chimed in seem to like it. I doubt we'll be able to get a full vote done, so we'll probably just have to make executive decision so if want any input put in speak now!

btw i just emailed primetime today, if i dont hear back by this time tomorrow i'll probably try and find a replacement owner.

I wouldnt mind 2. Would let teams like mine still build through the draft while keeping a good farm team

annd primetime snap responds to me, no replacement needed.

I vote 2

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I like 2, but it has a small flaw, IMO. Rookies in the draft pool come from three sources:

1) Guys who entered the pool via the real baseball draft in the summer
2) Guys who entered the pool as international signings
3) Guys who were eligible the year before, but didn't get picked

The problem is that the new system may partially cut off the third source. If I have more than 5 rookies on my team before the draft, it doesn't matter how bad the player is, I have no incentive to cut him. It's the difference between an 11-man roster and a 10-man roster, and I can't fill his spot anyway. So once a team gets over five - unless they want to cut a lot of guys - their incentive is to hold onto everyone. Whereas a team with five or fewer would cut their worst guys in the hopes of doing better in the draft. So I fear that the pool of eligible draftees would dry up somewhat.

Two ways around this:

1) Cap rookie rosters at 15 or 20. There would still be a keep-everyone sweet spot in there, but it wouldn't keep many rookies out of the pool who would have otherwise been in.
2) You get as many picks as guys you drop, with the same proviso that you can draft until you hit 10. No cap necessary here. By this rule, you could increase your roster with trades, but you couldn't increase it beyond that. And with players graduating you'd eventually settle back at 10. And you can still draft, you'd just have to drop ****ty guys in order to do it.

I kind of like my second proposal. To sum it up, the whole rule would look like this:

During the off-season, mandatory promotions are processed. Before the rookie draft, teams submit their rookie cuts. A team will be allotted as many picks as players the team has cut, with additional picks allotted as necessary to increase the team's minor league roster to 10 players. The draft order, as before, is in the reverse order of the previous year's standings, with teams skipped if they have no picks remaining.

The second proposal is almost the same as no change at all. A rebuilding team is going to have to be getting elite prospects to go over 10 and give up their first round pick, which is probably going to be in the top 2-3 picks in the draft. Even a non-rebuilding team can't add prospects - like I have some guys I don't need on my big league team now. I'd happily trade them for prospects, but I'm probably not going to get anyone elite, and that means I can't go past 8 prospects, because then I'd lose picks 13 & 14 in the draft which just isn't worth it.

Anyway, most people won't go much past five rounds of drafting. It's not that common to have less than five minor leaguers worth keeping - 5*13+ a few more for those who want extra picks = about 70 picks in the draft. There are easily 70 guys every year who merit a draft pick, especially if we don't have the 10 man roster cap, which means taking guys who are a long way away is less valuable.

Anyway, I vote for Exit's option 2.

So everyone gets 5 draft picks regardless of how many kids they currently have? And minors have no cap, interesting.

Sounds good unless someone brings up a glaring issue we haven't thought of.

Im good with whatever is chosen. Would prefer the second option with no cap, but that is just my opinion. It would be great if we could decide soon though. If we opt to stay with same system I need to make some moves before the draft and want to make sure I have enough time and dont hold up draft

You can still trade for picks and draft if you have a big minor-league roster, you just have to drop your organization's worst rookies to do it. All it means if that if you're already at ten, you've got to discard before you draw.

That plays just like the current system.

Except that now, if it's the middle of your season and you want to sell your veterans for ten minor leaguers, you can.

I do think there should be some incentive to cut minor leaguers. Maybe a salary penalty for having more than 10?

Penalty at 10 might be a little low. I know I have 9 guys I wouldn't want to cut. Plus 4 picks in top 15. I mean I personally wouldn't care about a penalty since I have a ton of space, but not sure if all rebuilding will go like mine. If we do it maybe a penalty at 15

I see, didn't realize you had so many keepable guys and first-round picks. Should we just say you can have up to 15, but you can only draft up to 10, picks you've traded for excluded? Under this scenario, if dan doesn't cut anyone, he gets his first-round pick, but he'd have to drop someone to get his second. He gets any picks he's traded for.

I dunno, we do want to keep some constraint on minor-league rosters; this one seems reasonable, right? And I'd be happy to make a one-time exception for dan this year, just because the previous rule was sub-optimal and we're changing things around.

Accumulating a load of prospects is how you build/rebuild in a league like this. Why do we want to make this more difficult? I think the fact that we pay salary for minor leaguers and a cap at 20/team is more than enough.

Why would you get picks you trade for but not your own picks? That seems unfair and it distorts the trade market, as it makes picks much more valuable than a similar standard prospect, because traded picks don't count towards caps. In fact, if this was applied it would make sense for people just to swap full sets of picks with each other so that everyone has protected traded picks.

I seriously think that we're overthinking this. Just set a limit for minor leaguers and leave people alone to work out how they want to play. Stop working out schemes to take picks away or give extra picks to people who don't prioritise their minors.

Finally, I'm against treating Dan differently from everyone else. He isn't the only one with difficult decisions to make. That's because the current rules don't work very well. He's just the most extreme case.

I've been extremely busy the last two weeks, so I haven't had a chance to chime in on these discussions. My thoughts:

Free Agent Contracts and Salary Increases

I think there has been a ripple effect from the salaries created through those early FA auctions. Since we were just starting out, there was a learning curve and the market got a bit crazy. Now that people have a better idea of how they value players in this particular league, I think the issue of contracts occupying the extreme ends of the spectrum will correct itself. Once all those five year contracts expire and players that were originally drafted start to hit the FA market, salaries should adjust accordingly through simple supply-demand.

I view the current 5% increase salary scale as a mock collective bargaining agreement. Once this one expires, the owners can consider whether any broad changes like altering the salary scale should be made. I feel that if we do it preemptively, people who planned their teams around those guaranteed salary scales or valued their players based on that overall contract term get screwed.

Grandfathering existing contracts while raising the annual salary scale is a possibility, but I'm not convinced this is necessary. After a few seasons, the market will have adjusted again and I bet we end up with the same scenarios we have now. Or maybe a new set of problems, since teams would still have the same $1000 budget, but higher overall salaries as well. My preference is to let the market play itself out a bit longer.

Agree with this btw. I don't need special rules. Just need to know what rules are so I can adapt. I knew rules when I made deals to get picks. I just haven't acted on my plan to move picks or prospects yet because of the rules questions. Once we decide rules I will adapt to whatever they are

Minor League Rosters and Draft

So just to rehash the moving pieces in the currently favored proposal:

• Full retention of prospects year-to-year (no cap)
  
• Ability to trade for as many prospects as you want (no cap)
  
• Five guaranteed picks per draft
  
• Minors roster has a floor of 10, with an unlimited ceiling
  
• Owners are required to carry a minimum of 10 prospects year-to-year, with any shortfall fulfilled through the draft during the offseason
  
• Draft keeps the same structure, with a reverse-snake and participants getting whittled down each round based on whether they still have roster spots to fill

Some additional thoughts:

1) I'm assuming that each prospect still costs $4 to keep on the minors roster and counts against the team's $1000 cap (same as we do now).

2) Why five guaranteed picks? Is that arbitrary? If so, why not three picks, or two?

3) Just trying to imagine how this would likely play out - bad/rebuilding teams tend to have a lot more cap space since there's little incentive to hold onto their stud free agents when they can take flyers on cheap guys or trade for prospects. Therefore, they are more likely to stockpile picks and prospects, taking full advantage of the unlimited minors roster. They also have the cap space to add an extra $X worth of prospects.

Contending teams will likely have fewer resources to allocate to a large minors system, as those $X can mean missing out on the MLB players they need to win. Teams that can balance their FA $ with their prospect $ will be rewarded the most with a balanced, self-sustaining roster, rather than just gambling heavily on FAs each year (think D-Rays vs. Yankees).

4) For me, point #3 raises the question of whether $4 is enough of a value for a top prospect. I don't want to make the system too complicated and agree that we need to allow players the freedom to focus on accumulating prospects if that's how they want to play.

Another way of phrasing it would be with "unlimited" minors rosters, just how big should we expect a typical farm system to be? Say it reaches 20 players, double what it is now. Is an additonal $40 an appropriate valuation of that luxury?

With the need to cut players removed from the equation, I'm just trying to figure out if there are any potential issues with this approach.

Perhaps something like prospects 1-10 cost $4. Prospects 11-15 cost $6. Prospects 16-20 cost 8. And prospects 20+ cost $8. They would all be $4 when called up, but it might help with that you were talking about

Not to shoot down the idea, but that was the sort of thing I had in mind when I said I didn't want to make the farm system too complicated. It's good to put suggestions on the table though, I don't mean to be discouraging.

I'm not sure there's a simple solution to the problem though (assuming there actually is a problem, I'm undecided).

No worries. I agree simple is better though.

Simplest solution - cap minor leaguers at 20 or 25. Not sure it's a real problem, but I'm comfortable with that sort of limit.

Also, I think I'm the only one who thinks this, and that I've already contributed too many walls of text to this debate, but I don't understand why we need to restock everyone's system up to 10 every year. If people draft badly or trade away all their prospects, that's fine, but I don't see why we should give them extra help to recover from that. It will, also, if we have more trading, be an encouragement for people to empty out their whole system as they know they'll get 10 picks to restock.

ok guys im sorry for being an absentee guy, but irl is crazy right now. end of this week ill have a lot more time to devote to this.

i definitely think there should be a hard cap on prospects, but i do agree with upping it. we want teams that are struggling to still be able to get back into competition, and we want a rich rookie draft each year. in the real MLB, there's 32 teams competing to retain prospects. here, we only have 10 teams, so allowing unlimited rookie rosters could quickly eat up anyone and everyone each year.

i think increasing to a hard cap of 20 with a floor of 10 is a good idea.