You're such a bitch karak.

Would it be possible to get a final set in stone rule list sent to my pm when you get a chance Exit?

Sure, i'll PM you the most recent one. Considering none of us have done something like this before, I'd say it's prettty likely that something will have to be tweaked as we go. I think we covered all the major issues, i just wouldn't call it "final set in stone".

Fair enough.

Thanks

personally I don't want to wait too long. I mean he's known about this league and known that we needed to get the draft under way, I'm thinking it was hinted at last week we were thinking of drafting on Monday. Plus we're pm'ing him so I don't know why we haven't heard back from him.

On the other hand he was active in the 2p2 midseason league last year and regularly posted in that thread. Wed at 12pm EST the deadline??? I mean we gotta set something this can't be up in the air all week.

Replace him with Wise!

Here's an idea (that people might be against). We can finalize the rules, wait for Levarkin, maybe even find a 14th, and then just find a few hours that work for everybody and do a fast auction all in one day (or maybe two sessions). If people want to stick with the slow auction, that's cool, I'll go along with it - but I really think a fast auction will work better. I think it will be really hard to keep everybody around and checking internet regularly for a whole month (I know I will have one weekend when it will be tough for me, and I can't imagine I am the only one) - it just seems a lot more convenient to do it all at once.

A fast auction is a logistical nightmare to get 14 people from all across the internet together at the same time. No way that will work. Levarkin will be here soon.

I'd be cool with a fast auction too, but my schedule is more accommodating than most.

How long would a fast paced auction take? We could just use CBS's actual software if we choose that path.

edit: nm karak smackdown. agreed @ logistical nightmare though, unless it can be done in like 2 hours.

Pecota ran a simulation, and I think the 20% FA salary increases are really severe. They are going to create a massive turnover.

We might need to tone it down a lot... to maybe 5 %... either that or scale it so the increases are different for different $$ amounts of salary.

5 seems a little low, but i agree 20% is high - i mentioned so early on, and have since just accepted that there was gonna be a lot of turnover with the best players and was planning my strategy accordingly. what about a sliding scale?

like (just pulled these numbers out of air, so adjust with... logic)
players 400k-2M = 7.5% increases
2M-5M = 6%
5M+ = 5%

how did pecota run the sim? can he run it again w/ different settings, or share the spreadsheet or whatever, i'm curious to see it. and this is obv a good problem to solve before we start anything.

He just set a certain $$ amount at each position that seemed reasonable and ran % increases.

I won't ask to him share his numbers, but 20 % is completely unreasonable IMO. 5 % is a lot better...

So I say we go forward with 5% with the understanding that we may tweak it up or down in the next off-season (but won't change it drastically to be fair to everyone unless everyone agrees).

cool with me.

and we decided all contracts are guaranteed right? thats another thing that i think would be good to set for this year, but potentially tweak in the offseason after we see how things go down.

What about applying an NFL like Franchise tag to the player of your choosing (or maybe you can designate 2 or 3 players) and then everyone else has to fall under the 20% increase.

Personally, I don't like guaranting the contracts b/c I don't feel that falls in line with what the real mlb clubs have to do. Well maybe so, but there's also the flipside to that where we're paying free agents $400k even if we pick them up in August. The Red Sox didn't have to pay Paul Byrd a full $400k when they got him in August last yr.

But I do agree its easiest and if we try and copy every little Major League rule and use it in this fantasy league we'll all go nuts. Still I'd like to have a look at what the coniditions are for mlb contracts to be voided. I know the Rangers just voided Khalil Greene's contract. Or say I have Sidney Ponson on my team and he goes into one of his Karak like drinking binges where he misses a start b/c he's so drunk he's seeing like 3 catchers behind the plate during warm up. That major league club wouldn't have to pay him. I'm not even sure what the rules are for say if the Blue Jays had tried to just cut ties with Halladay this season and another team would of picked him up and paid his remaining salary. I guess thats a moot point b/c the Blue Jays would of had several teams to work a deal with like they were able to do with the Phillies. But say its a lesser player like Milton Bradley. He goes into some sort of funky attitude in Seattle the first 2 months of the season and they decide his attitude is doing more harm than his baseball good and they release him. Then in July the Red Sox are like Adrian Beltre sucks we need another bat in here lets get Milton. How does that work for post July in real life, would the Mariners still owe him his salary or does Boston now assume it?

I think if Boston now owes Milton his remaining salary it would then be nice to be able to go out and pick up a free agent at the time Boston (i.e. a fantasy team in our league) signs Bradley to go out and use that remaining salary to pick up a free agent off waivers like with Paul Byrd but not have to pay him a full year's salary. If that makes sense, I guess I should clarify. Say you're a team in this league and you have a player making $400k if you want to cut him b/c he's having some sort of Ortiz like dryspell from last year you should be able to and then when Ortiz picked it up again last year and becomes fantasy worthy again and some team signs him. Then you only owe him from the beginning of the season to the point he was signed by the new team. Say the new team signs him July 1 so you'd owe him like $200k, then it'd be nice if you could turn around and sign a new player to a $200k contract to finish out the season so there's some symmetry there.

Just to clarify: when you guys are talking about guaranteed contracts, do you mean if a player were to be cut during the season the player's remaining salary would still have to be paid? In addition to the 15% cap hit on said player's salary for cutting him.

I thought having the cap hit attached to cuts was a good check. Also, we're going to be in a deep league, so it's not like owners are going to be able to drop an early-round pick and expect to come away with many players of known value. There isn't a strong incentive to shake up your roster unless an injury or total collapse hits a player and people certainly won't be streaming or they'll just run out of cap space.

I think this is one "realistic" aspect of actual MLB contracts that might not be all that necessary in this league. You draft poorly, you've basically punished yourself because now you have to deal with a reduction in cap space and a shallow pool of replacement talent.

A friend of mine has participated in a league like this and he suggested that 50% of the player salary be guaranteed. So no matter when you drop a player, April or September you are on the hook for 50% of his salary. Seems like a happy medium that will allow us to cut down on messy calculations.

Thoughts?

Yea when i say guaranteed I mean you owe it regardless of cutting them at any point in the season.

The reason i was looking to get rid of the cap hits/prorated part because I was trying to make sure it was easy to use w/ whatever fantasy setup (CBS) we use. I assumed that they wouldn't have an option built in for 15% of the remaining contract time stays left over, which means the commish is gonna have to stay current with all add/drops and manually adjust the caps - which would be a pain in the ass. 50% flat would certainly be easier, and probably better than full guarantee. i'd be fine with it.

thundercat -

the actual mlb system is the one karak mentioned. if you release an mlb player you owe him his entire salary. If he is signed after you release him, you owe him the difference between your contract and his new one. When the Mets signed Gary Sheffield for $400k last year, the Tigers had to pay $13.6M of his $14M contract.

oh and still no word from Levarkin. He hasn't logged into 2p2 since thursday.

I don't know if I have the answer for the adjusting team salary caps after a player has been cut or not. Having a player paid for a full season no matter if he plays 1 game for your club or 162 seemed excessive, and I have concerns about 50% too. I think that makes it so if you have a guy like Ian Kinsler and you signed him to an $11 mil deal and hes a guy you weren't planning on paying the increase of $12.1 mil the following season. You could cut him the last 2 weeks of the season (it'd take a full week for the waiver process to go through before he could be on another team, thus lessening the chances he gets picked up by another team and improves another team to the point it effects your team in the standings i.e. I'm in 4th place I cut Kinsler 3rd place team picks him up but only has 1 week to use him instead of 2 weeks) Then the team that cuts Kinlser all of the sudden has $5.5 million to spend the following 2 weeks of the season running through pitchers. Basically he could have a 2 or 3 extra starting pitchers, pitching every night the rest of the season and still not go over the $5.5 million. That would be a problem since we don't have a maximum amount of Innings Pitched set in place. Not to mention the fact, if you use a player for 90+% of the season you should have to pay him more than 50% of his salary.

All of that said, most of my concerns are for improving this league as it moves forward. These are things we can be aware of the first season not necessarily implement. I mean I don't want Karak or Exitonly to have to take on full time jobs just managing this league that'd be ridiculous. The primary job is to get this puppy off the ground and running. But I do think we need to be observant of how team's salaries function this season and what problems we encounter so they can be fixed for season 2. I assume Karak is going to keep a running log of these hiccups, is anyone else going to volunteer to help him? I might nominate myself for that duty if no one else wants to jump in.

Valid point about the 50% rate, We'd have to set a date that you no longer get any cap space back. Or we could just do away with it altogether. Forcing owners to leave cap space isn't so bad, we just have to make sure to communicate it to all the owners that any free agent space will need to be alloted during your initial auction.

I think I'm like everybody a little torn here. I remember Levarkin being very active in our 2+2 mid season league and he's been active ITT. But it seems a little far fetched to think he had no idea the draft would be starting this week. I know no one wants to bail on him, but in a way he's bailing on us. It'd be different if this was mid February and no talks of a draft starting had taken place. Then he's gone for a week everyone gets antsy and is like hey lets do a draft I can't wait to get this started. He comes back the next week and is like wtf?

Thats not whats happening here, its been mentioned ITT and he should know anyways that with a big league like this doing an auction draft that it has to start soon. Which brings me to my next point... How long are we going to wait on Levarkin?

My vote would be set this draft up for tomorrow at noon EST and if we haven't heard from him by tomorrow morning then Exit sets up a new 12 room draft and we all join that draft room and get started at noon with the draft.

I also don't really care if its tomorrow, or Thurs or Fri or Sat or whenever, but I would like to set a date today so I have some sort of idea whats going on with this league instead of it all being up in the air, b/c I'm trying to plan my week and this is throwing that off a bit.

HOLA. Very sorry dudes: I won't bore you with the details of what came up in the past few days, but obviously it limited me to only the briefest stints of internet access. I'm actually still on the road, but in a city and found an internet terminal specifically so that I could log into this thread (well, I had other purposes, but whatevs).

Anyway, life is back to normal as of tonight late and definitely tomorrow. I haven't been able to read the entire thread, but I saw my name come up a lot, so sorry for being sketchy. In any case, lock and load. I'm ready to draft.

!!! Holla.

Oh also, re paying: I was going through the process of setting up a paypal account on Thursday, but obviously that got held up. I guarantee payment tomorrow before noon EST. Glad that this thing is really rolling . . . busy weekend!