if by the bottle you mean the casebook, then i plan on catching up this evening

i have a ton of reading to do and im judging a negotiation competition tonight (i am in no way qualified to judge a negotiation competition where the results are actually meaningful, such as this one)

and for some reason everyone always calls me drunk karak but i probably drink less than most people i know IRL

i just have a tendency to post wildly on message boards when i get home from drinking rather than going straight to bed

hahaha its all good

ill take juan rivera for $5. that's fine.

i think there should be some sort of free agent compensation.

like for example lets say you don't retain player X for $15M.

If he gets signed for >10M you'd get a 1st round pick from the team that signs, if between 7.5-10M a 2nd and less than that nothing?

eh?

sounds like it's for next year, but it'd impact trades immediately so thats why bringing it up now.

I'm on the fence about that idea. This will probably balance out in future seasons, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a decent amount of turnover for higher paid players this offseason, since most teams seem to have at least a couple regrettable contracts on their payroll that they'll want to release into the FA pool.

Although, that may not even be an issue under your proposed system because given the high price of a player's previous contract, it's unlikely that the new owner would pay him enough to activate the draft pick award.

I think I am against it. Benefits teams who signed a lot of superstars at the expens of other teams. I am not against it in principle, but if it would have to be reworked somehow so that it's fair to everybody before I vote for it.

In general we're doing a F***ton of babying to teams that didn't spend money at the beginning, as if the teams that bought high priced players had $200 mil to spend or something. If you didn't buy a high priced player thats your fault, I don't think the rules need to be customized to protect players who thought not getting any top players was a good idea. Thats your strategy make it work for you. As for the teams that did get high dollar players its not like we wanted to waste money on them. Its just that there was alot of interest and if you wanted that guy you had to pay the price. I think it'd be nice to be able to get some compensation for lost players. Especially since the pay raise is mandatory.

Karak,

hey bro on a serious note I hammered out a monster post yesterday addressing some future concerns that impact draft strategy now. If you get a chance to read it and at least give some initial thoughts that'd be cool.

thanks,

TC32

huh? playing by the rules that were laid out in the beginning does not equal babying. Creating new rules to benefit teams that overvalued players early on does equal babying. And I am even Ok with some of it - see my proposal for free injury replacement min salary add/drops (btw, still want to see what you think of it, karak). I just don't want to have more of it than necessary to make the league run smoothly.

how would you suggest making the FA compensation fair to all? The numbers/brackets i used were just pulled from air. I like the compensation because if you're out of contention - any player you won't be keeping should be traded for whatever you can get - and with some compensation it'd prevent some of the more serious salary dumping/league changing trades. it'd also add an extra element of trading for players who you don't want to keep but you can get the compensation for.

Not sure. I guess I would lower the picks (to 2nd/3rd or 3rd/4th) to at least lower the impact. Another problem though, is that this means that a team can't sign more than one player within a certain salary category, right? And it can't sign even one if it traded its pick. That seems problematic.

Maybe we could combine this with Karak's idea of player extentions (guaranteeing salary for x number of years in exchange for lower raises) - where you only get compensated if it's a player coming of a guranteed long-term contract. People were complaining that there was no incentive to gurantee long-term contracts since the normal salary raise is only 5%, maybe adding pick compensation would provide an additional incentive for long-term contracts. Just a thought.

we could just give the teams that lose the FA's bonus picks, not necessarily coming from another team. like have round 1 then round 1 supplemental for the teams that lost FAs ordered by free agent's sale price.

I like the bonus picks idea. I'll vote for it if we do it only for players who have been on the team (or traded, but on the same contract) for 3+ years. This way, you get compensation for losing you franchise cornerstones, but it doesn't reward teams who bid poorly and will have to release a bunch of superstars the first offseason.

don't have a lot of time to respond to this.... but in general we don't have any rules per say, we pretty much said this first year is an experimental year.

Really all of the rules I've read contain the language eh, I'm thinking x, y, and z that is if there are no objections to x, y, or z or if there is we could keep some of it or all of it or none of it. There's little to no concrete rules.

So all I'm saying is I'm noticing that alot of teams that didn't spend are complaining now and really no one told you to hold onto all of your money. I think its basically ignorant to not draft a top 20 player in a 13 team league and expect the rules are going to conform to your needs later. And I'm not saying this about your team in particular sergsz b/c you've done an excellent job of drafting imo. But you seem to be on this bandwagon for some reason.

Real mlb teams get compensation. Why can't we?

My compromise suggestion for $4 contracts:

For 2 weeks after the rookie draft you may void up to 3 $4 contracts (or any contract and simply eat whatever is over $4) and add a new player. Those new contracts will be guaranteed. If another team bids on the player you dropped, it doesn't count against your cap (assuming you cut a >$4 guy).

After that 2 week period you get an addition 4 free voids until the trade deadline. Any unused ones from the first 2 weeks don't count. After the initial 2 week period, you may only void what is left on the contract pro-rated. So if it is halfway through, you simply void the remaining 2$. Also, if the player is grabbed by another team through waivers or bid up... you can simply take that $$ rather than using your void. You only have to choose to use the void after the waiver auction.

Re: FA compensation

Not a fan of this. It won't be so easy just to trade everyone away. We pay the top 6 spots and there is a last place penalty. Those are there to prevent salary dumping. Plus you need to take on some of that salary AND take on the new rookie's (or whoever's) salary.

If we incorporate a long-term extension thing, then I can see working it in there.

are we fine with this? it's obviously what I was trying to do and I didn't think through what was going on. no one was going to bid $6.

Reply to Thunder:

I am ok with a compromise solution for compensation I posted earlier (get picks if the player you lost has been under contract for 3+ years).

As far as the broader issue, I just have a very different view of the rules than you do. There was a league constitution agreed on before the auction that had plenty of concrete rules. These rules set a baseline of reasonable expectations that made it possible to assign value to players and select reasonable strategies. If rules were completely up in the air, it would be impossible to draft/bid intelligently at all, because obviously player values and optimal strategies change drastically depending on the rules. Now, I concede that some rule changes may be necessary because it is impossible to foresee all issues and contingencies when you design the original league constitution, and it is important to keep the league fun and running smoothly. But given that the original rules set a baseline of expectations that people relied on when selecting their teams, I think there should be a somewhat strong bias toward maintaining the status quo, with rule changes implemented only if they are such that they would not have altered the player values / optimal strategies for the initial auction, or if they are absolutely necessary to keep the league running.

I have no idea why we want free agent compensation. FA compensation exists in real baseball (to my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong) to help balance the disparity between high-spending and low-spending teams, so even though the Yankees are buying your awesome player, it's not a total loss because you get the pick. But there are no Yankees and Marlins in our pool: we each get $100MM to spend, and that's it. So why would we want this?

And Pecota's observation that there will be a lot of morning-after contracts coming off the books next off-season is dead on. And it will be hilarious.

Yeah this seems like the right solution.

Sounds pretty good.

Exactly. There is no opportunity to be like the best sports franchise in the entire world (rangzzzzz) in this league.

definitely agree with all of this

You mean that team in New York? What do the Mets have to do with anything?