2019 Rules Discussion

[Cardinals]

There's been a lot of debate, talk and questions to me about changing a few rules, but ExCo decided over the last week to leave everything as-is for 2018, primarily because we believe that rule changes should occur between November and December so that each GM has time to adjust coming into the year.

That said, we also need more feedback and ideas from everybody in this league. In my own words (not speaking for all of ExCo), here's some of what's been brought up to me, and to ExCo in general.

Raising the roster size
This has been an ongoing debate for probably the better part of a decade when we saw a new wave of GMs come into the league, and with them, new ideas and ways to build teams. With so many more websites and so much more data available, many have asked to raise the roster size to 53 or 55, taking into account more prospects for rebuilding teams, and more spots to stash vets for competing teams in case of injury.

My $.02: I'm not sure that this would do much to help the balance of the league. Speaking to me personally, it would give me 5 more spots to grab prospects to take away from the FA pool, which hurts the rebuilding teams. Yeah, I may opt to snag a backup C with one of those spots, but it's all to help the future of my club at that point. I think the idea in there is good, but I'm not sure each GM in the league would take advantage of it they way they would in order to make it work (e.g., the rebuilding teams stay focused throughout the year rather than mailing it in and make good usage of the spots).

Changing the draft/inactive roster
Another one that has been going on for awhile, multiple GMs have asked about abolishing the draft roster and simply going to 10 inactive (read: non-projected players) rather than 10 from the previous two draft classes.

My $.02: I don't really have an opinion. I do think it's foolish to punt on draft classes entirely, but that there are weak classes so forcing somebody to spend a % of their roster on a class that is weak is, well, weak.

Draft pick compensation
This is an idea that I brought up last year, awarding draft picks to teams that are good, but not great, and that a.) cross a certain win threshold and b.) do not advance past the wild card round.

The idea is that this will make veteran players more valuable, and keeping the balance of the league a bit more intact. Instead of dealing a decent reliever for a 4th round pick, a team could hang onto the reliever and try to win some games, and possibly get a 2nd or 3rd round sandwich pick instead.

My $.02: My idea, so obviously I like it. We too often have teams losing 100+ games. If we can make 3-5th round picks less valuable as trade currency and increase the value of guys who project well, I think that's a win.

Raising minimum actives
Instead of 20 required players, we raise the minimum to 23-25.

My $.02: This is a symptom of all the other issues. if you're trotting out less than 24-25, you're probably not really attempting to win. If anything, the problem areas in the sim which lead ot massive loss counts are 1.) not having a backup catcher or 2.) having only 10 active Ps, which causes the entire staff to get tired before long.

What this all means

All of these issues tie into one thing: making the league more balanced. Obviously, I'm somebody who likes to win and tries to win every year. I'm not suggesting penalizing teams for winning, and I'm not suggesting that penalizing teams for losing is good, either.

But what we do need is more of a drive to win, and we need to make sure we're tackling the major issue at hand rather than bits and pieces of it.

What I'd like from you

Healthy debate, ideas and feedback about all of this, and hopefully we can come up with a few solutions to make the league more balanced into the future.

[Twins]

Roster Size:

I'm in favor of raising the roster size, not so much to hoard prospects, but because the new MLB DL rules means we have more players than ever hitting the DL, and that can put a strain on IBC roster dept. I would be in favor of 55, but 53 would work, too.

Draft Roster:

I'm also in favor of having 10 uncarded players rather than forcing us to be married to recent draft classes.

Draft Pick Compensation:

I think I'm in favor of it, but I'd like to hear what everyone else has to say.

[Phillies]

Raising the roster size
I'd leave the roster size alone.

Changing the draft/inactive roster
I'm fine with switching this. I don't think there is ever a time when all 30 teams have a "legal" roster anyway. There are a few teams that don't have ten '16 and '17 guys right now. Do away with it.

Draft pick compensation
I like the idea for the sake of competition.

[Rockies]

Roster Size - for expansion, sure.

Draft Roster - I like the current setup, but I also see a case for getting rid of it. Why not just call it a 40 man roster and an inactive roster.

The draft pick compensation is backwards to me. I don't see this helping balance anything. Awarding additional draft picks to "good' teams will just cause a bigger divide IMO. If you want bad teams to turn it around quicker, then perhaps they should be given a compensation round of extra picks.

Additionally, why are we discussing rule changes when we can't even put out a definitive list of updated rules, something that I thought was promised to be done this offseason. :\

[Cardinals]

Roster Size - for expansion, sure.

Draft Roster - I like the current setup, but I also see a case for getting rid of it. Why not just call it a 40 man roster and an inactive roster.

The draft pick compensation is backwards to me. I don't see this helping balance anything. Awarding additional draft picks to "good' teams will just cause a bigger divide IMO. If you want bad teams to turn it around quicker, then perhaps they should be given a compensation round of extra picks.

Additionally, why are we discussing rule changes when we can't even put out a definitive list of updated rules, something that I thought was promised to be done this offseason. :\

I don't know if 76-82 win teams are considered good.

As far as rules goes, should be updated in short order, ditto new website/OOPSS build.

[Cardinals]

One idea that I forgot in my original post:

Raising minimum actives
Instead of 20 required players, we raise the minimum to 23-25.

[Athletics]

Roster size / Draft Roster:

I think these sort of go hand in hand if we were to split the difference, which is raise the 40 man to ~43 to account for more DL appearances and those looking to find carded players that are more diamond in the rough types to help there team this year and next but leaving alone the uncarded section. The uncarded section is obviously the mystery box of the league and more boxes allow for greater swings in league parody. Obviously any team can trade away their draft picks and fill in the remaining holes with the international and high risk high reward picks, but opening up even more spots for 16-18 year-olds just increases the chances that the highs and lows becomes further apart.

Another note for the uncarded side is I don't think they should be from just the past two draft years, but anyone that is uncarded or is within the last two years (for those college RP types that manage to get a rating after one year)

Draft Compensation:

Would need to hear more details on what you were thinking and rewarding managers, usually this makes more sense in a salary cap league where finances are pinched by raising budgets and forced free agency.

[Cardinals]

Stephen, this is what the compensation stemmed from: viewtopic.php?t=6404

[Marlins]

If we are having discussions on changing the rules, can I put my $0.02 in as well and suggest we actually have rules in place which we can change? This always seems to fall on deaf ears, but am I the only one who thinks we should have somewhere showing what the damned rules are before we work on changing the rules? Other than random rules decrees buried in the forums of course...

[Cardinals]

See the above comments. They should be ready to go with the new OOPSS.

But sure, if you guys don't want to discuss either, that's also fine.

[Nationals]

There's been a lot of debate, talk and questions to me about changing a few rules, but ExCo decided over the last week to leave everything as-is for 2018, primarily because we believe that rule changes should occur between November and December so that each GM has time to adjust coming into the year.

That said, we also need more feedback and ideas from everybody in this league. In my own words (not speaking for all of ExCo), here's some of what's been brought up to me, and to ExCo in general.

Raising the roster size
This has been an ongoing debate for probably the better part of a decade when we saw a new wave of GMs come into the league, and with them, new ideas and ways to build teams. With so many more websites and so much more data available, many have asked to raise the roster size to 53 or 55, taking into account more prospects for rebuilding teams, and more spots to stash vets for competing teams in case of injury.

My $.02: I'm not sure that this would do much to help the balance of the league. Speaking to me personally, it would give me 5 more spots to grab prospects to take away from the FA pool, which hurts the rebuilding teams. Yeah, I may opt to snag a backup C with one of those spots, but it's all to help the future of my club at that point. I think the idea in there is good, but I'm not sure each GM in the league would take advantage of it they way they would in order to make it work (e.g., the rebuilding teams stay focused throughout the year rather than mailing it in and make good usage of the spots).

I'm kind of torn on this. I think the point about the DL is both insightful and valid, but I think I prefer keeping roster sizes as they are. Teams work within the constraints of a 40-man roster within the new DL rules as well. If a team's roster construction is resulting in difficulties based on that, then I think that's on the individual team. Overall, I think smaller rosters are better for the parity in the league.

Changing the draft/inactive roster
Another one that has been going on for awhile, multiple GMs have asked about abolishing the draft roster and simply going to 10 inactive (read: non-projected players) rather than 10 from the previous two draft classes.

My $.02: I don't really have an opinion. I do think it's foolish to punt on draft classes entirely, but that there are weak classes so forcing somebody to spend a % of their roster on a class that is weak is, well, weak.

I'm for removing the draft year restrictions. Let teams manage the way they want without being pigeonholed into something. As long as there was still some minimum in place.

Draft pick compensation
This is an idea that I brought up last year, awarding draft picks to teams that are good, but not great, and that a.) cross a certain win threshold and b.) do not advance past the wild card round.

The idea is that this will make veteran players more valuable, and keeping the balance of the league a bit more intact. Instead of dealing a decent reliever for a 4th round pick, a team could hang onto the reliever and try to win some games, and possibly get a 2nd or 3rd round sandwich pick instead.

My $.02: My idea, so obviously I like it. We too often have teams losing 100+ games. If we can make 3-5th round picks less valuable as trade currency and increase the value of guys who project well, I think that's a win.

Definitely for this. I would love to see more parity in the league. I personally think to really dissuade tanking we should talk about a lottery system, where the bottom 5 would have less odds at the top pick vs. 6-10 or something like that. This is by no means fully thought out, but even with sandwich picks, Most of the time, I'd rather have a top 5 pick than 10 and 45.

Or, just spitballing, you get +X extra chances to get a top pick, where X is your final standing this year minus your final standing last year. So if you're consistently at the bottom, you might get 10 shots, but someone who went from 25th to 15th might have more.

To me, I think lottery is the way to go as it will give flexibility in the rewards/penalties. I also don't think sandwich picks are going to be enough to dissuade teams from shooting for a top pick. Not that we couldn't do them, I like the concept to help lower teams get better faster, but I don't think it would be able to do the job we're hoping it would on its own.

Raising minimum actives
Instead of 20 required players, we raise the minimum to 23-25.

My $.02: This is a symptom of all the other issues. if you're trotting out less than 24-25, you're probably not really attempting to win. If anything, the problem areas in the sim which lead ot massive loss counts are 1.) not having a backup catcher or 2.) having only 10 active Ps, which causes the entire staff to get tired before long.

I don't think this is an issue. If we can incentivize winning, then this problem won't exists. It's a byproduct of tanking.

[Astros]

Okay I'm on board with a lottery system, just gotta make sure nobody freezes the Knicks envelope

[Rockies]

I hate lottery.

[Giants]

Raising the roster size
Raising minimum actives
There seem to be two threads here, since we want to encourage teams to compete and people seem to want to stash more guys. My thought is some combination of both goals can be achieved by adding a few roster spots and requiring a 25 man roster (maybe 23 if guys are on the DL).

Draft pick compensation
I like this idea quite a bit, even if it means there won't be so many sim freaks sitting out there for me to have every year. I'm generally against lotteries, I don't think they actually solve the problem, frankly I think a better solution is to punish people who go on multi year extreme tank jobs, maybe something like if you lose 100 games in back to back years you can't have a top 10 pick or something like that. Putting in that threshold will encourage even the bad teams to compete in September to win enough games to get over the hump.

[Nationals]

I hate lottery.

#healthydebate

[Mets]

50-man roster ceiling - no policing how the spots get used. Rebuilding may have more, competitive may have less uncarded. I have never been in favor of forcing teams to carry certain draft years.

No team should ever have less then 24 active players at any given time. It negatively impacts the competitive balance of the league.

[RedSox]

Raising the roster size

I know I lose a lot of guys to waiver claims when I try to slip them through, as does Perryman, and the other prospector GMs. If we get more roster slots I'm going to get to hold more prospects and over the course of a couple years I expect to mine an extra 1 well above to star level player for every 3-4 roster slots. This seems like a significant disadvantage to guys who don't dig all the way down to the DSL.

Changing the draft/inactive roster

Meh, I don't really care either way on this.

Draft pick compensation

I think we arrived at where this MLB offseason was a couple years before they did. The problem is it's a lot more valuable to be in the top 5 picks of the draft than the 10-20 range. If you're going to finish at 70 wins, why not cut your supporting players and fill those slots with lottery tickets? What this has done is made said supporting players essentially worthless on the trade market. Scarcity is the only way I see to make these guys have value again and I'm not sure on how to get there.

Raising minimum actives

By my count Szymborski projected 2644 players this year. He's projecting a lot of guys that never would have gotten projections before. If we raised the active roster llimit to 25, that's only 750 players. A total of just over 28% of projected players. Seems like a no brainer.

[Brewers]

I’m all for getting rid of the 10 last 2 draft rule. I end up having to scan 2-3 guys constantly just to be in compliance even though I typically have 10 inactive.

[Royals]

I like the draft pick compensation and the minimum active raised to 25. The rest, I don't see a reason to mess with.

[Rangers]

I think that there are three key points in achieving better league balance.

1 - Motivate more/all teams to try to win more/all of the time
2 - Give the teams that are not in a position of strength good opportunity to get there
3 - Field 30 GMs who don't give the best and most valuable players in baseball to another team without getting a great deal

I think that folks who are pushing for higher minimums for the active roster are on the right track. The advantages are covered above. However, I think that anyone who wants to raise the active minimum without increasing the total maximum is underestimating the damage that they are doing to the ability to build a team that isn't in great shape to compete with the teams who have stacked the tops of their rosters.

Ripping people off in trades should not be the only way to build an elite roster in this league, in my opinion, and if we give very few inactive roster spots, we are giving people who need to build their roster but aren't interested in terrorizing the weakest traders as the means to do so less, not more of a chance. Who cares about giving more draft picks if it simply pushes another equivalent player off the roster?

So, I think that increasing the minimum active roster to 23-25, increasing the full roster size by the same amount, and taking measures such as some pick compensation to guys in no-mans land is the right combination of measures to take.

Then, I agree with this comment from Tullar:

If you're going to finish at 70 wins, why not cut your supporting players and fill those slots with lottery tickets? What this has done is made said supporting players essentially worthless on the trade market. Scarcity is the only way I see to make these guys have value again and I'm not sure on how to get there.

I think that some level of motivation to be in the 7-15 rather than bottom five is helpful, as is seeing more of them onto rosters, but I likewise am not sure how to make these players more valuable in a way that more mirrors MLB without overhauling the whole system to match MLB's organization sizes and crazy things like that. I would be interested to hear more ideas on that front if anyone has them.

One final thing - I included an additional element in the three factors above, as I think that we have two issues impacting balance and we're really only addressing one so far. The other is that we still have a funnel of the elite players onto what are already the best rosters. None of these measures help that in any way and other than having 30 guru GMs it might be hard to, but I just wanted to add that if anyone has ideas on how to combat this, it would be great. We are never going to have a league where everyone is motivated to try to win and everyone thinks they have a chance unless we improve on fairly consistently having five or so struggling GMs feeding elite players to five or so prosperous, aggressive GMs.

[Mets]

I've been rebuilding for 5 years. It's a long and painful process. Draft slots, roster limits and lotteries don't do anything to change the fact that we are non-salary league with lifetime contracts. Without any sort of free agency, teams can only really rebuild by getting lucky with the draft or trading assets for more younger assets. I just had to trade JBJ because he was one of the only assets I have in an effort to improve. My team will be less competitive in 2018 without him but I can't compete with the top 5 teams in the NL - so I just have to continually be a farm team for other teams.

[Rangers]

I've been rebuilding for 5 years. It's a long and painful process. Draft slots, roster limits and lotteries don't do anything to change the fact that we are non-salary league with lifetime contracts. Without any sort of free agency, teams can only really rebuild by getting lucky with the draft or trading assets for more younger assets. I just had to trade JBJ because he was one of the only assets I have in an effort to improve. My team will be less competitive in 2018 without him but I can't compete with the top 5 teams in the NL - so I just have to continually be a farm team for other teams.

On the sentence above that I bolded - or by signing prospects who see their value grow, which is a major component if you use it, which is why I think it would be a step backwards to remove non-roster slots with a goal of improving balance. Makes zero sense to me. Something that we tossed around a bit in the exco discussion this winter was to vary the number of available roster and non-roster spots based on previous season record. Probably very tough to make the site support or enforce, but kind of an interesting idea.

[Dodgers]

Probably very tough to make the site support or enforce, but kind of an interesting idea.

I can't foresee any logic we come up with that I can't make OOPSS support.

[Cardinals]

I've been rebuilding for 5 years. It's a long and painful process. Draft slots, roster limits and lotteries don't do anything to change the fact that we are non-salary league with lifetime contracts. Without any sort of free agency, teams can only really rebuild by getting lucky with the draft or trading assets for more younger assets. I just had to trade JBJ because he was one of the only assets I have in an effort to improve. My team will be less competitive in 2018 without him but I can't compete with the top 5 teams in the NL - so I just have to continually be a farm team for other teams.

I guess. Over the past 13 months or so, here's a few of the guys I've either signed or created. Jury is out on a lot of them, but at least one has turned into a top 100 prospect (Bieber):

Jose Martinez -- batting third/fourth for the Cardinals, really good numbers over the last year
Shane Bieber -- top 100 prospect
Jose Siri -- top 30 in Reds org, was able to use in trade
Jose Soriano (https://twitter.com/longenhagen/status/ ... 62752?s=12 for a quick update on him)
Sean Murphy (no. 4 catching prospect according to MLB.com) -- foolishly dealt for Shawn Kelley
Jonathan Arauz -- traded Derek Law for him, having a nice start to season and #6 on today's hot sheet
Cavan Biggio -- made today's hot sheet as well, signed him a couple weeks ago. Turning into a legitimate prospect.

These are guys I signed as a contender, so I have fewer roster spots to devote to prospecting than rebuilding teams do.

There are gems out there, it's a matter of finding them and figuring out how to use as assets (keep v. trade). I'd like to have a couple of these guys back for sure.

[Mets]

I've been rebuilding for 5 years. It's a long and painful process. Draft slots, roster limits and lotteries don't do anything to change the fact that we are non-salary league with lifetime contracts. Without any sort of free agency, teams can only really rebuild by getting lucky with the draft or trading assets for more younger assets. I just had to trade JBJ because he was one of the only assets I have in an effort to improve. My team will be less competitive in 2018 without him but I can't compete with the top 5 teams in the NL - so I just have to continually be a farm team for other teams.

I guess. Over the past 13 months or so, here's a few of the guys I've either signed or created. Jury is out on a lot of them, but at least one has turned into a top 100 prospect (Bieber):

Jose Martinez -- batting third/fourth for the Cardinals, really good numbers over the last year
Shane Bieber -- top 100 prospect
Jose Siri -- top 30 in Reds org, was able to use in trade
Jose Soriano (https://twitter.com/longenhagen/status/ ... 62752?s=12 for a quick update on him)
Sean Murphy (no. 4 catching prospect according to MLB.com) -- foolishly dealt for Shawn Kelley
Jonathan Arauz -- traded Derek Law for him, having a nice start to season and #6 on today's hot sheet
Cavan Biggio -- made today's hot sheet as well, signed him a couple weeks ago. Turning into a legitimate prospect.

These are guys I signed as a contender, so I have fewer roster spots to devote to prospecting than rebuilding teams do.

There are gems out there, it's a matter of finding them and figuring out how to use as assets (keep v. trade). I'd like to have a couple of these guys back for sure.

I understand that and I've been in these leagues long enough. I am just saying that draft slots and lotteries aren't going to do much to affect competitive balance in my opinion.