Potential Fantasy Baseball League

[TheoSqua]

I'd like to make a new fantasy league for this coming season and need ideas/people who are interested in joining.

I'd like to be a bit complex, which means it'd be pretty small, 10 players tops.

I'm thinking something with a free agent market, a prospect draft, and a payroll to manage.

We'd have to find some sort of player value site for the first year to establish player costs and stuff, and the league would be holy spreadsheets, but i think it could be fun if I can get something together.

What I was thinking for the first season was starting every team with the same payroll, based off of one of the auction sites i'd hope. Every player in the draft would have a predefined contract that would go with them and every player would have to draft under budget.

Based upon something i've yet to establish, players would become free agents over the course of time and players would put in open bids for each player. The winner would be based upon some forumla to establish value in a contract (ie years vs dollars).

The prospect draft would be a pool of six players that you can keep claim to. I'd say that each "prospect" would have 3 playing years for cheap, then become a free agent and open for bidding.


If anyone has ideas on how to make something like this work, or would want to play, lemme know.

[clevername]

I know you've been thinking about doing this for a while. I'm on board.

[TheoSqua]

So here's my ideas so far....Obviously it's a rough draft, so i'm expecting to have to fix some kinks.

The Draft
Every team starts with a $100 payroll. The initial draft will be a snake draft. Players will be valued by Diamond Mind ( like this ). 14 hitters and 9 pitchers (and payroll values are adjusted at 60/40 accordingly).

After the draft each team will have a limited number of contracts to give to their players (contracts will be capped at 5 years) as so:

5 year contracts - 2
4 year contracts - 3
3 year contracts - 4
2 year contracts - 6
1 year contracts - 8

Four of the 1 year contracts will be guaranteed and four will be non-guaranteed. The 4 non-guaranteed contracts are more revolving 1 year contracts that cost the league salary minimum regardless of who is in it. This allows a team to swap out 4 players throughout the season at a bargain price.

Contracts will be capped at length (ie you can only have two 5 year contracts max) but teams are not required to go full amount. You could have 23 1-year contracts or five 4-year contracts if you so chose. But once you submit your budget you can't change your mind and once a contract expires that player automatically enters the free agent market.

The cap is only for the first year. After that a team can have as many 5 year contracts as you want.

Free Agency
After the first season there will be no draft, instead it'll be an open free agent market.

We'll loosely base our values on the diamond mind page linked above, but it'll be an open market, with a payroll percentage cap (both ways, prolly 20% of the cap being the max offer and 1m being the minimum offer). If multiple teams offer a max contract, or two teams submit identical offers, then the team that finished lowest in the standings will get the player.

Contracts will be weighted against years/average contract value based on age. I'm thinking right now it'll be an inverted 10% scale, but I haven't finalized the formula (basically signing a 20 year old will give you a 10% discount per year, so a 5 year 40m contract would win over a 1 year 10m contract but the exact opposite would be the case for a 40 year old player, a 1 year 15m contract would win over a 5 year 50m contract). All bids will be public and the best offer will be determined by the math formula to remove all bias.

Payroll Manipulation
Payrolls will start at $100 (i say $100, but it's short for 100m, we're just not dealing with the last six zeros) and inflate by 10% each year (100, 110, 121, 133, etc. decimals will be rounded).

Players can add or subtract up to (5% - 15%, i haven't decided on a number) of their total payroll for the next/previous season. Say you're in last place and have no chance of winning the league, you can trade/release/not use (5% - 15%) of your payroll and it can be applied to the next season. If you go "all in" for a season and want to boost your payroll you can borrow (5% - 15%) of next season's payroll to boost your chances of winning this year.

Contracts can be weighted however you want, like if you offer a 5 year $25 contract you can pay 5m each year, or you can pay 1m 4 years in a row and 21m one year in a row (might have to limit this somehow to make sure people don't max load contracts and then quit the league maybe weight it at 60% of the average value (so the lowest you could backload a 5/25 contract would be 3/4/5/6/7 per year).

S Team can release a player at 20% penalty for each year in the contract:
year 1: 20% of salary is hit against the cap
year 2: 40%
year 3: 60%
year 4: 80%
year 5: 100% (you don't release a guy the first year into a 5 year contract).

If a team goes over the cap and doesn't have enough from next year's payroll to cover then the team is disqualified for every week they are over the cap. I think we'd have to limit the amount of successive years a team can borrow against their next years payroll to ensure that people don't abuse payroll inflation.

DL
A team will have unlimited DL (or as many as the max that Yahoo allows). You will not be able to pick up players from the FA market that are on the DL. When a player goes on the DL, it frees up the league minimum in dollars to ensure that you can sign someone to replace him (i think the league minimum will be $1).

Trades
You can trade players for other players, picks, money, etc. Trades can eat a portion of another player's contract. Contracts are pro-rated. So if you make a trade at the deadline, you'll only be on the hook for 40% of the player's contract.


It'd be a standard 5x5 yahoo league for the actual fantasy game part. 10 players.


Thoughts? Ideas? I'm basically trying to over inflate payrolls to soften bad long-term contracts without having the system easy for someone to abuse for one year and then quit the league with his team in shambles. I want to keep it balanced so that a team kind of has to go "all in" at the expense of his future to win it, which will give the worse teams a better opportunity to compete in future years.

[TheoSqua]

for the record, there's at least six spots open for this...

[Transmogrified Tiger]

What are your plans for scoring and lineups?

EDIT: Missed the part about the 5x5 scoring. With an attempt to make the roster construction side so realistic, why not try the same for scoring?

[Fan_In_NY]

I am intrigued. what about the fact that diamond mind can have negative player value?

[TheoSqua]

What are your plans for scoring and lineups?

EDIT: Missed the part about the 5x5 scoring. With an attempt to make the roster construction side so realistic, why not try the same for scoring?

It'd be nice to make scoring more viable, but at this point i think i'd want to progress the complexity. Plus it's already going to take a ton of time for the commishes to calculate all of the payroll, allowing yahoo to caluculate the scores rather than someone by hand makes life a lot easier when trying to run a league like this.

I am intrigued. what about the fact that diamond mind can have negative player value?

The diamond mind rates will really only be necessary for the very first draft. As for negative values, there will be a minimum salary each season, so anyone whose value falls under that would just be valued at league minimum. I was thinking $1 would be league min if Payroll starts at $100.

[Rieges]

I'd be interested in playing.

[TheoSqua]

I want to try to get this started this week. But I'd need 2-3 more people to be interested in order to get it off the ground.

[TheoSqua]

What are your plans for scoring and lineups?

EDIT: Missed the part about the 5x5 scoring. With an attempt to make the roster construction side so realistic, why not try the same for scoring?

So would you be interested in joining this league?