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Post 29 Aug 2014, 12:06 pm

I like these clarifications/adjustments except for the way the owners match offers--I prefer the method I proposed (with the clarification that the offers need to be at least +5,8,9 and cannot exceed an owners $260 budget in total--I guess you would have to submit a tentative roster with your bids). It's just a philosophical thing-- I think one contract plus matching rights is good enough without allowing owners the ability to match with a 1 year 100% offer. But if owners liked the +100 percent system better , I would not have a problem with it. I am ok with keeping rookies(as Todd pointed out I wound up cutting almost all of my rookies--it 's tough to keep players who aren't playing), but if it is thought necessary to get rid of them so owners will compete I guess I can go along with it. The freedom to come up with different ways of building a roster is one of the things that make this a good league (better than any other fantasy league I have played in). In the narrow world of fantasy baseball, consider me a libertarian...
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Post 29 Aug 2014, 12:32 pm

An option to deal with the going-over-$260 problem:

During the match/release phase, owners may not match contracts if it will theoretically put them over the salary cap. Therefore:

Total value of all bids won + Current contract obligations + Matched offers <= $260

Where "bids won" are all the situations where the owner in question had the highest bid, whether or not that bid is accepted (which we don't know yet since this phase is still ongoing).

This would force you to do some careful budgeting when making your bids, or you might get stuck being unable to match offers to your own players.
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Post 29 Aug 2014, 1:12 pm

This feels like it's going off the rails a bit again in terms of addressing the initial issue. Specifically, this version seems more designed to address Mike Trout than early selling.

It could get pretty complex to track what counts as a 'fresh' contract versus an attempt to renew. Consider scenarios involving trades, waiver claims, FA claims, that sort of thing.

I originally thought of something very close to what Todd proposed, but I think it relies too heavily on the bidding system to correctly police inflation on all but borderline keepers (the guys who are questionable even at +$2).


We currently have nothing whatsoever that polices inflation, just a steep initial price increase that makes it hard to keep non-elite players. I suggested +$2 because that would leave room for additional discounts to offset the loss of surplus that bids would create. However, if the concern is that we'd end up having too much surplus from a net decrease in inflation, we could just go with +$3, which over a three-year period is the same inflation rate as our current contract system.
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Post 29 Aug 2014, 3:30 pm

I am not sure it's irrelevant. Part of the reason that we are having a problem with teams bailing too early is a perception that Matt has built too much of a powerhouse and can't be beat . And part of that is having premium players at bargain prices. So this proposal could help solve the problem of teams quitting too early.
With regard to going over the budget , it seems like you need to decide in what order bids get adjudicated. I am guessing that the champion from the prior year would have to make decisions as to whether to match bids first in descending order to the last place finisher. Now, so he would have to decide in making that decision whether his bids on players are likely to succeed and plan accordingly. Because any bid that he has that would put him over $260 would be invalidated when a later owner's adjudication is done. Conversely, a later deciding owner may find that he cannot match a bid because of earlier success on his bids.

I think this is how it would look so far:

(1) Players with expiring contracts are put into a pool;
(2) Owners submit their a tentative roster and all of their bids on players in the pool. This amount cannot exceed $260. The bids must be +5, +8, +9 of the last contract year of players eligible to be bid on;
(3) Bids are adjudicated from Team#1- Team #16. Bids are not valid (and need not be matched) lf the bid causes an owner to exceed $260. An owner may not match offers if that puts them over
$260.
a . use my matching system which just requires owner to match total dollar value of the bid OR
b. Matt's system of allowing owner to match by a 1 year contract at a max of 100% of the base value or whatever the bid, whichever is lower. Bids are 1 year only ( unlike my system where they can be from 1-3 years).
(4) finish doing keepers. This is a bit unclear. Do we allow owners to go back and redo their rosters even if they are over roster size , do we just allow them to make cuts from their tentative roster or do we just or subtract or add any players from their tentative roster based on the results of the bids. I think I am ok with being able to rework the final year-end roster based on the results of the bidding even it causes some owners to be over the max roster to ultimately choose their keepers from.
(5) auction draft
Last edited by freeman3 on 29 Aug 2014, 6:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post 29 Aug 2014, 4:13 pm

Also, owners have to worry more about giving 1 year contracts, because now they will be subjecting those players to bids (instead of seeing how a prospect does in a year and then offering a 3 year contract) By reducing the value of prospects that should help deal with owners giving up early. Also, the proposal would allow more players to be bid on, which has been a complaint.
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Post 02 Sep 2014, 8:45 pm

freeman3 wrote:Also, owners have to worry more about giving 1 year contracts, because now they will be subjecting those players to bids


This is the opposite of what I want. 3 year contracts already have too much upside, the result of which is we have a lot of bad contracts, because you need to play for that upside. This would just exacerbate that problem.

To bring up some numbers that I posted at the beginning of this thread (albeit on a different topic), about 1/3 of all contracts signed are for 3 years. At first glance, you might expect this, since the options are 1, 2, and 3 years. Except a longer contract is inherently riskier, so you'd expect to see fewer 3-year contracts than anything else (relatively few players should be worth that risk). Meanwhile, there are almost no 2 year contracts (just 8.5% of the total since we started, and that has decreased over time). Given appropriate balance, I'd expect to see something bell curve-ish- so maybe 60/30/10 for 1/2/3- but instead more than 2/3 of the 2-year contracts are actually in the 3-year bucket. So we have an extremely skewed distribution.

I maintain that the notion of long-term contracts existed initially to give us a trade off between price inflation and risk, and that while this works reasonably well, some of the ideas we're floating now would give us greater flexibility with price inflation, eliminating the need to trade it off against risk. I am not claiming that there should be NO risk. After all, surely we can all agree that spending money in the auction is risky, and you have much better information at that point than when you sign contracts. So risk will always be there. But the risk involved in signing a player to a 3-year contract is really something we're terribly equipped to try to assess. I also think it's actually bad for competitive balance, because bad long-term contracts tend to be punished across multiple years. Thus, I REALLY want to take advantage of the opportunity to move to yearly contracts.

However, even if people don't want to do that, it seems clear that 2-year contracts are useless, which suggests that our contract structure is unbalanced. That seems like something we should fix. So, what about limiting contracts to 2 years?
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Post 02 Sep 2014, 10:51 pm

Well, if you're concerned about 3 year contracts having too much upside why not make it +5, +8,+11? Or maybe + 5,+8,+13? I like having 3 year contracts , myself. And as far as owners going to more 3 year contracts to avoid their players coming out, there is already a lot of risk with players not panning out. I think owners would like having more players come on to the market each year.
I guess I don't really understand the concern about owners making bad evaluations about 3 year contracts. You hit on some which have huge benefits and then you miss on others. Can you specify any owner who has dug themselves a hole with bad 3 year contracts? The competitive imbalance has come from Matt doing quite well with 3 year contracts. Part of the attraction of keeper leagues involves the strategy of making all these decisions about prospects, about contracts, trades, etc. The real concern with a keeper league is that an owner will develop such a competitive advantage that owners feel they cannot compete for several years. And that may be true of Matt's team. If we all have a chance each year, some teams having a better chance than others but isn't an unbeatable advantage, (or at least that advantage won't last several years ) then everything is fine. I think that is the main reason we are talking about reform, is it not?
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 9:12 am

freeman3 wrote:Well, if you're concerned about 3 year contracts having too much upside why not make it +5, +8,+11? Or maybe + 5,+8,+13?


+13 makes no sense, but +11 might. It's possible that having the third year priced the same as the second year would create the appropriate balance between 2 and 3 years. It's also possible that it would tilt too far in the direction of 2 years. +5/+8/+10 might also be a better balance. Hard to say in advance (I wouldn't have guessed that 2 year contracts would be so unpopular when we first created our current system). If we want to focus on tweaking rather than overhauling, I'd probably vote for a move to +5/+8/+10.

freeman3 wrote:I guess I don't really understand the concern about owners making bad evaluations about 3 year contracts. You hit on some which have huge benefits and then you miss on others. Can you specify any owner who has dug themselves a hole with bad 3 year contracts?


Not only would I not wish to call people out on that, but I'm also not making the claim that bad 3-year contracts are single-handedly responsible for ruining anyone's team. All I'm saying is that bad 3-year contracts are often punished across multiple years- the year in which the player turns out to be a dud, and the following buyout year. As a result, it's something of a double whammy when you guess wrong. Yet guessing is mostly what it is, so that's a pretty harsh penalty. With yearly contracts, you'd only ever be punished within the relevant season, after which you'd be free to let the player walk.

freeman3 wrote:The competitive imbalance has come from Matt doing quite well with 3 year contracts. Part of the attraction of keeper leagues involves the strategy of making all these decisions about prospects, about contracts, trades, etc. The real concern with a keeper league is that an owner will develop such a competitive advantage that owners feel they cannot compete for several years. And that may be true of Matt's team. If we all have a chance each year, some teams having a better chance than others but isn't an unbeatable advantage, (or at least that advantage won't last several years ) then everything is fine. I think that is the main reason we are talking about reform, is it not?


I think yearly contracts+allocation or +restricted free agency would have plenty of interesting strategy- as much or more than we have now. I also think that would be true of moving to 2-year max contracts. In fact, the lack of 2-year contracts under our current system suggests that some strategy that you might expect to exist, doesn't.

But either way, the reason we're talking reform is because we want to decrease the motivation for teams to sell so early during the season. That's related to competitive imbalance, but there are other factors at work. I think the most direct way to address the problem is to decrease the surplus value generated by keepers (not eliminate it, just decrease it). That decreases the reward for selling early. And since most of that value is generated by the extremely low inflation rate for 3-year contracts, that's my target for reform. A move to +5/+8/+10 would also help, though I suspect it wouldn't help enough. I also suspect that moving to +5/+8/+11 would actually push too far. But again, it's hard to say without actually trying it.
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 10:08 am

My opinion on our contract structure:

Two year contracts are useless. You get the big savings, in actual dollars and lower base year, in year three. Under our current rules it only makes sense to go with a 1-year or 3-year contract. Rather than signing a 2-year contract, I'll happily pay the extra $2 in year 2 to avoid the risk of locking that year in, no exceptions. Still, year two is part of a 3-year contract, and I think the salary in that year makes sense. It's just that under these rules it doesn't make sense to stop at 2 years.

Also, to address Todd's earlier comments on our effective inflation rate, I agree that for good cheap players it ends up being $3/year. However, if a player's either not that great or not cheap, I think our effective rate is actually $5/year. At some point in the $10-$20 range, depending on whether a player is good or really good, it stops making sense to give out 3-year contracts and you really should just go year to year.

The two benefits of a 3-year are: $8 total saved over the life of the contract, and the base year is $6 lower at the end than it would be if you went year to year. For cheap contracts, this risk is often worth it. Once the base value of the contract starts to escalate, though, the risk/reward equation stops making sense and you really should just go year to year. That equation will make even less sense if we increase the inflation on the third year. (Todd's right, +5/+8/+13 doesn't work. In that case there's no benefit to locking in the third year rather than doing 2 years and then 1 year.) I think we lose something from this. I actually don't think it's a pure guessing game, and that part of the fun is trying to differentiate which players are year to year guys and which are worth the gamble. And on a minimum salary $6/$9/$10 contract, the penalty really isn't that high if you're wrong. Anyway, I think that increasing inflation on the third year will mostly just get rid of multi-year contracts.

We're really discussing two different things here. I think a restricted FA system like the one I suggested would address Freeman's concerns, by allowing owners to get a good amount of value early on from keepers, but then escalate elite players' salaries more quickly and push them into the auction pool on a more reasonable timeframe. But I'm not convinced that any of the tweaks to contracts that have been proposed, particularly lowering overall keeper value, will change the tanking equation in any way.

I'd be more in favor of positive changes (giving teams a reason and benefit to continuing to win throughout a season) that increase the options available to a team that's falling out of contention, rather than negative changes (reduce keeper value) that just make all options crappy for a non-contending team.
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 11:45 am

Well, let 's say we have all players with expiring contracts go into a pool and players can submit one year bids on them and we'll use Matt's 100% percentage idea--what would happen ? If you offer a 1 year contract to a prospect for $6 and that prospect hits big you can expect that you would be forced to match at $12 for the second year, $24 for the third year, $48 for the fourth year, and market value for the fifth year. If you offer a 2 year deal you would have to match at $18 after the third year, $36 after the fourth year and market value for the fifth year. If you offer a three year deal then you would have to match at $20 for the fourth year and $40 for the fifth year and market value for the 6th year. If we made it +5,+7,+9 then for 2 year contracts it would be a match of $16 after the third year, $32 after the fourth year and market value after the fifth year. You might see more 2 year contracts with this tweak or maybe owners would roll the dice on more 3 year contracts or maybe owners would offer less multi- year contracts because they have access to more players to bid on.
Anyway, making it more difficult to hold on to prospects should discourage tanking by making prospects a bit less valuable and by allowing owners more access to players each year so that they don't feel that they are closed off from top players indefinitely. My system, just allowing matching rights, would allow even greater circulation of top players. If we really wanted to make it easy we could do away with matching rights and just allow 1-3 year contracts and then back into the pool, if the bidding process is thought to be too cumbersome. Remember, under that system Matt would have had Trout for four full years. And by more players going back into the pool the auction draft would be a lot more fun.
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 5:01 pm

If we increase price inflation/decrease surplus keeper value, naturally we should see more players available at auction. I think that should by a byproduct of any successful method of dealing with the problem.

On the assumption (hopefully wrong) that people don't like the idea of eliminating long-term contracts, here's another idea. First, we move to +4/+7/+9. There's still a discount for longer contracts, but it's not as steep, so hopefully we get a better contract distribution. However, we also need some additional inflation to offset the decreased short term prices, so we do RFA as follows:

1. ALL players are eligible. Players in mid-contract have their BY price adjusted to reflect whatever happens with the bids.

My reasoning here is that we won't see enough impact from RFA if we actually restrict it to contract expiration; admittedly, this makes 'restricted free agency' something of a misnomer. However, if we did decide it should only apply to expiring contracts, Freeman's point about delaying a player's RFA would help offset the increased value of single-year contracts relative to 3-year from the switch to +4/+7/+9. Another alternative would be to say that players that players currently under contract or coming off contracts are eligible, but not those who have yet to be signed to an initial contract.

2. Bids can be up to +6; in addition to the baseline contract inflation rate. This represents up to a 200% increase on normal inflation. Owning teams match at a discount of -3, so they are matching at up to a 100% increase on normal inflation, allowing them to keep some of the advantage generated by identifying the valuable player, even if they're paying more than they would sans bidding. Obviously, this means bids can't be less than +4.

3. Each team can only bid on 3 players, and can bid on at most 1 player per team.

3a. Teams can only bid on players within their division

OR

3b. Teams can only be subject to 3 bids total. Subject to the adjudication order (see below), once a team has resolved its 3rd incoming offer (whether by matching or declining to do so), all other bids on that team's players are voided.

4. Teams must leave room in their budget for both matching AND bidding. When submitting keepers, each team must leave $9 available in their budget for matching (or less if they have fewer than 3 keepers). When submitting bids, teams must leave room for both matching money AND for all bids they submit. In other words, no one can ever, as part of this process, bust their salary cap, or have a bid or match invalidated as a result of doing so. This should help keep the process simple, and it's unlikely that people will have to worry about these limitations in practice (owners rarely spend enough money pre-auction for this to matter).

5. After keepers are submitted, there is an offer sheet period. Teams submit offers per the above rules, and rank them by priority. Following the offer sheet period is the matching period, in which teams match, or decline to match, the highest bids on their players. The matches are team-blind- that is, when you're matching, you don't know who the bidder is, only the price.

Tie bids are broken (AFTER matching, so teams aren't winning pointless ties) as follows: teams are ranked from lowest finisher to highest finisher from the previous season. Starting with the team at the top of that list, each team each of their bids evaluated for ties in priority order. As soon as a tie is found, that team wins that tie and moves to the bottom of the team list. The process then continues with the new top team on the list.

In the case of 3b (in which teams can only be subject to 3 offer sheets but can receive more)...

5a. A team receiving 4+ offer sheets choose which to respond to

OR

5b. Determining which offer sheets go through is subject to the same tiebreaking procedure as described above

----

Here's how the inflation looks for a repeatedly kept player with a starting BY of $1.

Current system:
01, [06, 09, 10], [15, 18, 19], [24, 27, 28], [33, 36, 37]

This system, with no offer sheets:
01, [04, 08, 10], [14, 17, 19], [23, 26, 28], [32, 35, 37]

This system, with full +3 matching every year:
01, [07, 14, 19], [26, 32, 37], [44, 50, 55], [62, 68, 73]

Notably, even in that worst-case scenario of yearly matching, there's still a lot of surplus value to be gained from a $30-$40 player (to say nothing of Trout, who still gets kept for a decade or so if nothing goes wrong). But as you can see, it doubles the inflation rate, and so it compresses the value from ~4 contracts into ~2 contracts.
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 5:16 pm

DiploMatt wrote:I'd be more in favor of positive changes (giving teams a reason and benefit to continuing to win throughout a season) that increase the options available to a team that's falling out of contention, rather than negative changes (reduce keeper value) that just make all options crappy for a non-contending team.


I think this is a reasonable attitude in principle, but in practice I'm not sure it's even possible, assuming you're talking about endogenous rewards and not exogenous ones like cash*; at least, not unless we're okay with punishing people for failure, which seems very problematic from a competitive balance standpoint. And I certainly haven't come close to being happy with any of the specific proposals we've had so far.

*This is, in fact, the motivator used in pro sports, in the form of attendance revenue and the like. And for all that I think that it would be very dangerous to introduce, it would also be FAR more effective at solving this problem than anything else we've discussed. Maybe someone can come up with a creative non-cash yet still appealing exogenous reward?

Also, I think that while "make all options crappy for a non-contending team" is rhetorically effective, it's somewhat disingenuous.I think what we're seeing now is that the options for non-contending teams are TOO good, and we don't have to make them outright crappy to make them less compelling. We want to strike a balance where even long-shot odds at a title are worth taking, and I think we have room to do that by decreasing surplus keeper value without eroding it completely or rendering keepers useless.
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 5:33 pm

While I appreciate Todd's logic, I see these proposals as becoming unnecessarily complicated. I'm with Matt, largely because I think the problem lies with owners, not rules. If the owners who rarely make the playoffs (ie not most of the people posting on here with the exception of me) have a reason to stay competitive for longer, perhaps they'll make fewer ill-advised trades. I don't see the restricted free agent proposals solving the problem of owners bailing early. I'd like to see how an auction dollar reward or something similar played out.

Here's the question: Will owners who bail early really change their strategy that markedly if they can't keep prospects for as long and as cheaply? Kris Bryant didn't make the major leagues this year. Is his possible future $8/11/12 deal really so appealing right now that an owner should give up Adam Jones, Adrian Beltre, and Ian Kinsler? Even with our current system, Todd struggled to find friendly contracts of established players that interested him. Even if we went to one year deals and more severe inflation, I think the same owners who sell early now will sell early to get one year of some shiny prospect.

I continue to think it's awesome to be able to keep players cheaply. It's a keeper league for a reason: we want to be able to develop multi-year relationships with players. Since we've already established that plenty of three year contracts bust, it's not like people are successfully locking up tons of cheap studs. Speaking of studs, why isn't Giancarlo returning my calls, that sexy manbeast?
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 5:56 pm

I actually thought my RFA proposal was pretty simple (about as simple as it can be, depending on which of the options you pick).

schulni wrote:Todd struggled to find friendly contracts of established players that interested him and were available.


Fixed. I could name several players I was interested in just on Matt's team.

That said, you have a point. But I'd rather suffer the problems of our current system than start creating perverse incentives and mucking with the salary cap by offering auction money to 7th place. Perhaps people just need more pride. I know I hated the thought of utterly tanking like Freeman last year, on account of the damage it would do to my all-time record (no offense Freeman).
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Post 03 Sep 2014, 8:41 pm

The one thing to remember is that the present system is relatively simple but allows for a lot of strategy (including the development of prospects which most fantasy owners like to do) I am not sure that we should care so much if teams tank. To me, that means I have a better chance of winning. As to the concern that some teams can take advantage of teams tanking to build super teams (I think the only real concern) based on trades, well, as long as there is no collusion other teams have equal opportunity to make trades with teams that give up early.
What I think would be popular is getting more players into the auction pool. The status quo is fine, we really don't need to change anything, but if there is any real issue with the existing system it has to do with taking too many players out of the auction pool. I have a very simple idea that won't change things much but should make more players available. The idea is this: if you offer a player only a 1 year contract you cannot renew the contract. That player will become a free agent. If you want to keep players you have to be willing to take a risk. You can keep a player as long as you want but once you go to a 1 year contract you lose the player after that year.
And Todd what matters is championships, not the overall record...in a keeper league with teams competing in not just this year but future years I don't think you can say a team has a lack of pride if it is trying to have a better chance to win in 2015 when the assessment is made that there is a poor chance in 2014