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Post 12 Jan 2015, 5:39 pm

I still think this is a topic worth exploring. Or at least, I think keeper overhaul is a topic worth exploring generally, but it's hard to keep track of what's going on through 9 pages of different types of proposals, so I'm starting a new thread to focus discussion, since this idea seemed to have some traction. If people have other ideas for how to change the system (they did months ago, at least), feel free to start other threads.

WHAT RFA (Restricted Free Agency) MEANS
Owners can bid on each others' players, to a limited extent, as part of the keeper process.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE STATUS QUO?
I believe that the risk/reward model we have with 3-year contracts encourages relatively uninformed gambles. I would prefer that teams not to have to commit up front to long-term contracts, and thus avoid being punished across multiple seasons for poor player evaluation, failure to anticipate injury, etc. However, many players would not remain keepable for more than a year or two at +$5/year, and lowering the inflation rate would make elite players too valuable for too long.

WHY USE RFA
I believe RFA can solve the problem of having a fixed, single year inflation rate. RFA can drive up the prices of elite players faster than the baseline rate, allowing us to lower the base inflation rate so that teams can keep favorite non-elite players longer. At the same time, the limitation on volume and pricing of bids should allow teams to retain significant value from elite players.

HOW I WOULD IMPLEMENT IT
First, change the base inflation rate to +$3, and eliminate the rookie contract distinction.
Second, introduce a RFA signing period, to take place after the keeper signing period. It would look like this:

1. Keepers submitted
2. RFA offer sheet phase
3. RFA matching phase

RFA offer sheet phase:
*Every team can submit claims on any players rostered by each member of their division, ordered by priority
*Offers must be $4-9 more than the price at which the player was kept
*Owners must have enough cap space to accommodate their largest claims for each division member combined, plus an additional $18 (the maximum possible) for potential matching. If they do not, all of their claims are voided.

RFA matching phase:
*Owners are given the opportunity to match claims on their players at the claim price minus $3.
*A claimant wins a player when the owner declines to match.
*If multiple teams claim the same player, the higher bid wins. In the case of a tie, the lowest-finishing team wins.
*A claimant can only win one player per division owner. Having won a claim, the claimant's remaining claims on the owner's players are void.
*A claimant can only force an owner to make one match, but can be involved in multiple matches in the case of multiple claims on the same player.
*Therefore, an owner can only be forced to match 3 players.
*Owners respond to the claims of the lowest finishing team first.

Here's an example that should help illustrate how things would work in a case of maximum confusion. Most of the time it would probably not be this complicated, but hopefully this helps explain why some of the edge-case handling exists.

Teams A, B, C, and D are all in the same division.
Team A has Mike Trout, Clayton Kershaw, Giancarlo Stanton, and Paul Goldschmidt (Team A is a jerk).
Team B submitted +$9 claims on Trout, Kershaw, and Goldschmidt, in that order.
Team C submitted +$9 claims on Kershaw, Stanton, and Goldschmidt, in that order.
Team D submitted +$9 claims on Stanton, Trout, and Goldschmidt, in that order.
Order of finish was A-B-C-D.

The lowest finishing team's bid goes first, so A has to decide on D's claim on Stanton. A chooses to match Stanton. Now D can't force A to do any more matches.

Next, A has to decide on C's claim on Kershaw. A chooses to match Kershaw. Now C can't force A to do any more matches.

Next, A has to decide on B's claim on Trout. A decides NOT to match on Trout. However, since D has not won a player yet, and D finished lower than B, D is currently winning the bid for Trout, so D receives Trout. B is still considered to have forced A to match, so his Goldschmidt claim is ignored.

Note that, had B put Goldschmidt at the top of his list, and A decided not to match, B would have received Goldschmidt, not D, since D had a higher priority claim on Trout.

My goal with this way of handling tiebreakers is to incentivize everyone to rank the most valuable players the highest. I'm not 100% sure this system accomplishes that perfectly, but I think it should come pretty close. It's hard to come up with a scenario in which it makes sense for a team to duck their responsibility to bid up a player like Trout (on the assumption they won't get him) in order to win a different player. Or at least, you'd only do so if you'd be willing to do so in a vacuum, rather than because you expect someone else to take care of it.

The other goal is to make this only a two-step process, rather than the 3+ steps it threatens to be. I think it works because the resolution order is fixed, so owners can just receive an email instructing them to respond to a set of bids. In the example above, Team A would be instructed to match or decline on Stanton, Kershaw, and Trout, and wouldn't need to know anything about who submitted the claims or how those players were selected. And I'd be happy to handle the logistics of this if people were interested in the fundamental concept but scared of the bookkeeping.
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Post 12 Jan 2015, 5:43 pm

AN ALTERNATIVE:
Since the goal of all this is to create what is essentially a variable inflation rate, there's another way we could handle this that would be simpler, if also less exciting.

Basically, take the same idea as above, except you never actually win the player from other team, you simply increase their cost, but the team has the right to decline to pay. Maybe just fix the increase at a flat +$6 over the kept price, or maybe make it variable (+$1 to +$6) so that smaller corrections can be applied. Each team can only cause one player's price to change, but it can't stack, so you still do the multiple submission thing.
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Post 13 Jan 2015, 8:26 am

Thank you to Todd for putting together this excellent proposal. Kudos to you for clear explanation and thorough reasoning. I feel like I understand your logic.

I'm still in the status quo camp, but I could be convinced to change my mind, especially if I saw a major shift in the competitiveness of the league (right now it still feels more on the fun side than the hardcore side; the playoff teams stay pretty consistent year-to-year and about half the league doesn't participate in these discussions, for example).

Why the status quo? First, because our current system does not force owners to take any risk. George has proven that by avoiding contracts altogether, it's still possible to compete. Other owners have used one year deals to avoid getting burned by buyouts. If you like to gamble, then you can sign three year deals. Sometimes you win (usually in the 6/9/10 deal), but plenty of times you break about even or lose.

The second reason I like the status quo is simply that we get to enjoy rostering good players for longer. I don't relish the thought of parting with my beloved Giancarlo after only a few blissful years because people in my division drive his price up.

You might say that driving a good player's price up is just a way to create more balance. But I'd argue that even with a few exceptional contracts anchoring a team (and we rarely ever see more than four on any one team), there's no guarantee of winning. Even starting with Trout, Goldschmidt, Donaldson, and Bautista, Matt has to fill quite a few other roster spots to compete (we have five pitching categories, for example!), and since we play head-to-head, there will always be luck involved. Matt's current case even feels like the exception to the rule. I don't remember another time we've seen two top-10 players on one team under good contracts.
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Post 13 Jan 2015, 4:12 pm

I agree that mechanically, this would be a move in the hardcore direction, in the sense that there would be increased complexity. But I don't think it would actually result in owners needing to be less casual in their decision-making. I think it would simply reduce the punishment for those more casual decisions.

In fact, that's more of what I'm trying to address than the Trout thing, which I have argued in the past is (as you say) more of an anomaly than a structural issue.

I don't think the problem is as much 'people can't compete with Matt because he has good players' as it is 'people can't compete with Matt because he has good players AND they have a lot of dead weight'*. That dead weight becomes much easier to clear if we aren't signing up for 3 years at a time.

*This is obviously not literally true, and certainly isn't true for all owners. I'm simplifying and exaggerating, but hopefully it gets the point across

You are of course correct that people have the option not to sign long-term contracts. But it seems clear that the current incentive structure results in many such contracts. We haven't really seen any major shifts in owner behavior on that front, so I doubt that's going to change.

As for Giancarlo... yeah, that is a potential downside, though some (Steve, I imagine) would argue it's a benefit. Starting from a $1 BY, instead of:

$1, $6, $9, $10, $15, $18, $19, $24, $27, $28, $33, $36, $37...

or, with the amendment:
$1, $6, $9, $11, $16, $19, $21, $26, $29, $31, $36, $39, $41...

you'd have (with maximum matching every year):
$1, $10, $19, $27, $36, $45, $54...

Of course, the numbers are tweakable. In fact, when I was writing it up I had an offer range of +$4-6, which would result in a match range of +$1-3, which would look like:
$1, $7, $13, $19, $25, $31, $37, $43, $49, $55...

... but I thought that would probably result in too much price deflation in conjunction with dropping the base salary inflation from +5 to +3.
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Post 14 Jan 2015, 11:24 am

I don't know who came up with the salary structure in our league...but they did a good job. This proposal would take a lot of the strategy out of the league. Trying to develop prospects would be much harder if owners had to pay $4 per prospect. Also gone would be the assessments as to which players are deserving of contracts. And if you lucked into a good player their value will quickly escalate . I favor tinkering with the existing structure to put more players back into the pool and discourage owners from tanking early in a hunt for prospects but not an overhaul like this.

First, I would have to be convinced of the dire necessity required for such a big change. And then I would need to convinced that this RFA would be better in the sense of making the game funner, or more fair or more strategic--I don't see that it necessarily does any of those things.
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Post 15 Jan 2015, 7:10 am

This is very well thought out. I think it's the closest we've seen to a finished, viable proposal for this type of thing. An RFA phase would add a lot of fun strategy to the league, both in that phase itself and in valuing and trading players. However, I also think that bartering existing contracts and buyouts adds a dimension to trading that makes it feel more like you're running a real team.

I'm still a little bit confused about why teams would be incentivized to bid up players they have no chance of acquiring, if there were actually some targets they felt they had a chance at getting.

I think this problem stems from two functions being lumped into one:

1) Create a variable inflation rate that is somewhere between a pure fixed system (what we currently have) and a pure market system (essentially the same as all players re-entering the auction every year).

2) Give teams a shot to acquire players that are under team control by someone else, but that they may value more highly than the controlling team (the purpose of restricted free agency).

I think the problem is that #1 and #2 will apply to completely different sets of players. #1 being for players that are good and cheap enough that there is no doubt they'll be matched at the max bid, and #2 for the mid-range types, decent players on good contracts or stars who are getting expensive.

I also think that in a true RFA system, where you're actually hoping to allow teams to take a shot at players on other rosters, it needs to be open rather than limited by division. I say that fully understanding that it creates a logistical nightmare that you solved by limiting bidding to intra-division.

Overall it feels like this proposal would mainly serve the purposes of #1 (requiring owners to target players on other teams just to push up their cost, which I have been against in the past), and that any activity on #2 would actually distort the system and be counterproductive. However, I am very open to being convinced.
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Post 15 Jan 2015, 2:03 pm

I went back and read the extensive discussion we had in this area last year. Todd proposed his allocation method and Matt and I had variants on a free agent draft. Todd has now filled in some more details on his proposal. For the heck of it, I'll submit a different proposal that is a variant of something that Matt/I was proposing last year:


1. Keep the existing salary structure, including rookie contracts (though it might be prudent to change the inflation rate, I don't know)
2. For all expiring contracts, each owners submits the players its offering contracts to. However, if an owner wants a player not be subject to the free agent draft he simply offers a contract 50% higher than the base rate. So if a player is $1 and a 1 year contract would be $6, if an owner offers $9 instead to the player then that player cannot be bid on. If an owner does this with all of his new contracts, then his players cannot bid be on.
3. After that, we have a free agency draft. Any owner can submit as many bids as they want on any non-protected player. The bid has to be higher than the contract tentatively offered to the player by the old owner. Highest bid wins. Existing owners can match the highest bid on one player only. Any other players with higher bids are lost.

The essential goal would be competitive balance to sort of ensure that an owner, because of cheap contracts on super-star players, does not have too big of an advantage over other owners. Presumably if an owner had someone like Trout he would have to offer $9, $12, $13 and then $27, $30, $31 and then $54, $57, $58. Because of the increased costs for keeping players, more players would go into the pool, making it more attractive for owners to try and compete just by drafting players at auction. And the bidding process would involve a good deal of strategy, in figuring what player to risk to the draft and how much to offer to bid on players.

I thought over Todd's contentions on 3-year contracts and I guess I just do not agree with it. Teams are not failing to compete because of bad three-year contracts. Even if they had extra money not lost to bad contracts they could not obtain players to compete with Matt at auction. They cannot compete with Matt because he has great players at a cheap cost and owners cannot find comparable players at auction. This drives owners to search for future cheap superstars and their one-year rental players are the best way to get those future prospects.

Allocation would drive up the costs of players like Trout but given that owners would likely match bids and the bidder would rarely get the player it does not seem like it would be a lot of fun.
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Post 16 Jan 2015, 10:03 am

Lots of interesting ideas here! If only more people would participate in the discussion...

These ideas of trying to get other owners' good players and/or drive their prices up are not super appealing to me. If we want to make it more expensive to keep the best players, then we can do some sort of arbitration system that increases salaries based on the prior season's performance. I don't see myself wanting to look at every marginal keeper on every team in order to decide whom to bid on. I'd rather just do what we do now: have an auction. If you have the skill and/or good fortune to find a player below value, you reap the reward of being able to keep that player, with a salary inflation penalty. If you don't keep a player, every other owner gets to bid on him at auction.

In other words, I'm still not seeing any justification that convinces me that the status quo is broken.

Freeman says: "Teams are not failing to compete because of bad three-year contracts. Even if they had extra money not lost to bad contracts they could not obtain players to compete with Matt at auction. They cannot compete with Matt because he has great players at a cheap cost and owners cannot find comparable players at auction. This drives owners to search for future cheap superstars and their one-year rental players are the best way to get those future prospects."

This makes no sense to me. If owners cannot compete with Matt, it has nothing to do with the rules. Matt wins more than anyone else in the league because he's better at fantasy baseball than anyone else in the league. We could have any rules - including salary structures, restricted free agency, arbitration etc. - we wanted and it wouldn't change Matt's being better than everyone else. Matt's finding good players when they are less known and therefore easier to keep when they break out is not something that should be regulated. Matt plays with the same rules as everyone else. If he is better at taking advantage of them, we don't need to change the rules; we need to get better at fantasy baseball.

Not to mention there are plenty of examples of owners competing with Matt despite his having great players at a cheap cost. Freeman started from absolutely nothing and advanced about as far as Matt in the playoffs in just his second year, stealing Rizzo in the process! I just don't see evidence that our salary system is responsible for making it difficult to compete in the league. In my first year, I started with one keeper (Nick Markakis, don't everyone get all excited at once) and won the league building basically my entire team in the auction. George does that every year and makes the playoffs more often than not. I wouldn't chalk my winning last year to having an abundance of great players at a cheap cost prior to the auction. In fact, two of those supposedly "great" players, Harper and Gonzalez, gave me almost nothing last year, which just shows the volatile nature of fantasy baseball. I could easily see Goldschmidt not being a top 50 player at the end of the year, for example, even if he seems like a first round lock right now and therefore an amazing guy to have under contract cheaply.

Okay, I'm done with my rant. Keep the suggestions coming :)
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Post 16 Jan 2015, 10:35 am

Schulni asks for other owner input so here is my two sense (sic) worth.

I do not want another team trying to affect the current contractual prices of my team. By the same token, I do not want that power over another team. If the team (I will use Matt as an example) does so well that he is near unstoppable, than whose fault is that? I place the blame on myself and all those who did not win. If you don't like it, then make a better team!

(Brad Ba steps of his soapbox and drifts back into the crowd to listen some more...)
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Post 16 Jan 2015, 11:56 am

I agree with the status quo being preferable to what is described above. Like Brad, I don't want anyone messing with my team nor do I want the responsibility of messing with another's. If we want long-term players to be more expensive then lets find a way to do so under the current contract system, one I like very much.

Of course, I might be biased by the massive amount of mid-tier (and maybe top tier) talent I have coming out of the chute this year :grin: . I took re-building to heart last season and am quite glad the +1 on rookies will not take affect this year.
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Post 16 Jan 2015, 12:19 pm

You're in a pretty amazing position, no doubt. The Choo contract is the only blemish...well, that and perhaps the temptation of keeping too many unknowns. But you can spend big on a few top players at the auction and only need a couple of your promising guys to break out this year to do well. Nice rebuild!
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Post 16 Jan 2015, 1:19 pm

I can't say I dislike the lavish compliments about my supposed fantasy prowess. However, despite the unstoppability of the Lumberjacks I not only got knocked out in my first playoff matchup this year, but would have lost the 2-week finals to Nick even if I'd made it.

Nick has said himself on several occasions that his team was in shambles just a couple of years ago, and he's built it into a powerhouse. As he pointed out, Freeman is another great example of a team making a quick turnaround, and George makes the playoffs every year with barely any keepers.

Also of note: in winning consecutive titles in '12 and '13, I won at least 2 and possibly 3 (can't remember now) of those 4 playoff matchups via tiebreaker. Yes, I have fielded strong teams for several years running, but there's a healthy dose of randomness in this whole thing, just like real sports!

I spent some time recently typing out my own proposal for RFA, but I threw it out because I also really like the current setup of the league. While of course a lucky hit like Trout can have lasting effects, I don't believe this provides insurmountable structural advantages. And as Nick points out, there's still plenty of room to do something dumb like trade a cheap top 20 hitter for Michael Wacha. Freeman didn't even have to talk me into it!

Speaking of which, does anyone want to trade me a good hitter for Michael Wacha?
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Post 16 Jan 2015, 2:02 pm

schulni wrote:You're in a pretty amazing position, no doubt. The Choo contract is the only blemish...well, that and perhaps the temptation of keeping too many unknowns.

I'll be culling the herd during spring training... and I have one extra week to evaluate them. Thanks guys!
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Post 16 Jan 2015, 2:06 pm

I like our simple system; it's more of an intellectual exercise to consider different ones. And even with his "Trout" advantage, we can still compete with Matt. I guess my post might have implied otherwise, but that is more of an attempt to explain why an owner might tank early then an overall assessment of competition in the league. And even that was overstated, I think.
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Post 23 Jan 2015, 10:00 am

I am getting the sense that this is pretty much dead in the water this year. Amendment season is closed.

Next stop... spring training! Only three weeks before pitchers and catchers report. :cheers: