2107-08 Offseason Thread

[APMP]

argente was no where near as good and no matter what i did...wouldn't come under 70M

Scoops is just an Indian superstar giving this home country team a discount

[Bob_Meteors]

I would also suggest moving the minimum up to maybe 300 or 400k. 200 just seems like way too little.

[Echo127]

Scoops is just an Indian superstar giving this home country team a discount

I've found that *when* you try to negotiate with your players makes a huge difference, sometimes. Particularly earlier in the season they seem to ask for less money. And then sometimes you can get a guy to sign a ridiculously cheap contract when coming off of one bad year... See SP Bob Turner giving me 5 years at $380k/yr :-)

http://www.worldbaseballassociation.com/reports/news/html/players/player_224.html

[Huckleberry]

Absolutely, timing is important. I will usually check what they're asking for each sim. Sometimes it's affected by their performance during the season, so while it may help if they hit a slump, it could also hurt if they go on a hot streak.

[Huckleberry]

I would also suggest moving the minimum up to maybe 300 or 400k. 200 just seems like way too little.

That may be a future change but as of now I'd like to stick with $200K. I decided on that just out of proportionality with modern day baseball where MLB minimum was around $500K and MLB average was over $4M when the WBA started.

[Coop]

Looking forward to the annual preseason predictions.  I'm curious as to how badly I'm going to get zapped for trading Serhat Karpat.  (If I was a real life GM, I'd probably be tarred and feathered by now.)

[Havana_Jake]

I would also suggest moving the minimum up to maybe 300 or 400k. 200 just seems like way too little.

I also think that moving to the MLB model for rookie contracts might help our economy. 3 years of auto-renew + 3 years of arbitration. Signing bonuses for draft picks might help our economy too. It just seems like we have way too much cash right now. People are spending money on free agents just so they don't have to burn it. I think things might be better if we created more things one has to spend money on, like arb years and draft bonuses for example. Just a thought though.

[Txhorns]

I have actually been looking into that pretty considerably today and talking to Huck about it.  I still feel like some kind of arbitration would be good.  It would need to be a controlled arbitration though.  I will write up a new thread when I get a chance.  I think the biggest problem is that we either have to let the OOTP system run real arbitration or someone in the league has to put in some work each league year to manage arbitration.

[Coop]

I agree that we need options for using our cash.  I'm sitting on the league maximum of $50 million, not because I enjoy hoarding imaginary money, but because I can't find a way to spend it.  I tried to sign free agents, but they all went elsewhere, even the guy whom I offered $20 million a year.  I'd like to use the money to improve my team.  Right now there's no way to do that, but maybe some of the changes that are being discussed will open some doors.

[Huckleberry]

The good news is I think I may have found a way to make the work necessary to run WBA arbitration manageable for me. I will test tonight if I get time.

[Huckleberry]

Okay, the website appears to be looking good so I'm about to run the last offseason sim.

That being said, please take a look at this page:

http://www.worldbaseballassociation.com/arbitrationsalaries.php

(HTML link in case the change to the 2108 regular season messes up the output - http://www.worldbaseballassociation.com/WBA%20Arbitration%20Salaries.html)

This page shows what arbitration would be for the 2108 season if the following rules were implemented:

1. Minimum salary for all players with less than 2 years accumulated major league service time.
2. Players with at least 5 years of service time go into free agency as always.
3. For players with at least 2 years of major league service time but fewer than 5 years receive an arbitrated salary calculated as follows:

$200,000 + $700,000 * (Maximum WAR in any of the last 3 seasons)

For the maximum WAR calculation negative values are of course treated as zero as no player can have a salary below $200K.

[Huckleberry]

Any thoughts? While I think this may be a good solution, I also think we may need to phase it in. This would add an average of $16.3M in salary per team in the WBA for the 2108 season. It would also increase the overall average WBA payroll from $41.5M to $57.8M, keeping in mind that the target is around $50M.

At the same time, though, most of our teams are cash-heavy and additionally some of the free cash has caused a few exorbitant contracts during our first 8 seasons. So maybe it wouldn't be that bad in the long run. Anyway, I imagine the process to end up being something like this:

• First day of the offseason the arbitration salaries script page is copied to HTML format. Everyone then sees how much their arbitration eligible players would receive in salary for the next season.
• Each team posts any players they wish to release (which should be at no financial penalty to the team I believe but we will need to investigate this) instead of paying their arbitration salary. The deadline for this will be determined by OOTP's rules. It could be anywhere from the first offseason sim to the sim when free agents announce.
• Players released by teams then become free agents like normal. It's possible that you could release a player instead of paying his arbitration salary and then sign him for less than that amount during free agency, that would be the risk each owner would run. This is the part we would have to monitor as a league to see if we need to adjust the arbitration salary calculation.
• Players who are not announced as releases by their owner are then assigned the stated salary for the following season.

Just as a thought exercise, on my list of players I know I would release Dave Mendoza and would have to consider releasing Sancho Cervantes and maybe even former prospect Bambang Ananas.

[claphamsa]

i like the idea of being able to release guys if you dont like their arb award!

[Huckleberry]

i like the idea of being able to release guys if you dont like their arb award!

Yeah, I actually think that is kind of key for what we're trying to accomplish. One of our biggest issues the past two seasons has been a really shallow and boring free agency period in the offseason. The ability to relinquish your rights to a player if you don't like his arbitration salary will help populate the free agent pool. It will also make for some tough decisions for owners and allow rebuilding owners the leeway to shape their roster a bit more once arbitration starts.

Not to mention if you don't like their arbitration award you might be able to find someone who thinks it's more reasonable or who has the budget room to accommodate it, which should help spur more trade activity in the offseason. I hope we can make the arbitration decision deadline be the sim before free agency filings to give owners more time for that one.

[APMP]

I like the sign-and-trade possibilities this could bring up.

[Huckleberry]

My system's ABL predictions for next year. North American division needs to step up, yo. Two-time defending world champions predicted to miss the playoffs despite a strong squad.

NORTH AMERICAN DIVISION

Team W L PCT GB Mexico City Aztecs 82 74 0.526 - Los Angeles Stars 72 84 0.462 10 Washington Senators 71 85 0.455 11 Northwest Emeralds 67 89 0.429 15 New York City Empires 64 92 0.410 18 LATIN AMERICAN DIVISION Team W L PCT GB Buenos Aires Dolphins 97 59 0.622 - Sao Paulo Toucans 92 64 0.590 5 Rio de Janeiro Jaguars 89 67 0.571 8 Santo Domingo Palmchats 87 69 0.558 10 Puerto Rico Coqui 59 97 0.378 38

[Echo127]

How do your predictions deal with the fact that our rosters still have more than 25 players on them?

Also, I like the arbitration idea. We need to get an economist in here to tell us what the long-term effects will be, though :-)

[Huckleberry]

Number of players on the active roster right now doesn't matter, it's based on players in the organization. It doesn't take into account injuries at all, though.