The Brewster

Sorry to see you go Ted. You've become such an integral part of our league. You'll be missed.

This is a blow for the league and for me personally. I get, though. Even I took a break once.

Sorry to see you go Ted. Best of luck to you. Feel free to come back and harass us once in a while!

Ted wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 21, 2019 1:18 pm

niles08 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 21, 2019 1:09 pm

I'm sorry to see you go. I personally love this league and never ever want to leave but I will say that if player demands continuously rise then so should the salary cap. That's why I mentioned the salary cap issues a few months ago but was shot down quickly.

I've thought about this more. That could be a solution. The problem is we have no idea if it would work. Would player demands just go up more? Are player demands related to available money? Who knows? OOTP sure as heck wont' tell us how anything works.

I'm not saying demands wouldn't go up if it was related to available money, however something that would fix it would be removing the cap as I suggested and instituting a luxury tax just as major league baseball does for teams over a certain final payroll total for the season. That would keep big teams from theoretically spending crazy amounts along with the fact owners would obviously have a say as well based on how much money you had. The game would basically play the same way it does in a single player game which seems to work fine as player contracts aren't absolutely insane especially if inflation is at 0%.

I guess maybe I am not fully seeing the issue. Utopia would be that guys ask for about what they would receive in FA. Maybe a little more/less depending on greed or loyalty (or intelligence!)

It would be bad if guys like Wareham were sitting in FA and nobody could sign them because a) they were all at the cap or b) Wareham was demanding 30M/year and nobody could (or would want to) pay him that. Supply and demand should be at play here. I dont see this happening

It would also be bad if players were signing low ball contracts for 10 years. This was an issue, but has largely been fixed.

It would also be bad if you could never resign your own FA's because they demanded ridiculous amounts of money they could never get in FA. I havent seen this as a widespread problem.

All in all, the model isnt perfect, but i dont think its terrible either. Maybe its just me, and i dont want to get into an argument over it.

Ugh, so sad to see you leave dude. I've really enjoyed your perspective. I hope you come back.

JimBob2232 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 21, 2019 6:10 pm

I guess maybe I am not fully seeing the issue. Utopia would be that guys ask for about what they would receive in FA. Maybe a little more/less depending on greed or loyalty (or intelligence!)

It would be bad if guys like Wareham were sitting in FA and nobody could sign them because a) they were all at the cap or b) Wareham was demanding 30M/year and nobody could (or would want to) pay him that. Supply and demand should be at play here. I dont see this happening

It would also be bad if players were signing low ball contracts for 10 years. This was an issue, but has largely been fixed.

It would also be bad if you could never resign your own FA's because they demanded ridiculous amounts of money they could never get in FA. I havent seen this as a widespread problem.

All in all, the model isnt perfect, but i dont think its terrible either. Maybe its just me, and i dont want to get into an argument over it.

I agree completely that they are asking what they may get in free agency. I dont think that's a huge issue. I do think it becomes an issue when a team cant resign someone regardless of revenue because it would put them over the cap.

No arguing here however.

That's kind of precisely what a cap is for. If everyone could always keep all their players, why have a cap at all?

crobillard wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 21, 2019 9:20 pm

Ugh, so sad to see you leave dude. I've really enjoyed your perspective. I hope you come back.

+1

bschr682 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 21, 2019 9:36 pm

That's kind of precisely what a cap is for. If everyone could always keep all their players, why have a cap at all?

This sentiment and those like it completely misunderstand me. I don't know why people insist on changing my narrative to one where I'm asking for the game to be 100% opposite from what it is. I'm asking for a functional middle ground.

I'm not asking to always keep all my players. If you payed attention to what I do, you'd see that I trade many players as they end arb because they are too expensive to keep. I am continually moving players to make sure I can keep the ones I'd like to. I hardly ever sign any free agents to keep cap room to keep other players. I'm not asking to keep "always keep all my players". I'm asking to be able to keep two players after 2039, who aren't even top 20 players in the league, when I have exactly four contracts over 5 million on the books for 2040. Again, my top for earners for 2040 were going to make a combined 37 mil, and I didn't have enough cap room to sign two non top 20 players, because their demands were so ridiculous.

Meanwhile, other teams had their pending FA's lower their demands by 40% or more. And some others didn't. And some FA's lowered their demands. And others didn't. And some teams get wiped out by injury, and others don't.

And now I find out that the settings for expected salaries do approximately nothing, so this appears to be something we can't even control. And no one knows what drives player demands or how they function, so we can't do anything about it anyway.

Choose to see this as whining about "wanting to keep all my players" if you like. You're missing the point entirely. My frustration and fatigue with the game is how the increasingly strict and more random mechanisms with players demands, injuries, and the like have made succeeding in this game more about beating a random number generator than executing a successful strategy.

Having to make a post like this one is another reason I'm leaving. I'm sick to death saying how I think certain aspects are limiting fair competition and enjoyment of competition, only to have my arguments misrepresented exactly as in this comment in just about every instance. Then there's a 20 post debate about something that was never the point of what I was trying to say.

Of course if you can keep all your players there's no point to a cap. But there is also a point where things skew so far the other way that the system is too restrictive. By arguing that I think it has gotten there, I am NOT saying you should be able "to keep all your own players".

When I complained about how frustrating it was to have so many minor league pitchers getting injured, that debate got derailed into "Injuries are fun. You can't have no injuries" and other extremist views. I was simply questioning whether the randomness of and increased injury model, realistic" or otherwise is better or worse for fair competition. I was open to debate that I was wrong. But instead, the debate because about "realism" or "Whether injuries were more fun or not".

Similarly, when I talk about the draft being way too deep, and number of people miscast my argument as wanting to back to the dead drafts where there was nothing by the second round. It's not all or nothing folks.

Anyway, I'm too frustrated with recent versions of OOTP to not talk about these things if I continue to play, and too frustrated with these kinds of reactions to continue wanting to have these debates.

Again, I know everyone means well. Text in a forum is a difficult way to communicate, and it is easy to misunderstand another person. I would suggest that if it seems someone is proposing an extreme nonsensical view, you consider that you might be misinterpreting them and ask if they are proposing said nonsense. And everyone else? Maybe you guys can wait for a response before joining in and burning down the strawman you have created.

Anyway, this will be my last time in these forums for some time. I've been checking in throughout they day and have appreciated the many warm thoughts I have gotten. Thank you all.

Ted hate to see you go, I have valued your posts and views over the years. Looking forward to the day you would return. Also thanks for the the time you have spent on the GB.

I'm not saying you should be able to keep all your players but California is an interesting case because he hardly dabbles in free agency and trades arb players away yet still could barely sign these 2 guys to extensions and be under the cap. The average Salary have risen since 2030 which is a bit concerning as the cap has not is my main point.

I'm also not saying all players should be able to be kept but if you have the money I think you should be able to resign then. It's one thing to not have the cash, than to have the cap.

How many 26-27 year old free agents do you see actually hit the market in the MLB? Harper and Machado are exceptions I think. You dont see many others.

Ted, seriously you know better than to think I’m piling on to you. Someone said it was a problem if people have the revenue but can’t resign who they want. That sounds anti-cap. I merely just said that’s what the cap is for.

As for the topic at hand, this seems so laughably simple to figure out that it boggles my mind a bit. We have people in this league that can reach out and get an expert answer. The question is simple. Does the game push the salaries up over time regardless of settings to simulate inflation? If yes, we simply have to bump cap and revenue at certain intervals. If no, then something is truly wrong.

New versions require financial examination every time we upgrade. And I do so. If there's a huge problem, it always gets addressed in some way. You can't please 100% of people 100% of the time, unfortunately, but given that we have a thriving and growing league and the vast majority are happy with the way it is run, I think we're doing ok.

recte44 wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:42 am

New versions require financial examination every time we upgrade. And I do so. If there's a huge problem, it always gets addressed in some way. You can't please 100% of people 100% of the time, unfortunately, but given that we have a thriving and growing league and the vast majority are happy with the way it is run, I think we're doing ok.

I dont want to speak for ted, but in this case I dont think his major problem is with how the league is run. I think his main issue (and it is not an unfair one in my view) is that OOTP is doing a poor job of explaining how things work behind the game and how the financial algorithms work.

I feel like it’s always been like that. I’m just used to it.

I think the longevity of the league, and not just longevity but thriving longevity, is a key indicator that something is very right with the league. The innovation with extra leagues like the EBA & UMEBA, the number of ex-GM's that continually come back after time away as well as the amount of top quality written history & analysis that is produced every year.

I don't believe you know what we have here until you leave , then when you compare the BBA to other available leagues . . . . I know it can't be 100% realistic, it can't model human thought or actions accurately sometimes, but it does it well enough for a simple soul like me. I have no real desire to know how the financial algorithms or anything else behind the scenes work. It's part of the fun that I don't know what the heck I'm doing, any inner knowledge would feel like gaming the system, using insider trading

bschr682 wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:29 am

As for the topic at hand, this seems so laughably simple to figure out that it boggles my mind a bit. We have people in this league that can reach out and get an expert answer. The question is simple. Does the game push the salaries up over time regardless of settings to simulate inflation? If yes, we simply have to bump cap and revenue at certain intervals. If no, then something is truly wrong.

The game has an inflation feature, but we don't use it.

We're looking at the issue more closely, but at present I think the behavior is purely about the fact that the game effectively uses player demands to drive them to free agency, and (among other things) has been amping these requests to do so. If they lower demands, few players go to FA...like we had in the first 5-10 seasons I was in the BBA (when everyone complained that the FA cycle was dry and useless). Now we are getting real players going the free agent route, which lets the market set values rather than the players. Given that players are getting bigger contracts than they used to suggests the the BBA's cost structure in the old days was deflated--that stars were getting paid considerably less than they would have if they'd have gone to the open market.

usnspecialist wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:59 am

I think his main issue (and it is not an unfair one in my view) is that OOTP is doing a poor job of explaining how things work behind the game and how the financial algorithms work.

OOTP will very rarely explain exactly how the game works--which is not unusual for a game company.

First, these things are proprietary, and there is competition. Second, a detailed explanation is often hard to do and they are a small company (the user guide was originally a project of volunteer beta people who wanted to help). Third, Markus and crew have always wanted to leave that infamous "fog of war" in which people can get surprising results. This always frustrates people like me and Ted (and many hardcore online league players) because we like the core surprise of randomness all by itself, and don't need that blanket to be happy. But Markus and crew are probably right about their bigger audience. That audience actually likes that they don't understand everything.

So, shrug. I dunno what's right here. Ted's view isn't unfair, but it's perhaps unrealistic to expect OOTP to do anything else when they are understaffed and already pre-disposed to not want to give away their IP.

And the system seems to kind of work. On the whole, if you play in an MLB league, my understanding is that the financial algorithms do pretty well. I suggest they work pretty well right now for us, too, in that they are finally sending star players into Free Agency. But one can disagree with my view there (my view that this is good). In Ted's case, his two pitchers will go to Free Agency unless Ted grossly overpays them--and Ted has only $40M left to spend. Same thing happened to me with my four guys two years ago. To me, this is the right dynamic (though, yes, our salary structure is certainly not the MLB's)...Ramos and Gracia will likely go to Free Agency, and will likely get their money. If they don't Ted can buy them back in the open market. We can argue whether the numbers are insane or absurd, but the result is very baseball.

Ted's angst here is that Gracia and Ramos are not top 20 players, or whatever, and are asking for more than $20M. Which can be a fair argument. But Ramos is 27 and a Nebraska award winner, and Gracia (33) just went 21-7 and led the Brewster in ERA. Is there anything unusual about the idea that they would both want to go to the open market to find out what they are worth? That's what this algorithm is saying to the GM: "blow me away, or you can fight for me on the open market."