New League Structure Discussion

[bschr682]

The 1-5 rating scheme turns the game somewhat toward stats only. Especially if overall ratings are turned off and relative ratings are turned on.

I dunno. I don’t see a chart or graph here proving this...

[RonCo]

In hopes of being helpful, I want to talk a little more about this:

Player demands:

The Brewster is a capped league and the game file settings for demands are much lower than what the engine is making the players ask for. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the very specific settings the Brewster has for financials, or if OOTP simply doesn't do this well. But I simply don't have an interest in a system where players routinely ask for 35% plus of the cap space in AAV. That's bonkers in my mind. This is the reason I left, and until it's fixed, I won't be back in the Brewster. I'm just going to assume OOTP can't work with the Brewster cap settings and try to come up with a different idea.

I'm pretty sure player demands are fairly simple to understand—at least today, anyway. IMHO, they are hinged almost totally on how good the player thinks he is, vs. how much a typical player of that quality is expected to be paid—a value that is set in the game settings ($14M in BBA for a superstar player). The question is: how are they developed and managed?

First, though, let me address why I say the system is driven totally off the settings in the financial screen.

To see this yourself, go to a test league that is in free agency, and fiddle with some settings.

• To test if players react to free cash, go to several teams and give them each a billion dollars (or something very high). Then go back to the FA page and check demands. They will not change. Set all those figures back to the original settings, then …
• To test if players react to excess budget, go to several teams and give them each considerably higher budgets. Again, go back to the FA page, and check demands. They again, will not change. Set all those budgets back to where they were, and then …
• To test the impact of greed, toggle off personality influence (or make a bunch of players really greedy or really not greedy), and go back to the FA screen. You may or may not see any change at all, but if you see any it will not be massive on the whole (think Carlos Garcia, he’s like one of the only BBA players I’ve seen with high greed that goes off-the charts on early FA demands). Regardless, it’s clear in doing this that greed is not a major institutional source of high or low demands. Set all these back to standard (or don’t, since this is a test file and it may not matter to you).
• Finally, go to the game settings and adjust the “typical” salary of the players as you will. Bump them way up or way down. Then go to the FA sheet again, and you’ll see dramatic changes.

Hence I say, player demands are almost totally dependent upon what you enter into your financial game setting page.

Perhaps there was a time when OOTP worked differently (when, to use one idea that I consider to be OOTP urban legend as an example, excess cash around the league influenced demands), but it seems clear to me that this is not the case right now.

X X X
Now, the obvious counter argument is: that can’t be right because the BBA is set such that a superstar’s typical salary is $14M, and our guys ask for $25-$30M! That’s ridiculous!

And I get that, at least from one angle.

There are people who take personal offense at this idea, and I think it’s clear you (Ted) are one of them. But (and this is me thinking rather than Matt or Markus saying what the logic here is…) I think the idea is that players see the “typical” salary as something toward a floor. And I think they start higher as a way to explore if there is extra cash around.

As we've discussed before, on the whole, it is my experience that better players will generally start their demands at roughly twice the “typical” salary of players at their perceived level (the exact number is probably random and maybe influenced by other factors). As the bidding process proceeds, they will drop their requests. I believe, but do not know, that they will drop them more rapidly if there’s been no action on their offers, and less rapidly if teams are showing interest.

On the whole, this means that while a star player in the BBA will possibly sign a $14M a season contract, market forces can, and do raise that up. In this case, and I’d assume as a normal case, we end up with our top 25 players averaging about $20M a year—or about half way between the “typical” and initial demand. This is an indicator of the market. I go back through this because ...

That said, this means us OOTP folks can adjust this behavior if we want to.

We could, for example, say we want players to ask only $20M on the top end, and drop the “typical” superstar salary to $10M. This will be less offensive to the Teds among us, and--if our current results wind up being representative--we’d see superstars signing for an average of about $15M per year. (halfway between $10M and $20M. That's Nirvana, right?

Of course, that also means we’d probably see considerably less sexy Free Agent classes, as most of use would be considerably more able to lock up our good talent, and technically it would mean top players were artificially settling for below market value (I say that because they are currently averaging about $20M without this constraint). There's no such thing as a free lunch, after all, so "fixing" demands results in at least those trade offs.

In addition, there’s arbitration, which I think is also hinged to these settings. (but of which I’m less sure). I make an assumption that arbitration numbers are shaved off the settings—so a typical superstar kid will get a semi-random percentage of $14M (in our case), and scaled down for different classifications of players.

You suggest you want to see top-end guys entering their second year of arbitration getting $8M or so. I note that Dong-po Thum’s current estimated values are $6.3M. $9.8M, and $10.6M. If we dropped the “typical superstar” salary from $14M to $10M in order to reduce top free agent demands, then my expectation is Thum’s arbitration estimates will also drop. Again, I’m not 100% certain of this, but I think it would be the case.

Other examples:

Don Smith (who has been up so early his performance has been weakish): $3.4M (super two), $3.8M, $5.5M, $7.5M … watch his numbers rise if he comes back strong next year.
Semei Kwakou: $7.5M, $10.6M, $10.8M
Dennis French: $10M, $10.6M, $10.8M

On the whole, I have a hard time seeing an issue with arbitration numbers being egregiously low for top end kids in the BBA.

I would guess that if we _raised_ the typical salaries of superstar players, then you’d see these numbers go up with some commensurate attachment. But then we might see some other problems ...

So, when are things screwed up?

This question is, admittedly, dependent on your point of view. If you just despise big asks, it’s screwed up the minute when players ask for twice the “typical” (I think this is a language thing, OOTP should call it something like “floor,” but what do I know?). Regardless of that, I think it’s also clear that something is hosed up when a lot of players don’t sign until after the season starts. A few is probably okay (like Gillstrom last season), but in reality, I’d like to see it be zero (like we had this year, really…though it was close). In other words, the BBA is borderline here. I could see us dropping the values a million or $500K off the top, but I’d not advocate too heavily for it.

Ultimately, if we _increased_ the settings, I'd expect more players to not sign before the season starts--and that's going the wrong way. Right this minute, BBA, for our salary cap, is almost exactly in the Goldilocks zone for my sensibility, though, as I noted, we might have some fun shaving the top end "typical" just a shade.

X X X
At the end of the day, at issue is, perhaps, that players do not appear to be particularly cognizant of the salary cap. They don’t care if they are asking 5% of cap or 25% of cap or 30% of cap. Nor are they apparently deeply aware of the fact that they could make more money by taking big bonuses that are easy to reach.

I’m personally fine with the first, and think it would be better for a cap league if they were more cognizant of the last—though that would be a huge change from MLB, and would greatly aid big revenue teams in the short term (though it would add big risk in the medium turn).

At the end of the day, it seems to me they are asking what the game tells them star players get, adjusted up to capture market forces that play to their advantage.

Regardless, if you’re setting up a league to drive salaries, I think it’s important to see the typical salary settings as the main tool at your disposal. I think it's also important to see the salary cap as your most powerful tool in ensuring a fairly consistent competitive environment. In my experience a fairly low cap is the most powerful of the tool set. Locking both national and local contracts is probably the second most powerful tool, and, in fact, I'd suggest if you don't have a cap, you almost have to lock media contracts or else the league will be almost certain to separate out into haves and have nots merely due to the structure of the league. Even then, I think you'll have strong likelihoods of having it happen.

Note the term "institutional" there. It's always possible that poorer and better GMs will separate themselves out, regardless of the structure you chose. Or it's possible that a major mistake can cost a franchise several years of set-back in any case.

So ... yeah ... probably more than you wanted, but since these elements are inherently deeply attached to your goals, I figured it was worth a spin.

[Ted]

Again, I do appreciate the feedback. I said I don't want to debate here. But people have questioned they "why" of certain parts of my idea, so I figure I should at least respond.

One theme I've heard is "this is a problem in MLB, too" - My response to this is, so what? It doesn't have to be. It's a problem in MLB because of the greed of owners. We don't have to have that. Just change the rules. We can make the rules whatever we want. There are lots of problems in pro sports that you could instantly get rid of without real life financial interests.

Two, I've misstated myself here a bit, but I have in the past made a better case of my disgust with OOTP's player demands. While I think they are too high in the Brewster, that's not really the issue. It's that they aren't uniformly high, and they drop by 50% or raise by 100% at times for no apparent reason with no real pattern. The biggest thing I did with California to stay on top the last ten seasons I had the team was check to see what my players wanted in extensions religiously each sim, then wait for the sim where they dropped their demands to 50% of the previous week's, then throw a lowball extension offer at them and see if it took. As long as I waited long enough, it would. This is why California never really participated in FA when I ran them. There is literally no scenario in which spending money in FA could compete with the lowball offers I could get accepted by simply waiting out my own players. I'd let you guys pay FA top dollar and have 2-3 players of similar caliber signed for the same total amount. (see 6 years of peak Luis Gracia for 12 mil AAV, or the army of 1.5-2.5 win position players I had on 3-4.5 mil 6 year deals)

This was actually the thing that I spent the most time on each sim. It stopped being fun. The entire game strategy became out waiting the rest of you on player extensions. I'm a patient and disciplined guy when it comes to that, so I continued to win.

So again, it's not really about the size of the demand. As long as they are consistent, you can adjust. But they aren't. You are at the mercy of the randomness of the game engine in deciding which players will start absurdly high, and which won't. Which ones budge before FA and which don't. Yes, players end up signing for less that their asking price in real life. But not by the amounts in the Brewster. Someone brought up Bryce Harper. The number was 400 million for ten years for like 3 seasons prior to his FA. Not 400 million one week, then 280 in june after he had a slow start, then 400 then next week, then 440 after that for no apparent reason, then 400 right before FA. Then 440 when FA started, then when he couldn't sign for months of FA, 300 million. The magnitude and arbitrary nature of the price swings in the Brewster are just too much. I suspect this is more of an OOTP thing than a Brewster thing, and i don't like it.

I'm proposing a financial system so different largely because I'm trying to mitigate what I perceive as badly written part of the game (player demand variability). I want higher salaries on average, higher starting salaries, and more arbitration years because I believe I can use that to drive the end arb salaries way up. I'm trying to chop off the low end of the player demand variability, and come up with an average team budget (with a narrow distribution) where the top players are paid more in the 22-25% of that budget range (which is where MLB is by the way). AND have extensions for years say 24-30 of players be withing spitting distance of that free agent value. In fact, if I can get it right, I'd like free agent prices to be LOWER than top player extensions. I'm not sure the game engine can handle this though.

[Ted]

And Ron, thanks for the breakdown of arb estimates in relation to the internal settings for superstar and star players. It's helping me frame where I want my settings. In comparison to the BBA settings, it looks like the correct approach to get waht I want is to actually raise the setting for less good players, along with raising mil salaries, then create the budgets to get those salaries in the percent of total budget I want them at.

Again, the idea would be to chop off the bottom end of the player demand variance if possible to hopefully make high end player demands more consistent.

[RonCo]

In all seriousness, consider one minsal season, and, like 10 years of arbitration... or something like that. With a house rule that says no extensions allowed. Then the only guys who go through the whole free agent process at all are scrubs no one likes or players who have to be released merely due to budget issues, and I'd guess players salaries still eventually reach levels you can control pretty closely within the system.

[RonCo]

I think I would hate it personally, But it sounds like something semi-close to what you are shooting for?

Include bumping up lower level players salaries in the settings?