One final tweak to league rules before the start of the season.
It’s a new year, and with it come the signs of a new fantasy season–mock drafts, draft crib sheets, and the first, probing questions from fellow managers about who you might be valuing this year. In our young league, we have the stat categories tweaked for the second season, new keeper rules in place, and new managers to replace the few that dropped out after last year. Almost all is ready for our live draft, and from the start of the new season on, I will be reporting on the experiences of our second season. First, though, I want to mention one last change to the league rules for this year.
If you play fantasy baseball through an online provider, like we do in our league, you may have had to go through the playoffs with a consolation round. (In our twelve-team league, the top six teams compete for the championship, and the bottom six compete for… seventh place.) So you may have the common experience that the consolation round feels like cold comfort–what’s the point of playing for a standing that’s out of the money?
Most of our managers came to the same conclusion last year, and more or less lost all interest in the game weeks before the teams in the championship round finished. What interest remained for them amounted to little more than swooping on any possible free agent keepers for the next season that the top teams shed in their frantic adding and dropping in the championship matches. In the interest of keeping all managers actually managing through the last day of the year, I thought we might try an experiment this next year: the winner of the consolation bracket is awarded a sandwich draft pick between the first and second rounds of next year’s draft.
Why bother? If you read a few of my previous posts about our young league, you may have picked up on a common concern–trying to achieve some sort of competitive balance in the league. And since our league is not an auction league, and we are instituting keepers this season, there is a possibility that the top teams are going to hold on to the top talent, year after year, at no extra cost to them. One way to counteract this imbalance is to limit the keepers (we’re putting three-year contracts on our keepers this year), which can help lighten the scales on the side of the top teams. Another way is to find something that weights the scales on the side of the lower teams. Something like the sandwich pick.
This way, players who don’t quite make the championship playoffs still have a prize to play for. What’s more, the prize they’re playing for has a good chance of also helping improve their team and standing in the next year. But what do you think? Is this meddling too much? Should we just leave the consolation round be? I hope you’ll share your thoughts below.
4 responses so far ↓
1 BrockforBroglio // Jan 19, 2008 at 11:22 am
There’s so much untapped potential in regards to league structure. I like anything different. I think there’s a balance between getting too creative and keeping it simple enough so that strategy and skills dictate the outcome and not plain luck.
Great read, I look forward to more entries.
2 FMC // Jan 21, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I love the sandwich pick idea, but as for competitive balance…
Why not just make keeper contracts inflationary? I’m sure your online provider has some type of player ranking system. Tie contract value increases to the rankings, so that the top players (say, 1-20) have large increases in keeper prices, thereby making the most expensive players nearly impossible to keep more than 2-3 years.
3 Andrew C. // Jan 21, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Thanks for the kind words, BfB, and I agree that simplicity is a virtue in the midst of all this tinkering. At the end of this year we should have a good idea of what worked and what didn’t, and can start fiddling even more for the year after.
fmc, inflationary contracts sound like a great idea, and could be good for our league in the next couple of years. For now we do straight drafts and not contracts or auctions, so salaries are moot for our system. But I do think it would be good to switch to an auction/salary system in the future, when our inexperienced managers have a little more practice with the way fantasy sports work.
4 F Diddy // Jan 22, 2008 at 3:49 am
My league simply reverses the draft order for the teams in the consolation bracket. Thus, the consolation winner takes the #1 overall pick, consolation runner-up drafts #2, and so on.
This does somewhat hurt the weakest teams with respect to the stronger non-playoff teams, but the inherent weekly volatility of the playoffs mostly offsets that; the consolation bracket rarely goes to seed.
Leave a Comment