Friday, April 11, 2008

Future Salaries

Eugene writes:
I've never been in a league where FAAB players who are bid under $5 don't have their prices adjust immediately to $5 or to $5 or $10 after the season. To allow FAAB prices to be keeper prices the next year is a terrible rule and promotes waiving near entire rosters by teams at the bottom, seriously impacting the race for the money. My leagues also have strict rules about September as well. Any player FAABed in September are on option year contracts. So, if you want to pick guys up for $5 for next year, take 'em in August, otherwise moves are only made to improve this year, not next, helping to preserve the money race.
I've always agreed with the notion that the best rules are the ones your league feels comfortable with. So if you want $1 free agents to be $1 players next year, by all means go for it.

Personally, though, I do agree with Eugene that allowing a team to take a flier on a bunch of $1 players at the end of the season is potentially damaging to the league. Beyond this, I also don't like the idea of rewarding the teams at the bottom of the standings too much. Granted, usually there's some bad luck involved for the teams all the way at the bottom. On the other hand, there are also at least a few poor decisions that lead to being in the lousy position of finishing at or near the bottom. Gifting these teams with a bunch of $1 players is probably doing too much for them.

There does have to be a balance between allowing a team to grab a few futures for next year versus allowing them too many of these fliers. You do want to keep teams interested to a point. Setting the bar too high isn't a good way to keep a team wanting to come back the next year.

A compromise position might be allowing a slightly lower free agent salary but offsetting that by reducing the maximum number of freezes per team. That way, non-contenders would still make some moves at the end but they wouldn't do what Eugene suggested and make 10-15 moves in the last few weeks in order to try and grab futures.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One thing I did not mention is my AL league only allows one player to be waived per week. In order to use FAAB, you need to waive an active player.

This keeps teams from adding players willy nilly.

Dr. Hibbert said...

we're talking about this in my league, still looking for input. so is it "common" to have FAABed players salaries adjusted after they are picked up? For example, will a player FAABed for $1 go to $10 for next year? What about sept. callups--any difference? Right now we are using their FAAB bid as their salary for next year.