From: kbos@carina.unm.edu (Kurt "Some Guy" Bose)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball.fantasy
Subject: Ridding Yourself of the Reserve Clause...
Date: 23 Nov 92 18:58:45 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Okay...I've been neglecting to think about this, and need some answers or 
sugestions, so I'd better get this out of the way...

After receiving the PTP team from Hell (tm), I looked at the methods by which
the team in this league could improve.  Here's what I found:

1)  Each team could protect their whole roster from year to year.  No salaries,
and no "contract" provisions.

2) The free agent draft each year basically allows players who have their first
at bat in a given year to be drafted.  All players usually are.  There is no
appreciable free-agency pool that I can see (a derivation from the unlimited 
reserve clause and lack of contract simulation).

3) Every team is _required_ to field a team with 162 starts from pitchers 
on it.  Players are only allowed to bat as many times as they did in real life,
with a tolerance of five percent.  Forfeiture of draft picks and games is
the penalty for this.

4) No upper limit for player at-bats is enforced.  If players on your roster 
bat 9000 times, and have 300 starts, great.

5) The effect of these rules is this:  There is no free agency.  The draft is
unlikely to yield more than a handful of players with appreciable playing time.
Thus, for a team with a desperate need for at-bats (such as my NL team, which
has one player with more than 350 at bats), trades are the only way to garner
the necessary at bats.

6) There are a couple of owners who are sitting, between them, on close to 
4700 at bats at third base.  One owner has publicly stated that the going 
price for Steve Buechele is a 600 at bat OF, a closer, an ace starter, and
either a high #1 draft pick or a low #1 and a #2.  The other owner has similar
demands, but at least he's offering Matt Williams and Terry Pendleton.

A similar situation exists in the AL, where Frank Thomas may very well be
traded for Pat Listach, straight up.

Now, is anyone in agreement with me that this is a Very Bad Thing?

***************************

I'm trying to put an offer on the table to try to work out some rules to solve
this problem.  Among the solutions I've presented...

A)  Contract rules, and simulated salaries, with a salary cap.
-Difficult to implement after the fact, and a hassle for whoever tries to
 attach salaries.  I, along with many in the league, are passionately against
 the "auction" method of drafting.

B)  Impose rules that mandate playing time upon owners.  Each player must play
    between 60%-125% of their real-life playing time, or be released.
-The "haves" claim that this penalizes them, by keeping them from keeping
 players they've drafted.  If one person drafts, say, Dave Hollins, Terry
 Pendleton, and Matt Williams, then why should they have to drop one or two
 of them just because they turned out to be good players?  If those players
 carry a certain market price, why shouldn't they be able to trade them for
 fair market value, determined by demand?  If a team has three third baseman,
 and has to drop a couple of them, what happens if the third player goes
 down?  

C)  Mandate a ceiling on the amount of playing time a team can stock.  I 
    would suggest a ceiling of 7500 plate appearances, and 200 starts.  This
    allows every team to lose one starter and one position player for the
    entire year, and still comfortably cover themselves.
-Again, people have complained that their team is being penalized for having
 good players on it.

D)  Add the concept of a "replacement level" player, to simulate the scrubs
    that come out of the minors, but aren't good enough to have a career.
    Create a player with rotten numbers (say .170/.210/.260, with fair defense.)
    Let teams play them when they run out of at-bats.
-Teams will dump players, and stock draft picks, playing the replacements and
 swallowing the losses.

e)  Redraft, with the addition of a lower limit on the reserve clause.
-NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Well, what do you think?

(BTW:  I wish to say that I advocate adding two players as per (D) per team, and
 either adding the 7500/200 ceilings or lowering the year-to-year protection to
 22 players.)


-- 
Kurt Bose (as in Daisy, not Rose) * kbos@carina.unm.edu * Make outs, not walks!
TONIGHT-In "Ryecatcher", Holden Caulfield foils a plot to turn his old prep
school into a right-wing military acadamy run by Neo-Nazis. 8PM(7PM C/M) Ch. 7
                                                        -The Book of Sequels...