I have a proposal for a long term change to our rules. This would be something we'd look at for the third year down the line from whatever season we were in, to give teams time to adjust.

Simply put: there's not enough incentive in the TRHL to win games. It's a very good thing that the league has no *disincentives* (and that probably helps a lot to make the league so good). But outside the playoff spots, there's no incentive for teams to win games, especially at the ends of the season.

So my proposal is for each team's maximum salary budget for each season to change from $400 per season, to either $360 plus one-half of their win total from the previous season, or $320 plus their win total from the previous season. New owners would be rated at 80 wins or something like that.

Purely a point for idle discussion, and not a formal rules proposal yet. Should we be trying to encourage more in-season competitiveness? (Especially given the small number of playoff teams). The current model, where there is no cost to fielding a silly team of rejects and losing a ton of games, is unrealistic.

I like the spirit of it, but, I think playoff teams should be ineligible for any bonus. You got your bonus by making the playoffs.

The best system would give the near-miss contenders an advantage for next season over the playoff teams, to encourage turnover at the top.

Let's say the best non-playoff teams win ~85 games. Let's set their budget = $330 + win total, so they're at $415. The worst teams will be at ~55 wins, so they'd get $385. Set the playoff teams at $400.

We may have to tweak the numbers a little to keep total salary the same, but I think that's reasonable.

I think the Astros (and maybe Phillies these days) would take issue with Craig's assertion that a team of silly rejects is unrealistic...

Semi-random thoughts:

I don't think encouraging turnover at the top in and of itself is a good goal.

I think a system that reduces the salary cap for the poorest performing teams relative to the best is going to make competitive balance worse and lead to a feedback loop. If competitive balance is the goal, you will probably need to handicap the best teams rather than reward performance. Not that I think that's a particularly good idea, either.

Winning is it's own reward, what I think we actually need is a way to encourage people to stay involved when winning in the immediate term isn't realistic and/or possibly some ways to make rebuilding somewhat easier. To be honest, though, I'm not sure how far we should go on that front, or how effective any potential solutions would be. IMO, their are structural issues involved that aren't going to be able to be easily addressed.

Bill,

Encouraging turnover at the top is THE way to encourage people to stay involved.

In Roto keeper leagues, where the top teams have to trade all their good keepers during dumping season, no team is ever more than one year away from competitiveness. This is important when you play for money, because owners will drop out if they face years of suckitude.

If you want players with bad teams to stay involved, you need to give them the prospect of being good NEXT year. No one is going to fiercely dedicate themselves to a 4 year rebuild.

I favor penalizing the playoff teams. The easiest way would be to enable "dump trades", so the bottom feeders can get good keepers by trading mid-season. Our salary rules make it very hard right now.

We have a financial system in place that applies a large amount of pressure to turnover rosters as it is. There are 3 players on my current roster who were there at the end of the 2012 auction, Venable, Hudson, and Ross. Both Hudson and Ross have been released and re-acquired since then (Ross more than once), so they don't actually count since I had to compete openly to re-sign both.

I don't have the salary info at hand or the record of the team I inherited, but they were 10th in the NL in OPS and 3rd in OPS allowed, so somewhere around average overall (though as I recall one of the stud pitchers, Ricky Romero, was overpriced and almost immediately dealt). It's not that difficult to rebuild quickly in this league as it is, and we don't need drastic changes to make it easier.

An analysis of the auction, trade and free agent markets makes it pretty clear that there are substantially different strategies being implemented by different owners when it comes to valuing players and building teams. That's a much larger factor in any competitive imbalance, along with real-life health and decline forecasting ability, than any systemic issue in the way our current system is setup.

Given that, expanding the post-season is a much easier fix to keeping owners engaged than attempts to modify the existing economic environment.

I agree with Bill, though I don't have an objection to the idea of financial incentives either, depending on the specifics of the proposal.

But I don't think it's difficult to rebuild in principle. Obviously not every team will be successful, wins remain zero sum, but at the same time every team is only one year away. That's clear from what actually happens. BDM was an abandoned team with no talent and now they are a top team. Cole Harbour was in first place, then in last place, and is looking great for next year. This league has no problem with turnover at the top in my opinion.

Our team is a bit of an outlier. Eric and I have both been playing fantasy baseball for 20+ years, and we also got really lucky on our speculative picks (Machado, Simmonds, Gomes, Corbin).

Not to mention we're still 15 games out of first ;-)

I think we want to give less experienced/less committed owners a punchers chance. Not that skill and effort shouldn't be rewarded, but we want a substantial luck element too.

The NFL has shown how randomness increases interest.