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Ultra Baseball Expands There will be 10 teams in this year's Ultra baseball league. Here is the explanation of why we are expanding the league from eight teams this season. The main issue is the composition of our rosters. We have always had a mixed league (AL and NL players), but many fantasy leagues only use one circuit or the other as a pool for drafting players. This type of reduced player pool is even more crucial to creating an accurate and competitive DMB league. Yet there are two reasons why we don't try NL-only, for example. First, owners with predominantly AL players would protest, unless we "grandfathered" their eligibility (thereby defeating the purpose of a single-circuit league.) We could choose selected teams from each circuit for drafting players, and even exempt one player from each of the other teams, but that's getting far too complicated. Second, a smaller player pool might make rebuilding a bad team much more difficult and longer to achieve, so owners who aren't at the top would claim that the Commissioner is being unfair to them (and I admit, that situation might not be fair.) One solution that answers both of the questions in the previous paragraph is the old salary cap. Then there would be no problem with our existing rosters, or excluding somebody's favorite players in the AL. It also would help the bottom teams rather than hurt them, because the cap would force top teams to take lesser players, leaving better players for rebuilding teams with more money. Unfortunately, the salary cap penalizes the upper level teams, and that is where our current owners mostly are. There are other problems with it as well. Some of you might remember when we had a salary cap in the beginning days of Late Night fantasy baseball. The draft took a lot longer, and every transaction was a nightmare to check. We solved the latter problem by making teams only have to meet the cap on draft day. But we got rid of the salary cap later anyway, because salaries got to be so high, the cap didn't work in an eight-team league. There are numerous guides to suggested player values, as many rotisserie leagues start each season with an auction instead of a draft. We could take one of those guides, such as Fantasy Baseball, and make it the official source for all player salaries. Then we would be dealing with $1 to $50 per player instead of Ken Griffey Jr.'s actual (?) $13 million figure. In this way, salaries would be (arbitrarily) based on performance. But we would have to set a fair salary cap, based on those dollar values. This would require taking into account our 30-man rosters (instead of roto's smaller rosters), and our eight-team mixed league (as opposed to a 12-team NL-only roto league.) After studying those crucial differences and applying values to actual Greenbears rosters, the Commissioner has concluded that accurately fixing a fair salary cap number in our situation would be nearly impossible. This is not the best way to solve the problem. If a salary cap won't work, we must consider expansion. Two years ago we had 10 teams in baseball. The Commissioner has generally been against expansion. More teams means that each team has less chance to win. But that assumes that you are adding competitive teams with competitive owners, and that's not actually necessary. We have always kept an even number of teams in all sports so that we could play head-to-head games, and sometimes that has meant having a "dummy" team. We can extend that concept to solve our baseball problem, by adding teams simply as a way of taking players out of the pool on draft day. (It's the same reason why we always had a minimum of eight baseball teams, even when we had as few as four owners one season.) With eight teams, our starters are in the top 25% of the MLB player pool, and our reserves in the top 50%. If we add two teams (making 10 total), that means our starters are in the top 33% of the MLB player pool, and our reserves in the top 66%. If we add four teams (making 12 total), that means our starters are in the top 40% of the MLB player pool, and our reserves in the top 80%. That last 80% figure means that only 1 in 5 major leaguers would not be on a roster, which might be a little low for us (although it would be close to what NL-only roto leagues do.) Nobody gets excited about drafting scrubs, and think about how long draft day would be. The advantage of 12 teams is that the 4 extra teams could be split into their own division for scheduling purposes. Using 10 teams means incorporating the new teams into the league schedule. But chances are good that we could reduce the number of games against those teams somehow. So let's make this a 10-team league for 2000. Another expansion issue would be how two new teams would fit into the league. First, since these are "dummy" teams, there won't be any expansion draft for them. They won't be assigned any available free agents, either -- those are all going into the draft. Second, they will draft in each round with the regular teams, but in the ninth and tenth draft spots. They will follow the same draft guidelines as any unowned team. Third, the players they draft will only receive one-year contracts, so if they draft your favorite superstar, he won't be locked up on that team forever. After all, these two teams aren't being built to be competitive, and they won't be given to anyone, unless we place all the other teams.
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