Feeder Leagues question

[jayharvill]

What is the formula for how many teams you need in your feeder leagues to properly create a draft pool? (I tend to make my feeders too big)

My league is 48 teams, 3 levels of minors

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by jayharvill

What is the formula for how many teams you need in your feeder leagues to properly create a draft pool? (I tend to make my feeders too big)

My league is 48 teams, 3 levels of minors

I read somewhere that a feeder league of 16 teams would work for a 16 team major league, with a 6 round draft.

That is how I am running my first attempt at a feeder league. It is a high school, 15-18 year olds.

There are about ten 18 year olds per team, times 16 teams, or about 160 available players. Ten players, six drafted from each team.

If you consider the major league roster of 25 players, and their average years of service about 10, then you will only need about three new players per year, or half of what you drafted several years prior.

Dunno how this will work.

It would seem to me that the higher the number of feeder teams, the better quality of the average player drafted.

Instead of a dispersal of 5,6,7,8,9, you might get 7,7,8,8,9,9,

Better pitchers, better batters, mayhaps no real difference in the results?

[jayharvill]

thanks

anyone with any other opinions or experience with this? fixing to start a league

[dsvitak]

I just looked at my high school feeder league, with 32 teams.

I have two divisions of this league, each with 16 teams. This makes it easier to see and rank players.

There are exactly 1000 players on the 32 teams.

The ages are 15-18, so that would mean, on average, 250 players available to be drafted each year.

With a 32 team major league, this would be 7.8 players per team, per year.

I started with an inaugural draft of 45 players, with 20 on the reserve roster.

I THINK that there is sufficient talent to keep my major league team going.

Even allowing for just two players per year being major league talent, down the road, each major leaguer would need to have about a 12 year career.

Two major league players, 32 teams, = 64 of approximately 250, or just about 25% of available high school feeder players being of major league quality.

I am considering adding another six teams or so to the feeder teams, and taking the draft up to 8 or so....more players can't hurt, even if they tend to clog up the reserve roster.

[Wolfbane]

Originally Posted by dsvitak

I just looked at my high school feeder league, with 32 teams.

I have two divisions of this league, each with 16 teams. This makes it easier to see and rank players.

There are exactly 1000 players on the 32 teams.

The ages are 15-18, so that would mean, on average, 250 players available to be drafted each year.

With a 32 team major league, this would be 7.8 players per team, per year.

I started with an inaugural draft of 45 players, with 20 on the reserve roster.

I THINK that there is sufficient talent to keep my major league team going.

Even allowing for just two players per year being major league talent, down the road, each major leaguer would need to have about a 12 year career.

Two major league players, 32 teams, = 64 of approximately 250, or just about 25% of available high school feeder players being of major league quality.

I am considering adding another six teams or so to the feeder teams, and taking the draft up to 8 or so....more players can't hurt, even if they tend to clog up the reserve roster.

This is almost perfect formula. I should however note that there are two more variables you have to consider.

First, you have to consider player generation ages. Unless you set both the minimum and maximum age to the minimum age of players in the feeder, you will have older players generated. For example, a league with 250 players leaving in the first year means 250 new players generated. However, if there is 15-18 age generation bracket; 25% will be 15, 25% will be 16 etc. This means something like 62-63 18 years old will be generated. This will increase your draft pool significantly enough. For my leagues i set generation age min/max to 15 for HS and 18 for college. Doing this will keep it somewhat predictable number of draftable players, considering the second variable.

Second, each player has different birthdays. Some players with late birthdays, most notably past the draft date, will be excluded. For example, 2 15 years olds are created, one born on March 31, the other on December 11. If the draft is on June 30, the March 31 one will be drafted in his age 18 year old season, the December 11 one, will be drafted next year in his 19 year old season. This means there will be a post draft date birthday group and a pre-draft day group born in the previous year. Since birthdates are randomly assigned you will probably have bigger groups one year then other due to this split. This can be rectified somewhat by putting your draft date as January 1, but you will have an older draft pool as a whole. Also this does eliminates the utility of short season leagues yet you still will have slightly varying draft pools.

[battists]

There is information on that here:

OOTP Baseball Manual - Adding Minor Leagues

Scroll down to the section called "Feeding First-year player drafts Completely through Feeder Leagues"

And, for those of you who use feeder leagues more than I do, I'd always love to know if that doesn't work well!



Steve

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by Wolfbane

This is almost perfect formula. I should however note that there are two more variables you have to consider.

First, you have to consider player generation ages. Unless you set both the minimum and maximum age to the minimum age of players in the feeder, you will have older players generated. For example, a league with 250 players leaving in the first year means 250 new players generated. However, if there is 15-18 age generation bracket; 25% will be 15, 25% will be 16 etc. This means something like 62-63 18 years old will be generated. This will increase your draft pool significantly enough. For my leagues i set generation age min/max to 15 for HS and 18 for college. Doing this will keep it somewhat predictable number of draftable players, considering the second variable.

Second, each player has different birthdays. Some players with late birthdays, most notably past the draft date, will be excluded. For example, 2 15 years olds are created, one born on March 31, the other on December 11. If the draft is on June 30, the March 31 one will be drafted in his age 18 year old season, the December 11 one, will be drafted next year in his 19 year old season. This means there will be a post draft date birthday group and a pre-draft day group born in the previous year. Since birthdates are randomly assigned you will probably have bigger groups one year then other due to this split. This can be rectified somewhat by putting your draft date as January 1, but you will have an older draft pool as a whole. Also this does eliminates the utility of short season leagues yet you still will have slightly varying draft pools.

This is a completely valid point....I AM generating 15-18 year olds each year into my feeder league.

I draft 15 December, and have fun with the January upgrades.

I am still in the first year of my league...and I can see, now, the need to make a few adjustments.

I can see that I need to generate ALL 15 year olds, to replace the 18 year olds going off to battle the Major League wars.

Kinda like how the Russian's draft soldiers...in increments.