expansion drafts

[tommybaseball]

I want to expand the league, but I have noticed that each team chooses not to protect some of their best players, for example Derek Jeter and Jon Lieber, who won 20 games the year before my expansion draft. Is there a way to change this?

[SteveP]

Originally Posted by tommybaseball

I want to expand the league, but I have noticed that each team chooses not to protect some of their best players, for example Derek Jeter and Jon Lieber, who won 20 games the year before my expansion draft. Is there a way to change this?

That can be a somewhat hard question to answer, because there may be factors specific to your league at work. Some of these possible factors include:

1. Finances: does the team need to shed salaries? One of the problems in OOTP is that teams don't necessarily have the financial resources that their real life counterparts do. This is fixable, but something to look at.

2. Vets vs prospects: Does it look like a team is favoring younger players? Or other tendencies (offense vs defense? hitting vs pitching?) There are settings which cause this to happen.

3. The AI doesn't regard these players as the "best" in the same way you do. Figuring out why that is can be tricky, and these forums are full of threads from people debating how the AI values players. A favorite subject is the AI Player Evaluation settings, which many OOTPers think is the key to getting proper AI behavior in this regard. I'm a skeptic, but it's definitely something to consider. As a general observation on this point, it's important to remember that the AI doesn't know who Derek Jeter and Jon Lieber are: they're just data to be interpreted. So you have to make some intelligent guesses on how the AI might be interpreting that data.

Hope that gives you a starting point.

[rutri01]

When is the best time to expand or does it matter?Can I add teams any time in the off season?

[SteveP]

Originally Posted by rutri01

When is the best time to expand or does it matter?

Don't know for sure, but I assume the reason it was done very early in the off-season IRL was to get it out the way so teams had time to deal with the consequences.

Can I add teams any time in the off season?

Apparently.

[LeeDorm8185]

I don't know what year you're looking at for expansion, but if an expansion draft were held today (2009 offseason), who knows, the Yankees might very well leave Derek Jeter unprotected. Why? Because of his $20MM contract and the fact that the contract will soon be coming up for renewal at numbers that only the Yankees can afford to pay. An expansion team would have to balance having a market draw like Jeter against paying that much to one person when they have so many other needs and holes to fill. The Yankees would have to balance the risk of losing Jeter against protecting one of their younger, less expensive talents. Jeter might also decide to sit out rather than play for an expansion team (not likely, but it could happen). Or the Yankees might be willing to compensate the expansion team with an extra player as reward for picking some other Yankee besides Jeter in the expansion draft.

Bottom line, it's not as unlikely as you might think.

[rutri01]

My league is ficticious and we started with 14 teams in 2009. For the 2010 we are going to expand 2-6 teams depending on interest. right now we got 2. We are currenly in the playoffs and I begun to do some testing.

So my initial testing, I found that if I add them before the amateur draft. They are included in the amateur draft but the expansion teams are placed in the top draft slots. That is fine but I would like to not have them in the amateur draft this year. So I am thinking I will add them after the ammy draft. Our ammy draft is in Nov each season.

We are not going to do an expansion draft but rather have the teams added with random palyers or create free agents and do a draft on the side depending on how many teams we add.

Anyway- what I have noticed ny adding them right after the playoff and before the ammy draft (Nov) was they have 2009 in their history but no record. I wanted their history to start in 2010 and not show 2009. It's not a big deal but I was wondering if this was because I added them too early. And if I add a team in 2015- will the history show 2009 on with no records in 2009-2014?

[tommybaseball]

Originally Posted by LeeDorm8185

I don't know what year you're looking at for expansion, but if an expansion draft were held today (2009 offseason), who knows, the Yankees might very well leave Derek Jeter unprotected. Why? Because of his $20MM contract and the fact that the contract will soon be coming up for renewal at numbers that only the Yankees can afford to pay. An expansion team would have to balance having a market draw like Jeter against paying that much to one person when they have so many other needs and holes to fill. The Yankees would have to balance the risk of losing Jeter against protecting one of their younger, less expensive talents. Jeter might also decide to sit out rather than play for an expansion team (not likely, but it could happen). Or the Yankees might be willing to compensate the expansion team with an extra player as reward for picking some other Yankee besides Jeter in the expansion draft.

Bottom line, it's not as unlikely as you might think.

It was actually in 2002, when Jeter was still a young star (as opposed to an old star, which he currently is).

[LeeDorm8185]

^ Much easier call then.