MLSB Commissioner Wishlist

[BretRock]

Here are a handful of things I'd like to see in future releases (and pardon me for repeating some of them):

1. The addition of player agents. In my league we are trying to find rules to govern contracts because young players too readily accept long-term deals without any real significant dollars behind them. It's not uncommon for a guy that would be worth $15-$20 million a year in real life to accept a long-term deal for between $5 and $10 million a year.

I did an analysis of our league last year and we are averaging about $2 million per WAR whereas in real life, that figure is closer to $5-$6 million.

Because younger players are accepting lower salaries, hardly anyone gets to free agency and those that do wind up with astronomically high salaries.

It also makes team payrolls a bit of a moot point because you can ink your young guys for next to nothing. In our most recent season, our teams used only 65 percent of the total available budget room.

We've done some things as work-arounds and I think we are in a pretty good place, but if the game could incorporate player agents correctly, I think that could be a night-and-day difference.

The way I would envision it is having agents that have different personality ratings (much like the players do) and maybe even having past dealings with an agent's clients factor in. There are a lot of ways to go with this and I think it would be a huge step in the right direction.

2. The ability to tweak not just the rate of injuries, but the severity of those injuries. I saw this on another post (and I'm sure there are others), but it's definitely something that could help.

3. Greater ability or likelihood of a pitcher adding a pitch or increasing in stamina over the course of his career. We've done a lot of studies in our league to see how long pitchers can throw with different stamina ratings and we even had a rule saying that a pitcher with a 3 stamina rating or below could not be a starter, but we've since gotten rid of it. If a smart pitcher could add a pitch or two (happens in real life) or if a guy could get stretched out in the minors (also happens in real life), that would make things much more interesting.

4. In line with the above, it would also make sense if the game could be more intuitive about the dangers of having a pitcher throw more pitches than he should. From my analysis, in OOTP the only variable in a 4 stamina pitcher and a 8 stamina pitcher is that the 4 stamina pitcher will throw fewer innings. His effectiveness really isn't impacted the longer he stays in the game and there really doesn't seem to be any greater chance of injury because of it.

5. The ability to more easily handle the draft in-game. I've recommended this before, but if there was a player search field inside the draft module where I could plug in a player's name and it would pop-up and let me draft him, it would cut back drastically on inputting the draft from the utility.

I recognize that there is a search option for players, but I'm speaking specifically about the ability to be able to find them in the draft and select them rather than having to hunt for a guy.

This suggestion would also be helpful when working on All-Star rosters and Award Winners.

This is my first shot at making recommendations, so I'll probably add some as they come up or as I think of them, but I think these are the types of additions that would really make OOTP even better than it already is.

Bret