How many draft rounds & minor league roster limits?

[gollum65]

For a fictional league, is there a "rule of thumb" about how many rounds your draft should be?

I'm in the process of setting up a 24 team league, with each team having a AAA, AA, A, S.A, and R league team. I assumed the proper setup was 1 round for each team, so I setup a 24 round draft with players created for 24 rounds (no extras).

Yet after just 2 simmed seasons, I'm seeing all the minor league teams filled to 25 players, and many young free agents under 25 years old. I'd set minor league rosters to unlimited, or even some number higher then 25, but then a lot of kids don't get into games, especially at the lower levels.

So what's the proper way to set up your minor leagues and draft rounds?

[gollum65]

So nobody has an opinion about this?

[Carplos]

The game suggests 5 rounds per minor league level, so if your teams all have only one team per level, then the suggestion would be 25 rounds, however, I tend to go under this by a couple rounds.

[gollum65]

Thanks. I think I'm going to try 15 rounds for a 24 team league. Reason being that there are over 500 free agents at any given time available to the teams. Granted they may not be ML quality free agents or prospects, but they can be used to fill rosters. And I've set all the minor league rosters to allow 35 players. HOpe that works adequately for my needs.

[Solonor]

Our league currently has a 15-round draft for 24 teams with 3 levels of minors. We create enough players for 20 rounds. We are currently debating an increase to a 20-round draft.

We cap the minors at 30 for AAA, 30 for AA and 50 for A.

[Corsairs]

Starting next season we will be moving to a 20-round draft with 4 levels of minors. Roster caps for each level are 25 (except for the lowest level, which will be set to 45). Our draft is populated exclusively through our two feeder leagues (one with 20 teams, one with 40 teams, both with rosters of 31 and 4-year age ranges).

[Solonor]

We haven't messed with feeder leagues in our online league. How is that working out? Does it make the league files any bigger? Does it just make the draft better (or worse)? Should we add them, do you think?

[Corsairs]

Originally Posted by Solonor

We haven't messed with feeder leagues in our online league. How is that working out? Does it make the league files any bigger? Does it just make the draft better (or worse)? Should we add them, do you think?

It does make the league files somewhat larger, yes. How much so depends on the size of your feeder system. Ours isn't enormous so the size increase is manageable (at least in my opinion). I'd definitely recommend testing it out on your end just to be sure you're okay with the extra size, of course.

One key to keeping things under control is to find the right feeder roster size balance. Our draft is exclusively populated through the feeders (no generated players), so not enough players is obviously bad because we won't have enough for 20 rounds of drafting. Too many, though, and the free agent pool gets overloaded with undrafted players. After some testing I've found that, using our settings, roster sizes of 31 keep things at that perfect balance where there's just enough graduating to fill out the draft. That keeps the free agent pool (and league files) from getting bloated.

In terms of what it does for the draft, it's been a very positive experience for us at least. I won't say everyone in the league monitors the feeders closely, but certainly a number of owners have taken to following rising high school and college stars. Some owners have even developed specialized "feeder beat writer" personas for articles on those leagues.

Personally, I think it's a lot more fun to follow these guys for a few years instead of having them just magically appear in the draft pool. You get neat situations like we had recently with stud SP Markus "Fireworks" Hancock. He was so dominating and so obviously a #1 draft choice that people began trying to pry away the first pick in the '08 draft from the Tempe Knights months before the draft pool was even released (incidentally, Tempe never caved and his since aggressively promoted Hancock all the way to the majors just a few months removed from the draft).

Anything that gets owners interested and involved like that is a plus in my book. So yes, I'd say give it a shot. There don't seem to be too many online leagues using feeders, so if nothing else it'd be an extra distinguishing factor (just in case playing with hobbits wasn't distinguishing enough already).