Millennium Gone?

[Red Blow]

Does anyone know the status of the Millennium Baseball League? Their website is still up (http://www.angelfire.com/on4/mbl/) but I get no response from their commish via email.

I was looking to ask his thoughts about restricted free agency. I got the idea from his league, and we are just completing our first round of it. So far, it seems to have added a new positive twist to the financial side of the game.

If you care... here is how we worked it. Any player that mentions free agency while negotiating a contract extension immediately becomes a RFA and cannot be re-signed until the end of the season. At that time, all teams (except the one he is on) bid on that player. When a high bid is established (24hrs) the team "owning" the player can either match the bid and attempt to give the player an extension at that price or let him go to the bidding team for compensation. Compensation was a 1st, 2nd and/or 3rd rd draft pick in the upcoming rookie draft. How much compensation (which pick(s)) was determined by how high the bid was. The higher the bid, the more compensation you got.

We had 27 players go RFA the first year, which was a few more than I had anticipated. One was the recently completed season's AL Cy Young winner (24-2, 2.75). The 29-yr-old ace received an astronomically high bid of $17,000,000 for 7 years. The next highest bid, for an 8-rated starter (13-7, 3.38), is $10,000,000 for 5 years. Others went for less, but it was fun to watch the bidding wars develop, large and small.

Does anyone else have anything similar to this in their league? The goal of RFA is to allow some players a chance at the free agent market that might never get that chance normally. Hathaway, the Cy Young winner set to make $17,000,000, would have been re-signed by his current team to around a $9 or $10 million dollar deal until retirement. In my book, too safe.. and too boring. RFA gave him a market-driven salary... and even a little higher as two divisional rivals drove his bid from 13 to 17 out of spite for each other

I would recommend a process like this to anyone that has owners who can stay on top of their finances. I provide a lot of infromation to my guys about how much money they have and how much they can expect to have in the next year. Aside from a couple of bids that were meant solely to drive the price of some players up, everything looks to go off without a hitch.

Anyway, Millennium if you are out there... give me a ring.

[RBrauerei]

Astronomical? Spite: Maybe my wife IS right! I take this too personally LOL

Go Mets! New Home of the 2003 NL Cy Young winner pitcher, Robert Hathaway.

[lilmcjr14]

The Millenium Baseball league is now defunct. I was in the league from the beginning, and the commish said he was too busy to run the league properly, so the league is no more.

[JAttractive]

Wow I really like this idea.

[Crackerjack]

Dont the really bad teams have a lot more players wanting out....it seems like its that way to me?

[Red Blow]

CJ,
That is something that did concern us, but we couldn't see anything that showed a disadvantage to the "poor" teams. We are looking at ways to improve the RFA system we use, and if someone has "published" some testing on the responses that potential FA give I would be very interested in seeing it.

Now, though, it seems that players will give you the "I simply don't like your team." line during contract extension negotiations much like they do during free agency. If that is the case, we might look at using that "catch phrase" as the one that signaled RFA. I believe it has been reported as being totally random.