Player Positions - a commish perspective???

[RBLwebguy]

How do you handle player positions in your league? Does a player have to be rated at a position or do you allow players to play out of position? I gotta know????

[kq76]

Starters must have defensive ratings at the position being played at. Backups on the other hand need only meet the following:

C need C ratings
CF need CF ratings
2B/SS/3B need 2B/SS ratings
1B/LF/RF don't need any ratings

If a backup is playing out of position then his max backup % may only be 20%.

http://kbl-ootp-online.com/info.html#RR

[Carlton]

kq, I don't get the Cf rating bit.

If you put a COF in the CF (which I have done out of necessity) he will bomb out 90% of the time, which I think is pretty good.

I don't know about putting a position player at C, or an IF in the OF...because with arm ratings...they will stink regardless

[Raderick]

In both the HPBL and the WCBL, I just let the owners decide where to play each player. They can deal with the benefits/consequences of moving a player to a position they do not know.

[WWBL Commissioner]

I allow my GM's to play any player at any posistion. i think the game does a fairly good job of making you not want to put say your 2B behind the plate

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Carlton

kq, I don't get the Cf rating bit.

If you put a COF in the CF (which I have done out of necessity) he will bomb out 90% of the time, which I think is pretty good.

I don't know about putting a position player at C, or an IF in the OF...because with arm ratings...they will stink regardless

Well it might help if I give some perspective first. We were coming from a system where to play a position the player had to have a rating at it, but we felt this was a bit too restrictive and wanted to give some flexibility to it. However, we did not want to allow people to be able to abuse the system for the good or the bad (short-term bad at least but long-term good) of their team by say playing a great offensive SS at 1B full time (good) or an awful defensive 1B at SS (bad). So I looked around at other leagues and found a number of them doing something similar, but with some minor differences, to:

C need C ratings
CF need CF ratings
2B/SS/3B need 2B/SS ratings
1B/LF/RF don't need any ratings

Now even though it might not matter much (from my tests at least) if you for example have a crappy corner OFer playing CF (the most important positions by far in my tests were 2B and SS) we wanted to keep some of the integrity of the defensive spectrum. IRL you'd rarely for example see a regular 1B playing anything up the middle, nor would you often see say someone who has little to no C experience behind the plate. Anyways, other than a suggestion to allow any OF to play CF (Ichiro would probably do fine in CF, but Canseco would not) I don't recall any suggestions in the league to change the above. And then to help prevent the possibility of abusing the system it was suggested that starters still needed a rating at the position, that only backups were restricted by this new more flexible system and were limited to only a 20% max backup if playing out of position. This sounded like a great way to do just what we wanted and when it came to a vote it passed.

Now some leagues might prefer to be as restrictive as possible as we used to be or have no limits at all and not think about abuse, but we went with this and I for one have liked the increased flexibility. Different strokes for different leagues and all that though.

[JimiP]

in WTL - players can only play a postion they are rated for, to balance this harshness (HAH) we allow Spring Training in new positions as well as minor league training.

[sporr]

In Baseball Maelstrom, you must have a rating at a position in order to play there. However, owners can request that a positional rating be given to a player and the Commissioner's Office determines what, if any, rating the player will get.

[disposableheros]

in WHBL

Okay, our spectrum from easiest to hardest, goes like this:

1B-LF-RF-3B-CF-2B-SS-C

A player may move left on this spectrum in any way a GM sees fit, however, a player may not move to the right on this spectrum without learning the position in ST.

In addition, a player moving left may only do so once per season, unless the GM has an unexpected injury occur, or is in a pinch.