@nivshah, forgive me if you’ve already addressed this, but how will the ottoneu season account for the 2020 season if it starts and is then stopped or cancelled before the regular season is deemed ‘completed’? Does MLB have to declare a ‘completed MLB regular season’ in order for our ottoneu season to count?
Niv, I understand your business decision to not reprogram your game to allow something other than business as usual. However, as a participant, it annoys me greatly to lose a year of a competitive team in a season that at best represents 37% of a full season, and and at worst could end after 2-4 weeks for Covid-19 reasons. Allocation should be reduced pro rata to the games played. Likewise, MLB players should add only $1 for a 60 game season, and MiLB guys who won’t play any games at the MLB level should not have anything added to their price.
And furthermore, if the actual MLB regular season lasts less than 25 games … I can’t call that a fantasy season. And we play fantasy ball, so there should be no allocations at all, and no automatic cost increases inasmuch as we did not crown a real champion.
I’ll answer both at once:
Each MLB season has an official status. If the season is deemed incomplete or canceled, we will revisit prize money, arbitration, and inflation at that time, per my note here. If the MLB season is determined by MLB to be completed, we will have normal inflation, arbitration and prize money.
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There should be no inflation for a 30 games season. It should be a buck for a 60 games season but nothing for MiLB guys who made no MLB appearances. We play fantasy ball, which is based on real life, but should not be dependent upon it in our leagues.
@Jackelder If your league(s) want to do that, pretty sure your commissioner can make that happen.
FWIW, I would be annoyed if any of my leagues cut back increases and stuff. Doing that will result in more keepers and a relatively boring off-season and draft. We are just wrapping up 3-4 boring months. I don’t want to exacerbate the problem by making the off-season less fun, too. I would find out if your leagues are aligned with you and, if they are, have the commish manage it. As a commissioner of a couple leagues that use a slow draft that we do off-site, I can tell you it isn’t that hard/time consuming to adjust player salaries and stuff.
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My two cents is that one of the great things about ottoneu is the ability to manage those types of issues through the commissioner tools. Leaves it up to each league to decide, not Niv making a unilateral decision.
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@themiddle54 and @jackelder, what you are both asking for can happen if your league/commish are interested in putting forth the effort. The key is gaining consensus within your league, since most folks don’t seem to agree with you on the forums. It seems like the majority of everyone on fantasy baseball websites is excited for a fantasy baseball season…
Just because the majority of folks don’t seem to agree with your assertions (predictions, valuations, etc…) doesn’t necessarily make you wrong, but it probably means you shouldn’t be asking for rule changes that would affect everyone to accommodate them.
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Leif, yes we are all excited to have even some baseball. But I am not sure most folks disagree with me on reduced salary increases over a short season. I am fairly sure most would agree with me if our season has to end after less than 30 games. 30 games is like ending a season on May 15 in a normal year; that is not enough to crown a real champion, so we may have a lot of small sample winners who likely would have finished out of the money over a 162 game season.
What I think matters not. Niv has refused to change the raises, even for MiLB guys who do not see live AB’s in organized leagues in 2020.
I will work to persuade my league to skip allocations to de-emphasize the damage to our best players. That would help, some.
If MLB says a season is complete and official (as opposed to cancelled), Ottoneu as a fantasy sports provider is not in a position to choose to acknowledge it or not acknowledge it. Conditional salary increases based on games played is a poor precedent to set. Ottoneu does not have agency in deciding what a sports season is or isn’t.
It is an impossibility to address hypotheticals without knowing how MLB will react, so we will pay close attention to how MLB will deal with any unexpected scenario and move forward accordingly.
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Ottoneu has agency to decide on Ottoneu things such as salary increases. That has nothing to do with cash payouts in money leagues.
But at least you leave the door open to ‘dealing with unexpected scenarios and moving forward accordingly.’
I think we are talking in circles now, but there are reasons stated in this thread why inflation is staying the way it is. If your league wants to reverse inflation, it has the tools to do so.
These are the reasons for the $2 and $1 inflations to remain in place, even after a shorter MLB season.
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Inflation and arbitration create owner bitterness in seasons where their team’s window has opened wide but a 40 game season and concomitant randomness leads to too short a season to win it all.
We have just had a full off season of player movement and an active draft. Which is the point: why can we not play out a full season, 2021 or 2022, with some semblance of our 2020 team without it completely going up in the smoke of inflation?
You can play out a full season with these rosters if that’s what you want. Just see if your league agrees with you and your commish can change salaries. In fact, if your commish gives other people commissioner capabilities you could all help and have it done in no time. Instead, you’re arguing that Niv should rewrite the code that drives the functionality of ottoneu for a one off instance to allow you do to something you can already do and that almost no one else wants. I’m in 5 leagues with 50+ other owners and not one person in those leagues wants to stop salary increases or arbitration (though I know some leagues that plan to bypass arbitration). No one is telling you that you can’t modify salaries however your league wants. If your league wants to do that, do it - the feature to do so already exists.
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Do you work for Kayleigh McAneny? Let us not pretend that not one of 50 owners in your leagues objects to arbitration and $2 boosts for all players. That short changes every strong team in 2020 – adding $70 to base salaries per team and exposing them to another $25 or so in allocation seriously damages a solid team’s chance of winning in 2021.
And you know we are unlikely to have a 60 game season this year to establish a legitimate Otto league winner. Legitimate being the operative word.
And he does not have to re-write the code for salary inflation. It would be a simple matter of changing a 2 to a 1 or a 0 in leagues that object.
Dude. That’s called rewriting code.
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This is wholly unnecessary. Please engage on the merits of the argument presented instead of name-calling or otherwise using inflammatory rhetoric.
This is literally the purpose of inflation and arbitration - to help avoid dynasties.
If MLB says this isn’t a completed season, then, as I’ve said multiple times in this thread, we will address that when the time comes.
I’m the only person who knows what is required to make this change, and making assumptions regarding effort level is not productive. Leaning against code changes will generally help your argument, but generally I’d advise against focusing on effort level against what is right for the game.
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As of today, all five leagues are planning on business as usual with no drama or dissent. I’d prefer you not resort to ad hominem attacks, especially about things you can’t possibly know (like what my leagues are planning to do).
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@Leif We don’t have consensus. We have a decade-long league with 4 people who are from Year One and another 5-6 who have been there for 4+ years, then a couple spots that turn over every year. Guess which owners keep us from consensus. Were we to want, as most owners in our long-term league do, to freeze prizes this year, we have no remedy because the two owners who have not played a game in our league yet don’t want it and Niv is very “sorry, hands are tied” on the issue which I find, frankly, not acceptable in its lack of flexibility.
re what @Jackelder is saying on inflation, another big issue is players like Marco Luciano, yet to play a low-A game. He’ll go on taxi squad and get some sort of MLB playing time this year so it’s not a lost season. He’ll be $2 salary inflation when he would normally be $1, then will be $2 next year when he’s back in the minors, and so on. So if you have him for $2 now, you might see him really debut at MLB at like $8-9 instead of $4-5. The whole thing is screwy. Fortunately I can override Niv on that and reverse all salary increases, which my league wants. But. There should be flexibility in Ottoneu to freeze that out as an option so that I don’t lose an afternoon in December changing every player’s salary.
As a follow up to this re something that further complicates the issue of whether or not a season is actually complete from a fantasy baseball perspective regardless of if MLB declares their season officially complete, because of health privacy issues, MLB cannot disclose if a player has tested positive for COVID. There will be incomplete injury report information as a result of this which throws a further wrench into the MLB 2020 season. Players will test positive as this goes along. We will have instances like in the NBA this week when the Nuggets shut their facility down.
If you’re in a prize league, do you guard your $100 investment and dump players you intended to keep long-term if they or their team are shut down? Or do you just punt the $100 because that’s what MLB owners are doing this year (oh wait, they’re playing so they make money and for no other reason) and we want it to reflect real baseball?