Dropping IFAs

[BrewCrewGM]

Have a quick question regarding all of the IFA signings, and I only bring this up because these kids are going for absurd amounts.

Is dropping an IFA that you bid, say 8 million on (or any price, for that matter), within the rules?

I just see all of these escape routes where owners can drop IFA busts that they bid high money on a year after they signed him, and they get off the hook financially for doing so. Maybe that isn't within the rules, but it's the impression I'm getting with all of this reckless bidding. Seems like Marlins has at least 25-35 million total tied up in all of his IFA signings (I know he has a ton of cap room, but holy shit is that a lot for 16 year olds).

If that's how it is, I propose that penalties be placed on owners who drop IFAs who bust out within their first year or two (i.e. Gerardo Concepcion(not pointing the finger at you, Indians. I know you got him in a trade, and did not win a bidding war on him)).

Maybe there are rules in place and this post is a waste of space, but I'd like some clarification on the matter, because it'd be borderline ridiculous if an owner can bid 5-9 million on IFAs and then drop them a year or two later (if they're playing terribly) in order to get their contract off the books.

[Arizona Diamondbacks]

Same rules as any other contract. If you drop them, you pay 1/2 the salary for the remainder of the year

[Deleted]

We really need to put IFAs in our our draft pool starting in 2014.

[Arizona Diamondbacks]

Jul 4, 2013 11:18:41 GMT -5 @royals said:

We really need to put IFAs in our our draft pool starting in 2014.

Though I don't really like it, it's certainly better than what we've got right now

[St. Louis Cardinals (Andrew)]

I agree, I don't think there is a perfect solution but incorporating them into our draft is probably the best solution

[Deleted]

what about if we hold off bidding on them until the offseason and then you bid with your draft picks. They wouldn't technically be incorporated in the draft, but they wouldn't be going for insane amounts either. We would have the order of the draft and whoever offers the lowest pick would get the player. Then we would just eliminate that pick from the draft. It basically makes all the draft picks more valuable and it wont make these guys go for insane amounts

[Deleted]

Jul 6, 2013 0:26:51 GMT -5 @mikeyp1515 said:

what about if we hold off bidding on them until the offseason and then you bid with your draft picks. They wouldn't technically be incorporated in the draft, but they wouldn't be going for insane amounts either. We would have the order of the draft and whoever offers the lowest pick would get the player. Then we would just eliminate that pick from the draft. It basically makes all the draft picks more valuable and it wont make these guys go for insane amounts

I dunno if this will really work because it would give more power to the best teams "bid" of a draft pick. Say I bid my first round pick that means I will probably win over the Marlins because of course he wouldn't bid his first round pick as that is #1 overall. I think that is overcomplicating things personally. Just throw them in the pool I say and draft away.

[BrewCrewGM]

I feel like putting them in the draft is the easy way out. Just doesn't feel right doing it. I know this isn't an actual, real league, but the more realism, the better.

I think the best course of action is to keep everything in place, but if you drop an IFA, regardless of how much money you paid for him (unless it's just the standard 1 mil), you pay the full amount of money that you bid on him as a penalty. So if Marlins, for example, wants to drop one of the guys he bid 8 or 9 million on in a year or two, he should be penalized that 8 or 9 million for the rest of the year. I think putting that in place will reduce the amount that the IFAs are going for, and will actually force people to be strategic about how much they spend, instead of just doing it recklessly.

I really think that's a much better solution than the draft.

[Deleted]

yeah im not a huge fan of throwing them in the draft. The way I do it in my other league is we all have a cap for international prospects every year, but we don't start paying them until they are actually in the major leagues. Just a suggestion.

[St. Louis Cardinals (Andrew)]

If the penalty for dropping IFAs lasted more than a couple of months it might deter the current ridiculous IFA bids, I just think the current system has become a farce with the number of $5M+ bids

[Cincinnati Reds - Chris]

Jul 6, 2013 0:51:29 GMT -5 @mikeyp1515 said:

yeah im not a huge fan of throwing them in the draft. The way I do it in my other league is we all have a cap for international prospects every year, but we don't start paying them until they are actually in the major leagues. Just a suggestion.

This may have been discussed before, but what about having a structured sliding scale like MLB currently has for IFA's of TPB League Ranks from 1-30, where each slot is allowed to spend a certain amount of money only if they have funds available is permitted. The worst team either from the prior years standings, or based on the standings of that current year as of June 30th . The worst team would be permitted the most to spend, 2nd worst a little less and so on down to the best team. We could tinker with the amounts as the years go on.

But this would accomplish a couple things.
*Keep the IFA's separate from the Rule 4 draft..... if this is what people want.
*As we tinker and see what slot numbers work best, we can work the numbers these guys are getting down to a reasonable amount, thus preventing wild problems of people bidding like retards on 16 year olds.

[BrewCrewGM]

Jul 6, 2013 2:00:38 GMT -5 St. Louis Cardinals (Andrew) said:

If the penalty for dropping IFAs lasted more than a couple of months it might deter the current ridiculous IFA bids, I just think the current system has become a farce with the number of $5M+ bids

Again, I think if the penalties were to be more severe, there likely wouldn't be any more reckless bidding.

[Deleted]

why do you guys think its such a farce? personally the only problem i see with the system is the fact that again you have top teams whom are loaded and bottom teams with nothing who've saved money and want to spend it. you have 30 teams in this league and bids increase by 1M. to be honest the bids are significantly low considering that most people just use the baseball america top 30 sheet in order to determine who they want. i'd say the top 10 is most desirable and for them to only be going to 10M is not that much considering 30 teams can bid. and with people only using baseball america as their scouting source you're going to have MULTIPLE teams wanting the same player.

i dont see how having to pay half of the salary is not a penalty. its not different from any other player with a contract in this league, right? why is there bitching? do you think somebody with 30 million is going to try and scoop up every player in the IFA pool and then he can get to decide who's the cream of the crop..and then drop who he wants while keeping who's panned out? still think its pretty significant for a guy to pay half of their salary for a year and a guy in that scenario would have been having to maintain those salaries for a few years to decide who's a bust and who isn't. i dunno. i just don't know why its being bitched about

i dont think theres any solution with the disparity in the league besides entering a cap system like the real mlb (and like rays and a couple others have suggested). i would honestly be pretty upset if these guys were to go into the draft pool. there's no reason top teams should be able to accrue these guys for no money. yes, there are busts but it certainly wouldn't be a right step to equality in here. wasnt royals at one point so stacked that he was completely full in the MLB and MiLB and he was still trading for amateur picks because of the wiggle room he had?

[Deleted]

Well the problem with the system as it is is that these teenagers are going to get huge salaries which you have to pay for probably 6 years before they even set foot in the MLB (assuming they don't bust). Like I think Dbacks says even if you got Sano this way years back it really isn't feasible or good for the league to have a guy sucking up that kind of cap in the milb. In all likelihood any guy that goes for this kind of money a team will HAVE to trade to keep themselves under cap unless they are fully committed to a 7-year rebuild which of course no one wants to do.

The draft idea isn't to try and get these guys in the draft pool so I can snag one in the later rounds, any of the elite ones will be taken by someone in the top 15 or so. I think putting them in the draft helps out picks 5-15 the most really. Usually there are 4 or 5 very high-level guys in the draft, this might make it so there are 8-10.

But anyway sounds like most people don't like the draft idea and prefer bidding in some way we just need to figure out the best way to do that.

What if we did something like you could buy supplemental picks with available cap dollars? Supplemental round 1 would be x, 2nd round a little less, etc etc. Since these dollars would not be permanently spent it should be pretty expensive I would think. The con to this though would be it would encourage Marlins strip everything away strategy a little more I think so you free up a ton of cap room.

[Deleted]

I'm bored at work so I'll just post a rough draft of what I'm thinking:

Every team, every year would get a certain amount of bidding dollars. Once bidding is completed these dollars disappear and you get the prospects on your MiLB roster at no cost.

For example the allotment of bidding dollars could be by winning percentage:

30th - 10M
29th - 9.8M
28th - 9.6M
27th - 9.4M
26th - 9.2M
25th - 9M
24 - 8.5M
23 - 8.3M
22 - 8.1M
21 - 7.9M
20 - 7.7M
19 - 7.5M
18 - 7M
17 - 6.8M
16 - 6.6M
15 - 6.4M
16 - 6.2M
14 - 6M
13 - 5.5M
12 - 5.3M
11 - 5.1M
10 - 4.9M
9 - 4.7M
8 - 4.5M
7 - 4M
6 - 3.8M
5 - 3.6M
4 - 3.4M
3 - 3.2M
2 - 3M
1 - 2.5M

This would give the rebuilding teams quite an advantage while not hindering their cap numbers.

It also would give the rebuilding teams another trade chip as bidding dollars could be traded.

In my head this does not apply to Cuban defectors, Japanese pro's, etc and instead is just for the IFA July 2nd bidding.

[Deleted]

I think that's a good idea. We could bid in 100k increments. I do agree it would create more maintenance. But we could have all of the IFA $$ info stored in a single board and not on individual team pages. Once the player is won, then the owner can add to roster.

[Deleted]

Although I'm not totally in favor of how Rays presented it, I feel like the cap system based off of rankings is the best solution if we want to make changes. I'm reading a lot of mixed opinions about this "problem" throughout everywhere on this site, so could we set up a poll to see how many people want a change to the system, and then maybe another to decide which new system to go with?

[St. Louis Cardinals (Andrew)]

Let's not start with fractions of millions ... it will cause an admin nightmare. It's hard enough to get guys to put the full $$$ amount on their roster, never mind trying to keep up with fractions.

If we had to go with allotting bidding dollar limits then may I suggest :

1st through 6th - $2M
7th through 12th - $4M
13th to 18th - $6M
19th to 24th - $8M
25th to 30th - $10M

That gives the bottom teams enough cash to get a couple of the better guys but keeps the dollars at full millions.

I think the condition has to be that these bidding limits are NOT extra cap.

[Deleted]

Jul 7, 2013 20:28:58 GMT -5 St. Louis Cardinals (Andrew) said:

Let's not start with fractions of millions ... it will cause an admin nightmare. It's hard enough to get guys to put the full $$$ amount on their roster, never mind trying to keep up with fractions.

If we had to go with allotting bidding dollar limits then may I suggest :

1st through 6th - $2M
7th through 12th - $4M
13th to 18th - $6M
19th to 24th - $8M
25th to 30th - $10M

That gives the bottom teams enough cash to get a couple of the better guys but keeps the dollars at full millions.

I think the condition has to be that these bidding limits are NOT extra cap.

In my scenario once a team wins a player the player is treated the same as a rule IV pick in that they don't affect the cap.

[St. Louis Cardinals (Andrew)]

yeah, I don't like that part. It looks like a work creation exercise that adds to the million things we already don't have enough resources to administer.

If you are going to treat them the same as Rule IV and exclude Cuban/Japanese then just put them in the draft and exclude Cuban/Japanese professionals.