This league attempts to replay each major league season as closely as possible.
The number one thing to understand about this league is that we use the actual rosters from WIS with no variation. This means we do not allow free agents, twists, SIM-generated AAA, or anything else. You get the guys in the WIS database who played for your team, and that's it. And yes, that means each season there is a chance you are going to get a team that is going to suck, and there will not be much that you can do about it. Hey, someone’s going to end up managing the 2003 Tigers.
Please re-read the preceding paragraph carefully before joining this league. In your first season, you almost certainly are going to get one of the weaker available teams. It ruins the integrity of the league, the statistical accuracy, and the fun for your fellow owners if you abandon your team in mid-season.
By joining this league you are implicitly committing to seeing it through to the end of the season, doing the best you can with the cards you are dealt. The good news is that most owners are able to work their way up pretty quickly.
Here’s how this works:
- We use the actual divisional alignment that MLB used, each season.
- That means 8 playoff teams each season - the six division winners plus the two wild cards - exactly as MLB did during this era.
- Each owner drafts 1 team from the respective season. Obviously teams are exclusive and no duplicate teams are allowed.
- Once you have chosen your team, you will go into the draft center and enter your actual players from that season. You can use the “load historical team” feature if you want…this is often the easiest and cleanest way to build your roster, but it’s not infallible. Occasionally players are missed when you load a team that way. If you prefer to draft your players individually, keep in mind that:
- For players who were traded or otherwise appeared for multiple teams in a single season, you MUST use the partial-season version of that player. If the player did not get enough PA or IP with your team to warrant a partial-season version then you cannot use him. NO COMBINED VERSIONS OF PLAYERS MAY BE USED.
- If your team is short of PA or IP, or even very short, so be it.
- Only players who played for your team in real life may be used in games. If you do not have 25 players in the database (unlikely in this era, but just in case), you will draft additional $200,000 players from the database (from any WIS season) to fill out your roster, but these players MUST:
- Be manually set to rest at all times
- Be manually removed from your player rest, defensive replacement, and PH hierarchies.
- In other words, these non-roster players may not be used in games, unless WIS slots them in because of some sort of emergency, and owners should take every possible step to ensure that doesn’t happen.
5.
All players who played for your team in real life, and are in the WIS database, must be on your roster. In most seasons, most teams have MORE than 25 eligible players, we use “draft your own” AAA with the following parameters
- Each season, the theme rules will be set for a number of AAA players sufficient to allow the team with the largest real-life roster enough slots to incorporate all of their players.
- Teams that have more than 25 players in the WIS database will draft these additional players into AAA slots. These players MAY be used in games, and the transaction deadline will be set as late as possible (game 159) to allow for roster moves throughout the season.
- Teams with unfilled AAA slots can either draft your own $200K players to fill the AAA slots, or just let WIS fill those slots with random AAA players, but in either case, those players MAY NOT be used in games. They should remain in AAA the entire season.
- Again, the purpose of AAA is to include as many real-life players as possible; no SIM-generated AAA players should ever be used in games in this league.
6. By all means, do your best to win as many games as you can with the players you have! This is important for several reasons, including…
7. …This is NOT a keeper league. Each season we will redraft from the pool of available teams following a draft lottery. The lottery is much like the NBA lottery; we will draw ping pong balls for the top 3 picks and then the remaining picks will be awarded according to lottery order. O
wners whose teams most overachieve in the current season will receive the highest number of ping pong balls for the lottery. “Overachievement” will be defined as “greatest relative improvement in winning percentage.” Or for those who prefer a formula: (WIS winning percentage – MLB winning percentage)/MLB winning percentage. So, if you get stuck with a terrible team in year 1, fear not. If you can win a few more games than they did in real life, you’re probably in great shape to draw a better team in season 2. If, because of owner turnover, we have new owners in the league, they will draft last in their first season (we will use random.org to generate the order for new owners if there are more than one in any given season.)
8. There will be real drafting strategy here. Do you pick the best remaining team available when it’s your turn? Or the team with the greatest possibility of improving on their real-life record? And obviously there is no benefit - EVER - to tanking. Losing never improves your draft position, and winning never harms it.
9. Obviously we are not allowing trades or waiver wire here. We use the DH in the AL of course