As is currently stands, it's just six days of nothing in between the off-season and the start of the regular season.

You really cannot get enough AB's or IP's to make informed decisions about how a player or pitcher is going to perform.  Prospects get development bumps whether they are on the ST rosters or not.  Risk of injury in an unimportant game leads to disincentive for playing your regulars for any significant playing time.

So for the amount of real-life time invested in this portion of the HBD season, there seems to be very little payback.

Not sure exactly what should be done, but I'll use this as a starting point to invite conversation.  What should be done to make spring training relevant?

GET RID OF IT.  Have every player progress/regress based on 20 days (include injury rehab) and just start the season.

Problem solved.

I like the free time.    Free agency and coach hiring are hectic.   ST gives you a few days to re-evaluate what you had already evaluated. 

Posted by toddcommish on 10/26/2011 7:42:00 PM (view original):
GET RID OF IT.  Have every player progress/regress based on 20 days (include injury rehab) and just start the season.

Problem solved.

2nd that.

The digesting time comes in the 4-5 cycles after spring training. Except, now it would be after FA.

Want to make it kind of mean something? Still build your spring training squads and have a cycle that does the progress/regress that it does currently for 20 days of ST, + injury hits (using, say a percentage of the actual regular season injury chance of getting hurt, to account for players not playing each of the 20 games)

Denied.  ST is good.

First, cut schedule to 16 games, ending on Day 6 a.m. cycle, and move up reg. season start 24 hours. ST is long enough without the lay day and a half, almost two for the pm2 starts.

Then, to get owners really involved, have 24-hour lightning round free agency bidding, beginning on the pm cycle and ending on the next day's pm cycle. You could have five of them (Day 1 to Day 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 5, 5 to 6.) They could be a mix of Internationals ... undrafted U.S. players ... even leftover A/B free agents. Have one or two appear each pm cycle, with bidding ending 24 hours later, announcement a half-cycle later. The leftover ML free agents would announce they'd chosen a new agent, Monty Hall, and they're ready to Let's Make a Deal! They drop their demands down to a starting point of - whatever - $1 million.

Of course, the players would have to be worth bidding on.. nothing of this DITR stuff. Might also take the sting out of lousy draft and Intl pools to come.

Posted by MikeT23 on 10/26/2011 8:47:00 PM (view original):
Denied.  ST is good.

Your denied is denied. ST sucks.
DENIED

I'm ok with ST as is

I don't mind Spring Training.  It gives me a chance to play the kiddies at the major league level and see how they perform.  I'll try playing that borderline LF/2B or RF/3B at the tougher position and see how good/bad he plays.  I also ramp up the aggressiveness on baserunning and see how many CS I wind up getting.  It's like a whiteboard for experimentation.

What I hate more is the day and half break between ST and opening day.  The waiting is the hardest part.

You cannot get a large enough sample size to see how the prospects perform at a major league level, or at different positions. 

Also, there's an equally good chance that your young prospect hitters will be facing the other guy's young prospect pitchers; again, nothing really meaningful to be gained from that. 

And as far as the baserunning goes, your base stealers could be going against the other guy's underdeveloped catching prospect.

ST doesn't hurt anything and it gives you a week to address issues that may not have been solved during FA/R5.   Leave it be. 

Split squad games, same number of games, ST cut in half.

That might work.   The thing is that HBD is an 80+ day committment.   ST and the A/S break are really the only times you shouldn't check in at least once a day.  If you have multiple teams, there's always something going on(except during Mantle's A/S break this season). 

I kind of like the break, too, but perhaps owners who do spend more time micromanaging, like I once did and keithjs still does, should be rewarded somehow. I've previously suggested something similar to DITR, but where players rise up toward their projections instead of seeing their ceilings rise.

These should be rare (no more than one or two per season, per team, if that), and sometimes pointless (like when that 26-year-old projected 58 OVR LF reaches his projections). But all players should be eligible for this bump, and it should be tied to how attention an owner pays to his squad. Of course, I haven't thought up the details for how that could be determined.

But I'd be more likely to pay attention to a young player's hot streak and give him more playing time if I thought he might put himself into my ML plans a year or two earlier than expected.

Posted by MikeT23 on 10/27/2011 7:08:00 AM (view original):
ST doesn't hurt anything and it gives you a week to address issues that may not have been solved during FA/R5.   Leave it be. 

It's a week.  A whole freakin' week.  I forget my new players names during that time.

I kind of like the split squad idea, which can cut it down to three days.  But if you're going to leave it as six days (plus the extra 1+ "prepare of regular season" day), there needs to be something that can be done that provides a tangible benefit (or drawback, if you do nothing) to your team.

Because right now, it's a mind-numbing week of near inactivity.  Which makes it pretyy much irrelevant.