6 to play

Lets get going..... Come on in , get in on the ground floor.

We can fill this

let's run this up to the top again and see what happens

I'm very interested -- but 16 owners is too many. There won't be enough players to fill all the rosters. I've looked at 1885, and there are only 84769 PAs the whole year (if you take only full seasons, no split seasons). Might sound like a lot, but if you divide that by 700 (enough PAs for one position on one team) and then divide that by 8 (enough to fill each position on one team) you get 15.137. And you need that number to be well above 16, since the players are not going to divide evenly among 16 teams -- some teams will inevitably have 800+ PAs at one position, for example.

If you cut it down to 12 owners, I'm in. Otherwise, the league will just be a lot of hand-wringing abuot shortages and how to deal with them, and I'll pass on that. I've been in leagues like that before, and you end up having lots of fights until people accept that you have to taking on a lot of crap players from other years, which is lame.

Or, if you prefer to look at pitchers -- if you take the maximum amount for each pitcher (no split seasons), you have 21764 IP. Divide that by 1350, which is really on the low side for a pitching staff, and you get 16.12. So barely enough IPs to fill 16 teams. And that assumes 1350 as an average -- inevitably some teams will have 1400, meaning others are left with 1300.

And even with 12 teams instead of 16, you'll run into some issues -- there are only 63 pitchers in 1885, total. That means 5 per team. You'll need to fill out rosters with 200k players from other years.

Even with that, you'll probably need some sort of cap on the number of IPs owners can draft. simply because pitchers pitched so much in 1885. It's hard to see why without an example -- let's say someone picks the pitcher with the most IPs, the one with the 16th-most, and the one with the 32nd-most. Not unreasonable, no? But if he did, he would have:

John Clarkson: 902 IP
Tim Keefe: 579 IP
Pete Conway: 304 IP

That makes 1785 IP for only three pitchers. You can see why that'll cause major shortages in a 16-team league, but even in a 12-team league, that could cause problems, especially if this owner keeps taking pitchers. You'd probably need to say "once you get above 1500 IP, stop taking pitchers."

Don't mean to crap on things -- I'm just excited abuot an 1885 progressive and want it to work out well.

Also intrigued by the two separate drafts for the two leagues -- how will that work? How do you divide players between the two leagues? I suppose you could say that all American Association teams go to the AL (the real-life AL didn't start til 1901) and the NL players of course go to the NL. But what do you do with players that spent time in both leagues, like Hall of Famer Pud Galvin, who played for the Buffalo Bisons (NL) and Pittsburgh Alleghenys (AA) in 1885? (Gotta love thsoe team names, by the way!)

Thanks for the interest chris. I appreciate any suggestions.
The way 16 teams work is that there are two 8 team drafts, with each draft containing all the players. So for example there will be a Clarkson in the NL and one in AL.

I ran a 1885 league for live play with 12 teams. There still are not enough players. It depended too much on AAA players which I am not fond of in progressive leagues. There is not an 8 team league available so 12 is the least you can have.

I did have a position limit and cap on IP in my live league but I think with only 8 teams drafting from the pool it shouldn't be needed.

Ah, that's a totally different story! Thanks, now that makes a lot more sense. Count me in!

Oh, and as far as a team -- I'll go with Pittsburgh. And I'm willing to take a second team if needed.

Posted by chrisekeedei on 11/13/2011 1:56:00 PM (view original):
Oh, and as far as a team -- I'll go with Pittsburgh. And I'm willing to take a second team if needed.

Got it man! Thanks for joining.