This league has just about finished it's fourth season and we need a new owner for the Oakland Athletics for Season 5 (1948). The league rules are as follows:

The idea here is based on the ancient practice of the Jubilee Year: every 7th year in ancient societies slaves were freed, debts were cancelled and land restored to its original owner.

This league will begin in 1944 (for reasons explained below) and we will begin with original teams and their actual RL rosters. We will play for 7 seasons, drafting players as we wish, making trades we want, but after 6 years of play, on the 7th season we will begin again with the actual RL rosters of that year and start again to reshape and manage our What If teams from that point. Any gaps in rosters will be made up by using any 400K  or lower salary player in the database that owners choose to use to reach a roster of 25 players.

Each Jubilee Year (the 7th year) in other words, all players will revert to the actual RL team they played with that season and our rosters will move ahead from that, all previous team history of drafting and trading rendered no longer relevant.

HERE ARE THE JUBILEE YEARS AND THE SUBSEQUENT 6-YEAR PERIODS OF MANAGING TEAMS BEFORE THE NEXT JUBILEE:

1944-49
1950-55
1956-61
1962-67
1968-73
1974-79
1980-85
1986-91
1992-98
1999-2004
2005-2010
2011-2016

Example: The New York Yankees will begin with the roster they had in 1944. The owner of that team will then draft players - any players available when it is her or his turn in the draft - and will have them on the team and this will continue through the 1949 season.

But in 1950 the roster for the New York Yankees (and all other teams) will be the actual roster listed in WIS when that team is downloaded as a historical team. In any case in which a player is listed in WIS for a Jubilee season as having played on more than one team, the player will end up on the team that they began the season with, not necessarily the one they played more games (or had more PA or IP) with that year.

So the Yankees, unless they are able to draft or trade for Mickey Mantle when he starts in 1951 will not have Mantle until 1956 - the next Jubilee Year in which all players return to the teams they were on that season, when they will have him and unless they then subsequently trade him he will be a Yankees from 1956 on, but not before. Indeed, one reason for the timing of the league start date is to avoid the inevitable Yankees-Giants advantages that come with the 1951 additions of Mantle and Mays. However, there was no way to work this so that Koufax' best years were also unavailable to the Dodgers, but hopefully teams through drafting and trading and strategy will be able to match the Dodgers in other areas to overcome that LA advantage.

In other words, this league allows for the best of both worlds: real What If play starting with real rosters but then managing as best you can to do better.

There will therefore be no drafts of new or unaffiliated players in the every-7th Jubilee seasons.

There will be no inaugural league draft: we will start play as soon as the 16th owner is signed up.

But we will be drafting players in the non-Jubilee seasons in between (and so there is a What If quality here).

Draft position will be in the order of the Real World (NOT our league results) W-L records of the seasons in question - the one that drafted players will play in, NOT the one just completed (thus our first draft will be based on the standings in the real world of 1945), with the team with the worst Real World (Not our league) record going first and that with the best record going last.

THERE IS ONE EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE: no team may have the first pick either in the overall draft nor from their own league for more than two seasons in a row. So in any season in which the same team came in last place in either the AL or NL, the 7th place team will pick first from that league and depending on the W-L record of the worst team from the other league will be placed accordingly in the overall draft order. The 6th place team from that league that season will pick second from that league (again where that is overall for the 16 teams depends on the W-L records overall for that RL season) and then will come the 5th place team from that league and only after that will the 8th place team pick (when we reach the expansion era this will be applicable but with the teams in each league ranked according to overall record and again any team that was the worst overall for 3 straight seasons will pick first from that league's team two years running but the third time will be the fourth from that league to pick and again be ranked overall in the draft order according to the overall W-L records from that RL season).

So tanking is completely pointless - your team's draft position is as fixed as one's destiny in any Calvinist predestination.