Congratulations!!! You have been granted the opportunity to purchase a franchise in a new baseball league that's kicking off this season. As we all know, it can be difficult to sell baseball, but your intrepid advisors have guaranteed that your roster will have a Hall of Fame player to build around starting in his rookie season. You can make your marketing all about him and go the extra mile if you wish - it truly is a fantastic opportunity!

There are 39 Hall of Famers that you can use to build your franchise around. For each 5 year period of the 1900-1999 era, I have selected the Hall of Fame hitter and pitcher with the highest salary in his first WIS season. (There are no Hall of Fame pitchers that debuted between 1985 and 1989 1980 to 1984 (thanks for the correction, epup!) - why there's 39 options instead of 40.)

Hitters:
Miller Huggins - 1904 Cincinnati Reds - $3,935,706
Frank Baker - 1909 Philadelphia Athletics - $4,887,357
Max Carey - 1911 Pittsburgh Pirates - $4,160,029
Dave Bancroft - 1915 Philadelphia Phillies - $4,508,238
Al Simmons - 1924 Philadelphia Athletics - $5,284,944
Lloyd Waner - 1927 Pittsburgh Pirates - $7,046,787
Arky Vaughan - 1932 Pittsburgh Pirates - $4,218,549
Joe Dimaggio - 1936 New York Yankees - $6,993,581
Stan Musial - 1942 St. Louis Cardinals - $5,411,386
Richie Ashburn - 1948 Philadelphia Phillies - $5,706,694
Ernie Banks - 1954 Chicago Cubs - $4,770,908
Frank Robinson - 1956 Cincinnati Reds - $6,038,674
Joe Torre - 1961 Milwaukee Braves - $3,904,176
Joe Morgan - 1965 Houston Astros - $5,411,692
Carlton Fisk - 1972 Boston Red Sox - $6,026,677
Gary Carter - 1975 Montreal Expos - $5,384,049
Ryne Sandberg - 1982 Chicago Cubs - $6,382,674
Roberto Alomar - 1988 San Diego Padres - $4,916,529
Jeff Bagwell - 1991 Houston Astros - $4,458,217
Derek Jeter - 1996 New York Yankees - $4,921,778

Pitchers:
Addie Joss - 1902 Cleveland Blues - $10,027,929
Rube Marquard - 1909 New York Giants - $3,745,695
Pete Alexander - 1911 Philadelphia Phillies - $12,009,469
Babe Ruth - 1915 Boston Red Sox - $8,866,707
Jesse Haines - 1920 St. Louis Cardinals - $6,888,506
Red Ruffing - 1925 Boston Red Sox - $4,812,201
Dizzy Dean - 1932 St. Louis Cardinals - $7,612,075
Bob Feller - 1936 Cleveland Indians - $1,839,348
Hal Newhouser - 1940 Detroit Tigers - $2,312,913
Warren Spahn - 1946 Boston Braves - $3,584,390
Hoyt Wilhelm - 1952 New York Yankees - $4,364,124
Don Drysdale - 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers - $2,173,430
Juan Marichal - 1960 San Francisco Giants - $2,674,144
Don Sutton - 1966 Los Angeles Dodgers - $6,639,376
Bert Blyleven - 1970 Minnesota Twins - $4,221,669
Dennis Eckersley - 1975 Cleveland Indians - $4,822,166
John Smoltz - 1988 Atlanta Braves - $749,755
Pedro Martinez - 1993 Los Angeles Dodgers - $3,192,119
Roy Halladay - 1999 Toronto Blue Jays - $2,618,917

Each Hall of Famer drafted will have all of his teammates from his rookie season added to the draft pool. In addition, there will be six additional teams added to the draft pool. There will be one team added from each of the following time periods:

1885-1889
1890-1894
1895-1899
2000-2004
2005-2009
2010-2014

These teams will be algorithmically generated based on the total salary of the Hall of Famers selected.*

Players are exclusive, so a player that appears on rosters for multiple years will only have the earliest eligible to be drafted. If a player winds up being on two teams that share a year (only possible in the initial draft), the owner may select which version they want, but will be charged the highest salary for that team.

When there are 24 signups, the owners will be randomized into a draft order. When an owner is up to draft, they may do one of two things: Select their choice of Hall of Famer from the list OR defer their pick to the end of the round, getting priority in the back half of the snake (where all of the other players in the draft pool are available).

* I am the only person who knows the algorithm before the initial draft. This could be considered an advantage, so I cannot elect to be the person who drafts a HoFer last and gets the first pick of the snake draft. If that is the case, I will take the 23rd pick in the HoF round and 2nd pick in the snake round. I will also share the algorithm with the first three owners who select HoF players, so they can confirm that it was calculated correctly.

After the first two rounds, each round will progress with the lowest cumulative salary drafting first, recalculated after each round. For drafting purposes only, a player with a partial and a combined season will have the highest salary season used as the salary.

The Basics: I would like to get to 24 teams, 4/4/4 divisions with wild card, but I'm open to starting this off with as few as 16 teams. Regardless of league size, there will be No DH, no AAA, no WW, trades allowed until game 120.

Alignment: Season 1 will be based on cumulative salary - highest in NL East, lowest in AL West. Realignment is subject to owner consensus.

I originally proposed that later seasons would have the division winner stay, with other teams divided into quartiles based on previous season's record and then ordered by cumulative salary (if the NL East winner in Season 1 has the 4th highest salary among the division winners in Season 2, the NL East would get the team with the 4th highest salary in the other three quartiles).

Keepers: Keep however many you want. Players not kept vanish into the ether to be added to the draft pool when their teams come up. Teams retain rights to players that miss seasons.

Draft Pool: Seasons without any players that are 5 or more seasons removed from the last season in the database will be grouped chronologically into 6 pools of relatively equal size. The season and team selected from each pool will be algorithmically generated based on the sum of the highest cumulative salary and the lowest cumulative salary. Players from these six team-seasons that are not already owned will be available to draft. The identities of these teams will be distributed after rosters are submitted but before the league starts.

Draft Order: All non-playoff teams will be included in a weighted lottery (details TBD) for the top 5 picks so long as the team has won 40+ games. Teams with fewer than 40 wins will get the 6th, etc. picks based on most wins. The remaining non-playoff teams will be seeded based on worst record first, with playoff teams behind them based on elimination round. The second and subsequent rounds will be based on straight record for the non-playoff teams, with the order for playoff teams being the same.

Special rules for Face of the Franchise: A player remains the Face of the Franchise until he is no longer on the active roster for a season. Each team must choose the ballpark of the Face of the Franchise as their home park. If the Face of the Franchise is cut/traded/inactive, a new Face must be identified for the next season. Only certain players are eligible to be the Face:

Highest hitting salary
Highest pitching salary
Highest $/PA
Highest $/IP
Any Hall of Famers not covered by these categories.

If a Face does not have a valid home ballpark, the team must play in WIS Stadium. Team names should contain a reference to the Face or one of his nicknames.

Miscellany: I'm HOPING average cumulative salary will be in the $90-100M range over the long term. If this winds up not being the case, I may schedule a vote to change the number of teams in the draftable player pool each season.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? I know there's a wall of text here, but there's not that much going on here (at least by the standards of my normal league proposals). If there's something that's not clear, please let me know so I can attempt to get you an answer.

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1. reddtrain
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I think you have the years wrong about the time period where there is no HOF pitchers. There are multiple HOF pitchers that debuted from 1985-1989(Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz to name a few).

Posted by epup1975 on 8/9/2022 2:56:00 AM (view original):
I think you have the years wrong about the time period where there is no HOF pitchers. There are multiple HOF pitchers that debuted from 1985-1989(Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz to name a few).

I could have sworn I double-checked that. But you're absolutely right - it's the period 1980 to 1984 where no pitching HoFs had their debut season in WIS. Apologies for the confusion.

I like the idea, it's certainly creative. A couple questions/thoughts:

1. Why re-calculate the draft order after each round based on salary? Won't that just allow the top teams to pick high each round, assuming they just draft good players with low salary their first season? Also seems really complicated and will slow the draft down a lot.
2. Any thoughts to considering a smaller league, even down to 12 teams? Seems hard to fill a 24-team league for something unique like this.
3. Realigning divisions each season makes it impossible to build rivalries. I personally like the competition with the same teams each season, plus you can plan around seasons you can compete.

Just some thoughts, I might end up joining but will hold out for now.

Also, just looking at some of the players and Miller Huggins got into the HOF as a manager - maybe that shouldn't count?

1. Why re-calculate the draft order after each round based on salary? Won't that just allow the top teams to pick high each round, assuming they just draft good players with low salary their first season? Also seems really complicated and will slow the draft down a lot.

I've played in leagues where the draft runs like this - it doesn't slow things down as much as you'd think because, by the time you get close to the end of a given round, you know the order of the first few teams in the next round. It also adds a layer of strategy in trying to balance drafting for this year as opposed to drafting for the future (and grabbing more of those low-salaried guys).

2. Any thoughts to considering a smaller league, even down to 12 teams? Seems hard to fill a 24-team league for something unique like this.

I've not played in any 12 team leagues here, so I'm not sure if there's an appetite for a league that small. However, I'd definitely consider 16 or 20 teams if that makes it easier to fill. It should be relatively easy to do expansion with this league since there are no hard-and-fast constraints on the player pool.

3. Realigning divisions each season makes it impossible to build rivalries. I personally like the competition with the same teams each season, plus you can plan around seasons you can compete.

I always found it frustrating to be in a division with a team that was going to be very strong for several seasons, knowing that it would be very difficult to qualify for the playoffs. I'm open for limited/no realignment if the other owners prefer that.

[4.] Also, just looking at some of the players and Miller Huggins got into the HOF as a manager - maybe that shouldn't count?

That is a fair question, but honestly I think people would be more likely (albeit only slightly) to draft Huggins over the next-highest salary in that pod (Joe Tinker). Huggins has more $4M+ seasons (5) than Tinker (3).

I was also trying to go for an objective criteria for each HoF season. I also didn't want to introduce any subjectivity into the process - I'm sure most owners would prefer to see Maddux in the draft pool over Smoltz, for example - but with the same standard all the way across it would be easier to defend a decision.