I recently came across a proposed world theme in my Google Drive account that was batted about in FYC a number of seasons ago, and it still looks like something that I'd like to try out. However, the best way to do that is to find 32 owners who are interested and start from scratch with these rules (or something similar.) It would require all 32 teams being pretty active on this site, but could be a lot of fun under the right circumstances. Check out the initial proposal below and let me know your thoughts and/or if you're interested.

Franchise/Park Selection

Owners will select franchise, park, and division of their choice from among those available when openings present themselves. Owners may choose among ballparks available to them at anytime.

Player Draft Structure

Owners will be assigned a number between 1-32 and an online randomizer will be used to determine player draft order. The draft will occur in a snake style fashion with picks being made 1-32 and then 32-1. The draft will take place for ten rounds every three seasons.

All players are eligible to be drafted in the player draft except for those protected by a franchise or eligible for free agency in the current season. Franchises may draft their own players.

No team may exceed $100M in total budget during the draft (returning players plus players drafted). If a team exceeds $100M in total budget, the player selection causing the budget overdraft will be voided. The franchise may draft a minor league contract player in their place.

The draft may have an agreed upon time limit or schedule. Those who fail to make an eligible draft choice before the completion of their draft time slot, may be passed by other owners once their schedule draft time slot is available.

Franchise Player

All franchises will be allowed to protect one player on their roster. Thus, removing the protected player from player draft pool.

Budget Requirements

All teams will must use the following minimum guidelines in regards to their budget.

Prospect $10M

Coaches $10M

Scouting $32M (any combination of the four categories)

Training $12M

Medical $12M

Free Agent Negotiations

No trade clauses are forbidden when negotiating with free agents.

Amateur Draft

TBD

International Free Agency

All IFA

Prospect Development

All prospects, International Free Agents or Amateur Draft, must remain in the appropriate minor league level for a minimum of two full seasons unless selected in the player draft.

Maintaining Minors

All teams are required to have a fully functioning minor league system for the sake of protecting talent development in the league.

Owner Participation

By participating, it is understood by owners that they understand this style of league does require time to plan and participate in the preseason. It should also be understood by owners that communication and patience are important to respect others participation.

League Procedures

In order to adopt a proposed rule or league action, 16 current owners must vote in favor of the measure within 7 days of the called vote. In order for a proposed rule to be put to the league for a vote, the proposal must be submitted to the commissioner with a minimum of three co-sponsors.

Any team that finishes with less than 50 wins in a season will be removed from the world. If an owner fails to win 180 games, over a 3-year period, the league will vote whether to replace the owner at the end of the third regular season and before the next season begins.

Owners that accomplish a greater than or equal to 15+ seasons, a greater than or equal to .530+ winning percentage, greater than or equal to 6 division titles, and a greater than or equal to 2 World Series titles in the world will be eligible for the Owner's HOF. Induction is automatic after having met the qualifications listed above; however, no more than one owner is admitted into the Owner's HOF per season. If two or more owner's have met the qualifications for induction in the same season, the induction criteria will be used by the commissioner to determine the order of induction for the qualifying owners. Once an owner is inducted, no change in the initial qualifications will remove an owner from the Owner's HOF.

If an owner is found to have violated the intent of the rules, the owner may be asked to step aside and allow someone to take their place in the league.

List of Owners Interested:
1. myself (bruinsfan911)
2. brickyard9
3. ericschmidt
4. shobob
5. cwaldenj
6. kersh03
7. deathinahole
8. kahrtmen
9. tmfran
10. hirschjt
11. bmsetterstro
12. pwessler
13. mgd64
14. foulballz
15. MaddMattyIce
16. thewheaties
17. jlittle523
18. fflgopher
19. kujayhawker
20. erbgotti
21. raiders91sc
22. billhowell75
23. kevmax100
24. groth911
25. captain10a
26. statman527
27. themojoking
28. easona
29. loudawg10
30. ksbb

Not sure of your comments about prospect development and about must remain in appropriate minor league level for 2 years. Generally very young players are kept in the minors until they have to be put on the 40 man roster, but older players drafted out of college may be able to speed up the ML in less that 2 seasons. So this needs some clarification. I think we should have a forum on each section of the rules to clarify and to fine tune each one so each of us know for sure what it means.

Franchise/Park Selection- Because of situations such as stud players on minimum contracts and terrible contracts, you would have to pick to get teams as well. Possibly you could do the franchise selection and reversew it for the player draft.
Prizes- If you are going to do anything other than the standard WIS prizes such as gift cards, make sure to kick owners out who intentionally violate rules such as FA over spending. If you keep to WIS prizes, the dropping of player would work.

Posted by obiewon777 on 3/12/2018 12:01:00 PM (view original):
Not sure of your comments about prospect development and about must remain in appropriate minor league level for 2 years. Generally very young players are kept in the minors until they have to be put on the 40 man roster, but older players drafted out of college may be able to speed up the ML in less that 2 seasons. So this needs some clarification. I think we should have a forum on each section of the rules to clarify and to fine tune each one so each of us know for sure what it means.

I totally agree obie...do you think it would be more beneficial to do this before or after we have a group of 32 worked out?

I have just spent some time going through my sitemail messages and this forum to gather a list of the questions and potential issues that have been raised and will attempt to address them here. In retrospect, it looks like most of them arise from the fact that this was originally an idea to spice up an existing world and we are now talking about creating a new world which would create issues unforeseen when this was written. Please let me know if you have any further questions...or just feel free to weigh in below.

1. Are we filling out the roster with whoever else is on the team after the 10 round player draft? As I recall, this was the intention originally, but if we don't want to do it that way this time around we don't have to. That being said, it probably is the most simple solution.

2. How do we choose who gets each team? This is one of those issues that we didn't think about before since the world already existed and people already had teams...adding in a franchise draft at the beginning seems like the most logical and fair way to go about this. I like the idea of reversing the order of the franchise draft for the player draft as well.

3. Draft logistics. It was suggested to me via sitemail to "Set it up as an online draft via JoinMe/WebEx/some similar software and have the draft live. Anyone that cannot make the draft sends a list of their preferred order of draft." I think that idea makes a lot of sense, but I am open to suggestions for which platform/software to use. The other, less appealing, option would be to do the draft on a forum site (either a new thread on here or an external website.)

As for the timing of this draft after the first season, I do think that the playoffs of the season prior to the switch (ie if we decide to do a draft every 3 seasons, we should conduct the draft itself in the playoffs of year 2) is a good idea. That way, all necessary trades etc can happen during the offseason of the appropriate season.

4. Is the Player Draft just ML rosters or the whole franchise? Re-reading the way we had the rule written, I believe that it was intended to be the whole franchise and then the point of the franchise player was for people to be able to protect their top prospects or MVP-caliber players. If people would prefer that it only apply to ML rosters going forward, I see no issue with that. ***NOTE: Based on tmfran's suggestion below, I think we should revise this rule to cover 1 ML player and 1 prospect. That seems more than reasonable and would allow for both scenarios outlined above to be covered***

5. Prize Considerations. For reasons that pwesseler outlined above, I seem to remember that we were going to stick to the traditional WIS prizes. I do like his suggestion of having to drop a player for rule violations.

6. Minor League Rule Clarification. From what I remember, this rule was intentionally somewhat vague to allow for different management strategies to be used. What that is essentially saying is that each prospect has to be in the minors for at least 2 full seasons before being called up, but they can start year 3 on the ML roster. It matters less what exact level of the minors they play in than that they aren't called up before fully ready. If memory serves, there were several fairly new owners in the world where this was being proposed at the time so this was more to prevent experienced owners from being able to take future stars off their hands when said future stars were called up by the inexperienced owners before they were ready and performed badly at the ML level. If we get a group of 32 experienced owners in on this proposal we might not need this rule, or we can modify it to fit our needs.

7. Cap on Players Taken from One Team in Player Draft. This is definitely a good idea...my instinct would be to set the cap at 5 players, but I'm willing to adjust up or (more likely) down depending on majority rule and/or advice from previous experiences with this sort of theme.

The return of foulballz!

Posted by pwesseler on 3/12/2018 9:23:00 PM (view original):
Franchise/Park Selection- Because of situations such as stud players on minimum contracts and terrible contracts, you would have to pick to get teams as well. Possibly you could do the franchise selection and reversew it for the player draft.
Prizes- If you are going to do anything other than the standard WIS prizes such as gift cards, make sure to kick owners out who intentionally violate rules such as FA over spending. If you keep to WIS prizes, the dropping of player would work.

Agreed. First thing first. A franchise selection draft needs to happen before first season.

My 2 cents

1) There will need to be 2 initial drafts. The first will be franchise selection. This will be important for that first season because the draft order will already be in place. Because I doubt admin will allow us to create a brand new world, most likely will we have to take over one of the dead or dying worlds. If they approve this at all. The 2nd draft would be the player draft. I suggestion finding a message board some where to use for the drafts.

2) If we plan on having a player draft every 3 seasons then there some be a cap as to how many players each franchise could lose. Also I think it would be reasonable to allow a team to protect one ML player and one minor leaguer.
This draft also poses a problem because we cant pause the world once it rolls, so when do we draft? Maybe during the playoffs the previous season?

Posted by tmfran on 3/14/2018 5:57:00 AM (view original):
My 2 cents

1) There will need to be 2 initial drafts. The first will be franchise selection. This will be important for that first season because the draft order will already be in place. Because I doubt admin will allow us to create a brand new world, most likely will we have to take over one of the dead or dying worlds. If they approve this at all. The 2nd draft would be the player draft. I suggestion finding a message board some where to use for the drafts.

2) If we plan on having a player draft every 3 seasons then there some be a cap as to how many players each franchise could lose. Also I think it would be reasonable to allow a team to protect one ML player and one minor leaguer.
This draft also poses a problem because we cant pause the world once it rolls, so when do we draft? Maybe during the playoffs the previous season?

I have included these concerns into my post above about potential issues. Thanks for bringing these to our attention.

I think it is worth a try, but I highly doubt that admin will give us a brand new world for this. Any progress on getting an existing one?

Posted by shobob on 3/14/2018 9:09:00 AM (view original):
I think it is worth a try, but I highly doubt that admin will give us a brand new world for this. Any progress on getting an existing one?

The way I see it, we've got 3 options:

1) Get an existing world on board with this idea and go from there...I've contacted Gehrig & Champions, as those are the two worlds with 20+ openings right now, and haven't gotten an answer from either yet. However, one of our interested owners (thewheaties) is commish in Pedro Martinez and he has mentioned that he might have an "uphill battle" keeping Pedro afloat. So, I was going to keep an eye on that to see how many openings there are and we might be able to swing it that way.

2) Actually have a brand new world generated...as you noted, this is unlikely but still worth asking for.

3) Once we have 32 owners, we could ask to a) have Draft Tournament World declared as public so we can all join and then shift it to private or b) have one of us installed as the commish of what is currently an empty world and then have that owner send the PW to the other 31 that we've enlisted. At the moment I'm guessing this is the most likely scenario.

Posted by tmfran on 3/14/2018 5:57:00 AM (view original):
My 2 cents

1) There will need to be 2 initial drafts. The first will be franchise selection. This will be important for that first season because the draft order will already be in place. Because I doubt admin will allow us to create a brand new world, most likely will we have to take over one of the dead or dying worlds. If they approve this at all. The 2nd draft would be the player draft. I suggestion finding a message board some where to use for the drafts.

2) If we plan on having a player draft every 3 seasons then there some be a cap as to how many players each franchise could lose. Also I think it would be reasonable to allow a team to protect one ML player and one minor leaguer.
This draft also poses a problem because we cant pause the world once it rolls, so when do we draft? Maybe during the playoffs the previous season?

I have suggested live draft via Webex or some other similar software.
If you can't make the draft, send a list o' players with someone attending.

Death is alive!

Posted by shobob on 3/14/2018 9:09:00 AM (view original):
I think it is worth a try, but I highly doubt that admin will give us a brand new world for this. Any progress on getting an existing one?

The old DTW is still there.

Posted by iain on 3/14/2018 2:10:00 PM (view original):

Posted by shobob on 3/14/2018 9:09:00 AM (view original):
I think it is worth a try, but I highly doubt that admin will give us a brand new world for this. Any progress on getting an existing one?

The old DTW is still there.

What do you mean I don't "see" it