Like many of us, I love progressives. And like many of us, there are things about progressives I dislike. In the past when I have run leagues, I have mostly prioritized around removing any incentive to tank. That's still important to me. I won't join leagues that use traditional reverse-order-of-finish draft orders, even if they have win floors or lotteries of the bottom X teams or whatever.

But there are other aspects of progs I don't particularly like either. One is the lack of roster turnover. You get lucky enough to draft Ruth, he's yours for his entire career unless you decide to trade him or cut him. There is no free agency in most progressives; in effect WIS progs are similar to MLB pre-1975 when the reserve clause dominated baseball for 100 years. As an economist I don't like the reserve clause, and as a baseball fan I like it even less. In the past I have created a league (still in existence, though I am no longer part of it) that used contract points to limit the number and duration of players you could keep long term. I still like that, but am open to other ways of doing it. One interesting way might be to say that each player has an x% chance of becoming a free agent every year, and we use random.org or some other method to let the chips fall where they may.

Another aspect I don't like is predictability. Yes, we all know that even a full season is a relatively small sample size and that wacky things can happen. But still, if you have Norm Cash you know that 1961 is going to rock and 1964 is not. The Tigers had no such luck. They went into every season knowing that Cash was a really good player, but didn't know if we would give them a good season, an All-Star season, or an MVP season. We have a lot more clarity around that. Similarly, I think about 1-year stars like 1986 Grubb, 1979 Champ Summers, 1974 Buzz Capra...when owners know they are going to get exactly that season, they can plan and draft accordingly. When in real MLB, getting that kind of lightning-in-a-bottle performance is a lucky gift, not something one can reasonably plan for.

I know there have been leagues in the past that used randomness to generate a specific season, rather than following a player chronologically though their career. Can anyone who has played in those leagues advise on (a) how exactly was it done (b) how well did it work? Are there other ways to address this issue?

Would love to hear from other owners on either of the above issues (free agency and/or randomization of career). As well as other things you would like to see done differently in progs. Note that I am NOT asking for programming enhancements from WIS. I am only looking for things that can reasonably done with the simulation that we have.

I like your thinking, free agency is a good idea. Once you get a league going, I’ll join

I'd Love to try a league with as much change and movement as possible. I would actually love to play in a league that encourages trading too. If you get something together please let me know. Id love to try it.

I ran a league a couple years back called the ORP = Once Random Progressive. We did not have Free Agency but did use seasons of players based on a random draw. It only used available WIS seasons and once a season was used it was off-the-board for future draws. It did not allow owners to build a team for a super season since you never knew which season was going to be drawn when. Unfortunately I could not keep enough owners interested in it and it folded.
I'm currently running 2 progressives, The Best First League and The Franchise Soup Progressive. Both very different from the usual progressives. The TBFL does have limited Free Agency which allows for some roster turnover. The FSP requires everyone to maintain a Franchise Soup on their roster every year so some good players are traded or released every year since newly drafted rookies may take the roster spot of an already good player, or players change teams the next year creating 2 or more players playing for the same Franchise.

A while back Italyprof had a post with different ideas on what he'd like to see in new progeressives. I remember one of his ideas was to have every player that won an award, (MVP, CYYOUNG, ROY, GOLDGLOVE etc, etc) become free agents. I thought that was a great idea to get the best players every year to go to different teams and balance out the power every season.

The problem with leagues that take good players away from teams, is those owners don't want to lose them. So, you may be doing what is best for the league and what you'd like but others don't like losing them so they get pee'd and leave.

I've always thought a keeper limit, 15 maybe, would increase turnover and put more on owners drafting ability

I ran a progressive years ago that was called The Crazy 8 Progressive. You could only keep 8 players each season. League only ran a few seasons and folded because of a couple bad actors. I would handle it differently now but the idiots ****** me off and I just ended the league.

let the best of both worlds occur.Have a salary cap of say 80 million.So if you have a Ruth Bonds Williams or Maddux Gibson you must fit their enormous salary into a 80 miilion dollar cap.I just threw that number out.It seems the correlation between winning in progressive and salry is obvious.Agai,i say that without the benfit of a study

I loved bheid408's ORP. I think it eventually sank under its own weight, but it was pretty fun while it lasted. You never knew which season of each player you'd get. One aspect I liked -- if I remember correctly -- was that the draft wasn't too unwieldy in that it didn't try to draw from every season every year. Instead, just a couple of years' rookies were made available (e.g., 1960, 1980).

If you get a good set of owners, a league can be sustained for a long time!

Contrarian, if you start this - I’ll play. Thanks

I had an idea similar to thus a long time ago. I have no time to run a league as a commish. That being said I thought It would be different to have your base league year. All the players would then have a random number generated as to what season they would use. I thought there could be a 40% to use the league base year, 20% to use the previous or next season from the base year and a 10% chance to use the season 2 years prior or 2 years in the future. Of course those percentages could change as well as the span of years. Just some food for thought. I also like the FA element and/or contracts/salary caps and no tanking...,

Ultimate Random as Possible Progressive (URAPP) and sister league Modern Era Random as Possible Progressive (MERAPP) are leagues run by Cheno5 that are random year and include free agency. Shoot him a sitemail. We don’t get a lot of openings but either of them are leagues you’d probably enjoy.

Wow ! A lot of great ideas here. I recall some of my own wackier ones - I am grateful to bheid408 for bringing up one of the less impractical, even if his point about its potential weakness is well taken.

But I was probably premature in the days a few years ago when I was proposing a new prog concept every week. Now serious people are interested and so am I. contrarian23, whatever comes out of this discussion - and we are grateful to you for starting it - please let me know as I would join in a heartbeat.

So....what if we just made ALL players free agents after each season, and had a random draft order. Yes, it's more work, but what the heck, it would fun as hell. You are playing in 1955, get an awful team, next year get Mays and Mantle, the following year you have to make do with the Danny Murtaughs of the world.

The make all awards winners free agents idea does still have some possibility. Of course people would have to join knowing that they would lose their best player if they had a great season, and so presumably would be okay up front with it. The more serious problem, I think is that it could lead to tanking - you bench Babe Ruth for the last 20 games to prevent his being MVP, that sort of thing. Not sure how to prevent that.

I do think that a strict keeper limit could do wonders, and the number of seasons on the roster limit that DiscoDogs suggests might be the key to real turnover. It does mean some drafting of players with great 5 season records and then discarding, but in some ways that happens in real life as well. It would mean a lot of work for the commissioner to keep track of who drafted whom when and how long they have been on the roster.

What if at the end of each season the two highest valued players (using the following season's salaries) on each team go to the two teams just below them in W-L record (with those of the last two teams going to the worst team and the one with the best W-L record respectively)?

If five years is too many because you can plan too well, what if players are free agents after 2 years on the same team. Yes, you might hit the jackpot and get a player who had two mega-seasons, but only if those two correspond to seasons right after a two-year "contract" ends.

Or a keepers list where you can only keep 5 position players and 3 pitchers each season, the rest are free agents.

In all, while any of these might work, the most fun might just be to let everyone be a free agent after every season, with a random draft order.

When I solitaire play OOTP baseball, I often create leagues, draft a team, then do another one, without playing through the season, as team-construction is almost more fun than watching the thing in motion. Here we could do that and still compete in a league with each other.

Keep me posted and informed please. I currently am not in any leagues, nor running any OL teams, but for something innovative like this I would join up and keep it to this one team eschewing my excesses of the past.

Had an idea a while back where everyone would draft 25 exclusive players from the entire WIS database via draft. Thus 25 different players on 24 rosters.
Each season you would have a 24 round draft and you would pick 1 player from everyone else's roster. You could use the same version they used or not, your choice. Only the 600 players that made it onto rosters would make up the draft pool. You could not draft any player you already used. After the 24 rounds are complete everyone would have 1 player left that wasn't chosen. You'd then have a choice to either replace that player with any player that wasn't already in the league, or you could keep that player but you'd have to use a different version of him.