Sorry for the grammar in the title, it is due to the limitations on letters in the dang twitter age (also known as the fall of civilzation, but I digress).

So...I was putting together my team in the inaugural draft for a progressive league - normal, straight-up prog starting in 1963.

My team:

C Elston Howard, Ron Brand, Cam Carreon
1B Lee Thomas, Ed Kranepool
2B Tony Taylor, Chuck Hiller
3B Pete Ward
SS Dick Groat, Dick Howser
OF Billy Williams, Curt Flood, Tito Francona, Hector Lopez, Willie Kirkland

P Camilo Pascual, Gary Peters, Steve Barber, Billy O'Dell (rotation)
P Al McBean, Joe Gibbon, Don Larsen, Lew Burdette, Dave Morehead, Roy Face (bullpen)

All players are 1963.

Now, with all respect to my players, especially the few good ones (I joined the league after the first few rounds had already been drafted for the team): Howard, Groat, Ward, Billy Williams, Curt Flood and Pascual, Peters and maybe Face among the pitchers, I think we can all agree that this is not the 1927 Yankees.

Yet once 25 players had been drafted and while I await word of the prog league ID number, I am told by the draft center that I am over the salary cap and so when I looked I realized I had a $96 mil team !!

Seriously. I remember when $100 mil got you Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson. Either I am seriously underestimating my team's chances or the old rule that an $80 mil OL team has great historical players that perform badly because an $80 mil team - all the OTHER teams in other words, are miles above any historical team that ever took the field.

What am I missing here? Is $100 mil the new $80 mil? I haven't played an OL team for a while, so maybe people are finding some very great HOF players for 20% less than I am paying to have Pete Ward at third, a fourth starter I never heard of before and Lee Thomas instead of Lou Gehrig at 1B.

Salary escalation took an open league team up around $90M, perhaps a tick north of that, IMO...'85 Willie McGee was an open league staple, now is above $9.5M. Many of Tim Raines' seasons are $7M and above, way higher than pre dynamic pricing.

Yes there are examples of players whose salary remained the same or dropped, but most of the heavily used open league players are no longer affordable at the $80M price point.

My happy place is $100-120M, which amounts to what had been a slightly amped up open league team.

ITYS

Italyprof, I'm jealous...my team's only at 89M! And I have Drysdale!

Well if so this is a good outcome, in the sense that OL league teams can't be superstar teams so easily anymore. Assuming this is an across-the-board thing. There always were cookies, and I assume there still are in OLs. But if an OL team is more like a decent average team that is a better learning process for newcomers here and more of a challenge to veterans.

How many of those guys are full-time players, though? I don't remember 1963 that well. But an average 80mil team with four 500PA guys on the bench seems like it would be pushing 95mil.

Here is another thing I noticed changed from OLs
I hadn't played this in 10 years, and my typical rotation would be 4 drafted SPs between 200-225 innings, and use my AAA pitcher as a 5th starter and he'd usually be good for around 150 innings, although effectiveness was hit or miss. Now my understanding is that your "starter" is like a 50-60 inning pitcher. Is this something that changed recently or did I just remember things wrong?

Posted by TulsaG on 5/20/2020 7:02:00 PM (view original):
Here is another thing I noticed changed from OLs
I hadn't played this in 10 years, and my typical rotation would be 4 drafted SPs between 200-225 innings, and use my AAA pitcher as a 5th starter and he'd usually be good for around 150 innings, although effectiveness was hit or miss. Now my understanding is that your "starter" is like a 50-60 inning pitcher. Is this something that changed recently or did I just remember things wrong?

That changed about 8-10 years ago, 2011 or 2012, I think. You can still get occasionally useful SP, but they’re a spot starter at best and usually better used in a relief or mopup role. If I get more than 60 useful innings from a AAA pitcher I consider it a really good haul.

I'm at 58M in that same league and was surprised my team doesn't look as awful as I expected. You must have powerhouse.

Dannino and dbrom, I hear you both and don't mean to complain. But look at my players: Lee Thomas is my first baseman in 1963, I think he has 9 homers on the year in RL.

Yes, Billy Williams is very good and so is Curt Flood and Groat still have something left in him. Elston Howard hit 28 homers in RL that year, so he is my real power hitter on the team.

And the pitchers are good but not awesome.

As to jfranco77's insightful question, yes there is something to that, but Howser, Hiller, Lopez, Kirkland and Carreon are 300-400 PA guys, not really full time, Kranepool has 200+ PA. So it IS a good bench. But again, a $96 mil team this?

Ask yourself how many of these players you would ever draft FOR an OL team - maybe Flood, Howard and perhaps Peters. I mean the team is nice enough and I hope I have made it competitive in the league, given that I took over drafting in, I think round 17 or something of the inaugural draft. If it did not have Flood and Roy Face it would lack poetry aesthetically, but that is another matter. I will try to report back on how it does in the 1963 season.

Well, my original reaction when I took over the team mid-draft was that the previous owner had drafted to have some success early on and then likely leave the league since most of the starters did not play even 5-6 years with the exception of Williams.

Apparently he may have been more successful than I realized, since I added up the Win Shares attributed for the 1963 season to the performances of the players on the team and they come to a startling 337 !!

That means that this team, if the players performed as they did in real life, could be expected all other things being equal to win 112 games.

I guess it is a $96 mil team. It will suck in 1967 when I will have to go begging for bench players to fill in at starting positions cause they all retired, but I guess for now I SHOULD have a winner.

If these guys HAD added up to $80 mil in the older pricing system, would anyone have drafted this team though? I wonder. Anyway, I will report back, having inherited (mostly) a 1963 contender.