I love progressive leagues but I hate the long drawn out initial drafts....it is a burden on me as the commish and I know it is exhausting to the participants as well. Does anybody know of a different format that is quicker/simpler but still is fair when it comes to distributing talent?

As far as I know no such thing exists but I would love to have a group brainstorming session to come up with ideas.....

Something I have never seen, but I have toyed with the idea, is bundling players into groups. It would be a little more upfront work for the commissioner, but would radically shorten the draft.

For example, say you're starting with a 16 team league, some season prior to expansion. You might select a group of about 96 or 112 players (6 or 7 rounds worth) that would comprise the draft pool. All other players would be grouped into bundles, ideally with a relatively even distribution of position players, pitchers, etc. Those bundles would be selected as a group. You could stick the parks in the bundles too.

So say we're doing 1946...it's an 8 round draft. Each owner will pick 7 individual players (drawn from the 112 that you set aside...this would be Musial, Williams, Spahn, Feller, etc.). And each owner will pick one bundle, to be used to fill out their roster. Yes, some bundles might be better than others, so you might want to select one earlier in the draft.

You could just draft a franchise and use their actual roster from your chosen first season.

Posted by evil_twin on 2/12/2021 3:37:00 PM (view original):
You could just draft a franchise and use their actual roster from your chosen first season.

You could...there are many franchise-based progressives...but you definitely have to address the competitive imbalance thing.

Posted by contrarian23 on 2/12/2021 3:52:00 PM (view original):

Posted by evil_twin on 2/12/2021 3:37:00 PM (view original):
You could just draft a franchise and use their actual roster from your chosen first season.

You could...there are many franchise-based progressives...but you definitely have to address the competitive imbalance thing.

One idea I had to deal with the competitive balance issue for a franchise progressive is to use a discounted cash flow formula to create a present value for each player, using future salaries as the cash flows.

You could set a max cap on the total present value of each team’s keepers. That way an owner must make cost/benefit decisions on each potential player he wants to keep.

Also, if you were doing this in the expansion era and allowing only 12 or 16 teams in the league, you could have a short draft to pick up players from the unclaimed franchises. Results from the present value calculations could set the draft order to give teams with lesser future potential to draft first in order to offset some of the difference.

NPV is (in my opinion) a very useful way to think about players in a progressive, and was one of the primary ways I valued players, prior to dynamic pricing.

Me too......

I like retiredfart's idea of using AAA and then just keeping some of the guys you've gotten from AAA. Maybe in a draft. So everyone gets 60/20 and then you keep 5 or 10, and have a draft for guys owned by more than one team. Need to be careful that it doesn't get too unbalanced though - be careful with the SIlver Kings of the world.

Alternatively, do a dual-season single-season franchise where everyone nominates one, and then you randomize what everyone gets. So you can do 1940/2000 or whatever, 12 of each get nominated and then you randomize from there.

I also really enjoyed the league everyone picks their starting team/year and players progress. Maybe combine that with randomization. BUt that can be a huge headache to keep track of. Someone has the 28 Yankees and then they keep all those players and draft from 1929 the next year, but anyone else already owned isn't available.