League Rules:
Concept: Start with 20 of the real franchises and their 1977 rosters. In subsequent seasons, each franchise gets the rookies who really came up with that team. For example, Oakland gets Dwayne Murphy and others in 1978, Rickey Henderson and others in 1979, etc, eventually getting McGwire and Canseco... The rookies are assigned based on their first team during their first WIS-eligible season. This is a WIS version of mimicking the real-life farm systems for each franchise.
A player's WIS rookie season defines his first team. That makes it easier to identify the rookies, and also more likely to put a player on the team he was associated with for more of his career. {EDIT: Let's call this the Ryne Sandberg Rule, since he is a good example. Sandberg will belong to the Chicago Cubs, because his first season in WIS was with the Cubs (1982). His 13 games with the Phillies in 1981 do not affect this, since he does not have a WIS entry from 1981. If a player splits his WIS rookie season between two or more teams, he belongs to the franchise that he played his first game with during that WIS rookie season.}
Once a player belongs to a franchise, he stays with that franchise until being traded (in the sim) or cut... it is up to the owners here to be better general managers than their real-life counterparts.
Rookie Drafts: For the six franchises that are not claimed in 1977 (Padres, Giants, Indians, Blue Jays, Yankees, Brewers), their rookies are draft eligible. Obviously the rookie draft will never be very deep, since the rookies will only come from six franchises until the expansions of 1993 and beyond. Rookie draft order will be set by your franchise's sim winning percentage compared to its real-life winning percentage. If your team over-performs compared to real-life, it gets rewarded with better draft position. This should discourage tanking. Playoff teams drop to the bottom four spots of the draft order.
Keepers / Waivers: I'm thinking let everyone keep up to 25 players, using real players for AAA. The catch is that any player who is not on injured reserve (missing from the WIS database for that season) has to appear in at least 5 of your games, or he will be waived and put into the draft pool. So if a good prospect has a lousy season, you can't just park him in AAA the entire season… he has to at least make a few appearances. But it is up to individual owners to police this - if it is your turn to draft and you see that Cincinnati didn't let that crappy young 1970's Mario Soto into 5 or more games, go ahead and draft him! You get rewarded for doing your homework and finding a steal. Edit: The 25 keeper limit includes rookies for the following season. If you are too late posting keepers, they will be assigned based on your player usage in the previous season, so we can get on with the draft. In that case, your keepers will be all your franchise's new rookies, and your returning players with the most (PA+IP) in the current (or recently concluded) sim season.
Since there are not many quality players to choose from in each year's draft, the off-season should move very quickly… if you miss your time slot for the draft, we'll move on to the next owner, and you probably won't be missing out on a player who is worth complaining about anyway. The idea for this league came partly from frustration waiting for a normal progressive to move from season to season, and partly from realizing that sometimes life just gets in the way of doing these drafts.
Extra Pitching: One quirk I would like to include, but other owners can vote this down if it is too unpopular… each team will get one additional pitcher per season, randomly drawn from a pool of moderate-quality pre-1960 pitchers with around 100 IP and around $2.5-3.0 M salaries. The purpose is to bolster the balance of pitching versus offense, since all progressives I've been in have had ridiculous offensive stats. This gives every team one more competent pitcher for the bullpen, or a spot starter, but not someone you would build a team around.
Hall of Fame: If enough owners are interested, we'll cast Hall of Fame ballots for players whose WIS careers have recently ended. I'll try to post career stats for candidates, merging pre-1977 real-life with the progressive's stats. But anyone can nominate a player.
Miscellaneous
- Four 5-team divisions, aligned similar to real life as much as possible.
- No salary cap
- No moving teams / ballparks until after 5 seasons (1981). After that, you can use your 1st round rookie draft pick to move to an available ballpark. But that only changes your ballpark, not your franchise name and available rookies. For example, if no one takes the NY Yankees when the league gets started, then someone can eventually move their franchise to Yankee Stadium. The Boston Red Sox could become the New York Red Sox (imagine that!), with Boggs, Clemens, etc coming up in the farm system. A team that has moved cannot move again for at least 5 seasons.
- DH in AL only
- Trades are mostly unrestricted, but subject to veto by 6 owners. Limit on trading draft picks or rookies too far out in the future - you can't trade a 1983 rookie or draft pick until the 1981 season ends.
- For players who missed 1977 in WIS, but were not rookies when they returned later, they go into the rookie draft pool when they return. They do not belong to a team first.