Brothers, I just painfully allocated 80 contract points to the 23 players I have drafted up to now. That leaves 10 points, one for each player I draft from now on.
Tough choices. Great league.
Compliments to contrarian23. We are WAY out of our comfort zone here.
Some thoughts:
1. If we draft players with good years in 1899 or 1900, while there is a chance those seasons will never get used, those are also ideal players for 1-year contracts. When we hit 1902, the 1899 years is gone (but 1904 becomes a 10% possibility). So there is a 30% chance that a players in 1901 will use a pre-1901 season. The 1900 season moves down from 20% to 10% when we move up a year to 1902, but that still means that over two seasons that we play 1901-2 there is a 15% chance (contrarian23 did I have to multiply something ? Have I calculated incorrectly?) of the 1900 season being used in 1901 or 1902. So a good 1900 player may be worth a 2-year contract. Maybe.
2. The 1903 and beyond players are the real heartache. Some of them are really, really good. But you need to a 3-year contract minimum to get to a 40% chance of the 1903 season happening. Their later seasons grow in importance and likelihood oddswise as we move forward in seasons, BUT you have to have given them a long enough contract to make those relevant. At the same time, their seasons are always potentially two-years ahead of our playing seasons, so let's say you have a player you signed for five years now, who does not even show up in WIS until 1903 but have a great 1905 season you want. You have to decide: 3-year contract, so that the odds of them playing for me using their 1903-5 seasons is 70% by the time I hit 1903 (40% 1903 at that point, 20% 1904, 10% 1905), and so the really really good 1905 season is at least a possibility, or is that a waste of 2 contract points beyond the minimum just to have a 10% chance at that players' great season? Otherwise, you can go with 5-year contract, be sure that in 1905 itself you have the 40% chance of that great season happening, though 60% chance it won't, and in the meantime have had the 10% shot at it in 1903 and 20% chance for it in 1904. But that is 4 points over the minimum and over that time there was never better than a 40% chance, and so over the three year period well under a 40% chance to ever have that season from that player.
3. On the other hand, as we go forward, we get closer to the seasons when these players are useful as opposed to the advantage of being great for 1-2 year contracts in the case of the 1899-1900 players, or advancing historically, those from previous seasons already played. As they fall away, they free up points, so we have to calculate that we will have freed up contract points each year BY trying those players at the same time, which may leave us willing to take a few risks on the players who appear two years from now and only get good 3-5 years in the future. Maybe.
4. The players who have great careers and whom we want to give long-term contracts to. But how long? Until 1914? That is the temptation for me with Johnny Evers. But 14 points is a real drag on the rest of the "budget" - bordering on an A-Rod drag. But why HAVE a player this good if you are not going to get a significant part of his career happening for your team? And the great advantage of long-term contracts to great players is their consistency: it matters whether you get this particularly great season of course, but the chances of you getting a very good season from them regularly means you can worry less about the "coin toss" of the random table each year at least for them. Stan Musial, Eddie Murray, players like these who played every year, rarely missed large sections of seasons, are a gem in this league. BUT, you only have 90 points to allocate. Have Stan Musial on a 17-year contract? Great. You have 73 points to work with at the start. As they use years of course, that burden is lessened, as you free up a year contract point for someone else.
Probably many or most of you have already thought this through. But since I just spent nearly an hour going through the likely allocation of contracts I thought I would share my thoughts on the process. AND
not-whine about putting myself in a box ((see video link below) since if there is a 1903-starting player I want in the rest of this inaugural draft I have to draft them with only a 10% likelihood they will get used (some will though and I THINK - bad at math again - that the more of such players we draft the more chance of at least one of them hitting the jackpot even with 10% odds - right? If you have to roll a 1 on a ten-sided die, and you roll ten times, you will still not get a 1 in 10 tries, and the chances on each roll remain 10%, but you will eventually roll a 1 if you roll often enough) then I will have to take a contract year from someone else or live with the 10% odds for 1901 and then release the player to be good for some other team.
5. As happens in real life baseball. Bet Minnesota wishes they had allocated more points to David Ortiz. I know as a Yankees fan I wish they had.
6. About whining:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8fem_aVbgI
5/12/2020 6:04 AM (edited)