2023 Rule Changes

Topic: 2023 Rule Changes (Read 1274 times) previous topic - next topic

2023 Rule Changes

December 22, 2022, 07:08:25 AM

All,

We have only a few rule changes this year which belies the amount of time it took us to write and revise these. These changes include the following:

We've increased the number of minor league players on one's team to 28 for the 2023 season and 30 for the 2024 season. We want to be at 30 but want to stagger the increase over a two year period.
We have changed the manner in which we calculate the first year of arbitration. Previously we used fWAR from the immediately prior year. We felt that this did not accurately capture a player's value to that point. So we've shifted to career fWAR to date and adjusted the arbitration chart to reflect the change to career fWAR. What this meant is that the ranges for specific salaries moved upwards. While this would have some impact on the top end, we believe that the impact should be minimal for most arbitration-eligible players.
Going forward, players on a salary offset (for whatever reason) will not be eligible for the playoffs. We believe that teams receive a significant benefit in the 50% cut to their salary and are concerned that players with limited AB/IP can have an outsize impact in the playoffs. These players will still be eligible to play in the regular season.
Playoff teams must carry at least 2 catchers. We had an issue this year (impacting me) where Salvador Perez was tossed from a game and I had to start Luis Urias in his place. While nothing problematic happened, we felt that this was a scenario that should be avoided.
We will be implementing version 12a of DMB. It doesn't require any rule change, but wanted to be clear that we are doing this.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #1 – December 22, 2022, 11:48:57 AM

Picadores

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #2 – December 22, 2022, 07:06:56 PM

I am a bit concerned about the changes to the arbitration system. I can understand the concern that just using the previous year's WAR might not fully reflect the "true" value of a player, but this change seems to swing too far in the opposite direction. I don't have the chart from previous years, but I'm more concerned about the inflation in the upper end of the scale. I'm guessing the highest starting salary in the first year of arbitration was around $4 million (given that Juan Soto's salary is $4 million in his first year and that's based on a WAR of 7.0), and now a player like Soto would get an initial offer of $7 million. The idea of arbitration was to mimic arbitration, where the salaries start to move towards what a player gets in free agency, and this adjustment seems just a bit too much.

I understand the concern of some GMs about free agency and pushing more players into free agency quickly. However, I think the arbitration system has been working well as is. Teams that have been good at drafting minor leaguers do get a benefit from that skill, but as I can attest and I think Brendt can now attest to, this is a double-edged sword. Arbitration can really tie the hands and salary cap of a team, which is an indication that teams aren't getting cheap talent. For example, this past off-season, instead of going to arbitration with Lindor, I declined arbitration and then resigned him at a price that was cheaper than arbitration. I have a feeling that increasing the starting values of arbitration will push more teams to do what I did with Lindor, which could be the CO's desire; although I'm not sure if everyone would agree with that.

I guess a comparison of how the old and new system would affect salaries would be nice to see what the true impact of this is, so we can better judge this change.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #3 – December 22, 2022, 10:26:06 PM

I echo Jason's remarks. The change in initial arbitration salaries will result in roughly a $7 million uptick in team salary for the Winds. That total includes a $3M salary offset for Tatis otherwise the increase would be about $10M. This is for only 3 players and 1 of them has no stats. If you want to initiate such a big rule change there should be a ceiling per year with the overage moved to the next year. Obviously there was no way to plan for this year's changes when projecting my 2023 payroll based on my 2022 payroll. It's just a bolt out the blue.

mike

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #4 – December 23, 2022, 06:27:39 AM

I agree. May I ask for a further explanation for the change? It seemed quite fair as it was.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #5 – December 23, 2022, 07:24:13 AM

Yeah, Tatis is a really good example for this discussion. Mike's decision - while certainly a no-brainer (and I understand we're trying to make arb decisions more than that), is a difference of $6M for a guy who didn't even play. Salary offset helps, of course, but that's still brutal.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #6 – December 23, 2022, 08:30:01 AM

I think to be fair, any rule change affecting salary to such an extent should have a one year waiting period. That gives GM's time to plan on the changes. The new rule seems to unfairly penalize the GM for astute or fortuitous player picks while the players were still wet behind the ears, so to speak.

mike

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #7 – December 23, 2022, 08:44:13 AM

I glanced at #2 and without looking at any rosters seems to punish GMs and is an attempt to push players to free agency.

I agree with @Mike Loar that a salary change should be given at least one year's notice.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #8 – December 23, 2022, 11:26:37 AM

As David stated, the CO felt just looking at the previous year WAR was not an accurate representation of the players value and therefore determination of whether or not to offer arbitration.

I can honestly state that Tatis never came up in any of our discussions regarding this topic. This was never about any specific player. Although having said that, we are aware of an example of a player whose arbitration value would have gone DOWN under the new rules (Mullins). I’m sure there are others.

This was a topic that had a lot of conversation between the three of us. This wasn’t something that was done hastily or without a lot of thought. We all agreed using career WAR was a better than previous year WAR as the arbitration baseline. What took time was determining the new scale. Eventually we came to a compromise that we felt made sense. We completely understand that the tiers at the top are going to be a raise compared to the previous system. But we feel this is a better system and more representative of how the arbitration actually works in MLB.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #9 – December 23, 2022, 11:32:45 AM

CO, if this rule is a done deal regardless of how other owners feel about it (which is the CO's prerogative), would you all please at least discuss (maybe again - if you already have) waiting one year to implement it? Though I personally don't have a player affected by it this off-season, I totally understand owners who would appreciate a one-year heads up.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #10 – December 23, 2022, 12:03:38 PM

Implementing a rule with such far-reaching effects without studying the consequences specific to each team and without ample time to allow for GM planning is pretty high-handed IMO. I would feel the same whether my team was affected or not. Bruised egos is not a reason not to reconsider the timeline of implementation.

mike

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #11 – December 23, 2022, 12:51:45 PM

It is a drastic change of salary for some eligible players. Tatis Jr would be $1.0 under the old system and $6 million on the new. Wow.

Having it just the last year as it is now does not seem realistic as the career body of work before that is not considered. It should be changed.

Maybe a compromise. Keep the old grid and make the qualifying measure the average of the two highest previous WAR years. Tatis Jr with 4.2 and 6.6 WARS in 2019 and 2021 would see a 5.4 WAR average and a salary of $3.5

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #12 – December 23, 2022, 03:06:39 PM

I agree with a lot of the points made by my fellow owners here about this change.

First, I agree that if this change goes through (and I hope that the COs reconsider and make adjustments based on the feedback they are getting here), it should be delayed at least one year. There is an implicit contract with the league rules regarding how arbitration works, and teams drafting, promoting, and planning their teams have used that to think about how they sign players, the deals they make, and everything else. Changing arbitration weeks before we go into that process seems to break that implicit contract with the league. jayhawk brings up a good point with Tatis since he could have planned that Tatis would need only a low initial offer this off-season due to this injury last winter. He could plan to have that additional salary space to sign other players either last season or this season.

On the COs idea that looking at last year's WAR might not be the best representation of a player's value, that can be true. I actually don't have as much of a problem with using the career WAR as much as the increases in the salary scale. Again, this seems to be done with the intent of hurting GMs who have been skilled at drafting and promoting minor league players and trying to push more players to free agency quicker. I do find it strange that there wasn't more thought about what the actual consequences of this change would be, by either looking at previous years of free agency or what might happen this year. I know that's one of the first things I thought of and started to do when I saw this idea.

I think Bob's idea of averaging WAR might be a better solution, along with keeping the old scale. I think a weighted average where 50% of the WAR comes from last season, 30% comes from 2 seasons ago and 20% comes from 3 seasons ago. This would shift some of the calculation to thinking about how a player has done for the first 3 seasons but giving weight to more recent production and less to production from the past. I know this might be a bit more challenging to do (since we'll need to actually get 3 figures), but this seems like a doable change, which accomplishes the COs goal of a more accurate representation of a player's value while discounting the past a bit.

I think one of my biggest concerns though is that this is a major change to how the player acquisition and retention system works. While I agree that the COs need to do what's in the best interests of the league, this seems to be one that should involve the input of all owners. As I recall, when arbitration was first introduced, it was because of the input from other owners and not the COs in thinking about how we needed to change the system of minor league promotions. We'll get better buy-in from all owners and fewer hard feelings if everyone gets to have a say in what might happen here, instead of feeling like this decision came from on high and that's that. I want to emphasize that I do think the COs have the best interests of the league, but this is something that needs to be discussed and debated by all owners, and allow the owners to offer suggestions and critiques of the plan so that it meets the needs of the entire league.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #13 – December 23, 2022, 05:04:41 PM

I can appreciate that not everyone will agree with this change. But please don’t suggest that we didn’t put a lot of thought into this.

If my comment about Tatis above gave the impression that anything other than the fact that this was carefully thought out and debated on to come up with what we felt was the best solution then I apologize. But a lot of effort was put into this knowing that it was going to impact some players, especially at the top end. However it solves for some issues that we feel needed to be rectified under the old arbitration system. And for the record, there were other proposals that was discussed - including ditching arbitration completely. But none of us wanted to do that if we could instead make some small changes to the system. We felt this accomplished that.

Re: 2023 Rule Changes

Reply #14 – December 23, 2022, 06:25:27 PM

PS - David is unable to access the forums right now as he is having an issue with his firewall. I have been sharing some of the comments on this thread via screen grabs.

Just wanted to update everyone in case they were trying to reach him through the website.