Mutiny Simulation Baseball

•   GMs will be rewarded/penalized if any player exceeds their playing time limits (Total Plate Appearances or Total Batters Faced) as follows:
o   If no players exceed 115%, that GM will receive a supplemental draft pick between the second and third round of the upcoming minor league draft.
o   If at least one player exceeds 115% but not more than 130%, that GM will receive a supplemental draft pick between the fourth and fifth round of the upcoming minor league draft.
o   If at least one player exceeds 130% but not more than 150%, that GM will receive a supplemental draft pick between the sixth and seventh round of the upcoming minor league draft.
o   If at least one player exceeds 150% but not more than 200%, that GM will not be impacted.
o   If at least one player exceeds 200%, that GM will lose their third-round pick in the upcoming minor league draft. 
o   Note that the order of picks will be based on last year’s record and only one supplemental pick may be received per year.

Just a quick observation on the player exceeding 200% and losing a 3rd round pick. Here's an example. It's near the end of the season and I need to stretch my IP. I have a SP who threw 3 2/3 innings for the season and I slot him to start. I set my MP for a quick pull but the bum throws a solid 6 2/3 IP before the Sim manager pulls him. A 3rd round pick seems like a high cost for 1/3 IP.

I understand the concept of the rule and we don't want anyone abusing 20 AB's of Babe Ruthian stats. But it can be tough squeezing out playing time for guys with minimal AB's or IP.

David, one note on the language used regarding the PTL rewards/penalties: Using the phrase "at least" in the wording, are you saying if ALL of my players exceed 115% but stay under 130% I'll actually be rewarded for that?

1. We've revised the rules to reflect that tiebreakers will be resolved similarly to MLB's rules.  No more game 163.

2. We've had a number of owners asking why we don't allow trading cash in this league.  To be honest, I don't think any of us remember why we don't; maybe something to do with the difficulty of keeping track.  But likewise we have pro-rating which can be difficult to track and, at least in a couple of instances this summer, teams were structuring trades so that some players were traded with pro-rating in one trade and some players were traded without pro-rating in a separate trade.  Technically in compliance with our rules, but seemed a weird thing to force teams to go through those extra steps.  So we're doing away with pro-rating altogether and adding the ability for teams to trade current-year cash and to be able to re-trade that cash to other teams.  At the end of the year, all cash traded will be reset to the original team.

4.a. We are going to revise the schedule and playoff structure somewhat.  Rather than an unbalanced 158 game season, we will move to a balanced 152 game season in which each team will play every other team 8 times.  Given that we are now only playing about 94% of a major league season, PTL will go down to 100% for batters and pitchers though batters will still retain 110% PTL against RHP and LHP.
4.b. We are also going to move from our current playoff structure to one where each one the two leagues sends their top team to the playoffs and the next 6 playoff teams are the 6 teams with the next best records.

3. Free agency is changing somewhat to deal with the clusterf&*k that has been week 6.  Rather than having unlimited nominations in week 6, we are revising the number of available players in each round according to the list below but also adding a week 7 that will be a snake style draft in which any player selected will be automatically given a base level $250k contract (which you may select for one to three years).  The new numbers of slots are as follows:

• Week 1 remains at 20
• Week 2 remains at 25
• Week 3 remains at 30
• Week 4 goes down to 35 from 40
• Week 5 goes down to 40 from 45
• Week 6 goes down to 45 from unlimited

5. To help address PTL (and potentially keep owners more involved towards the tail end of the season), we are adding a bunch of carrots and one stick involving PTL.  I'm just going to reprint the language from the rulebook here:

Quote

•   GMs will be rewarded/penalized if any player exceeds their playing time limits (Total Plate Appearances or Total Batters Faced) as follows:
o   If no players exceed 115%, that GM will receive a supplemental draft pick between the second and third round of the upcoming minor league draft.
o   If at least one player exceeds 115% but not more than 130%, that GM will receive a supplemental draft pick between the fourth and fifth round of the upcoming minor league draft.
o   If at least one player exceeds 130% but not more than 150%, that GM will receive a supplemental draft pick between the sixth and seventh round of the upcoming minor league draft.
o   If at least one player exceeds 150% but not more than 200%, that GM will not be impacted.
o   If at least one player exceeds 200%, that GM will lose their third-round pick in the upcoming minor league draft. 
o   Note that the order of picks will be based on last year’s record and only one supplemental pick may be received per year.

6. We are adding in-season free agency.  Any players is available at any time in a $500k/one year contract as long as you have cap and roster space.

I think this can be helpful, and should make trading a bit easier (since you could just trade the cash to balance a trade). I do wonder about the accounting for this, but that's why I'm not a commissioner who needs to deal with it.

Again, I might be tilting at windmills, but I know I'm always concerned about PTL against LHP and RHP. I agree with the idea that we don't want four amazing PAs against LHP to make a player into Babe Ruth. However, last season, I know that I had problems with Gleyber Torres, a full-time player (he played in 158 games and had 672 plate appearances), but because of the Yankees' schedule, he only had 128 PAs against LHP. If you make a player a regular, he's most likely going to need between 180 to 200 PAs against LHP and between 450 to 500 PAs against RHP. Given this, even though Torres is a regular, he won't be able to start 100% of the time against LHP. I don't know if there is a way to do this, but I think once a player gets over a certain number of plate appearances against a handedness of pitching, they can go over the limit until they hit the overall playing limit. This might be an accounting nightmare, but I know that this is an issue I have. The other part is that we can't control what our opponents pitch at us. It wasn't this league, but in another league, I was in, 40% of the time, I was facing LHP. There was no way to handle playing time when you get imbalances like that.

How many rounds would the draft last in week 7?

Depending on how long that draft is, I wonder about the viability of the in-season free agency (or at least the price of signing a free agent). I agree with the in-season free agency (I favored this in a discussion earlier), but what will the pool of players be like? I feel it will be the dregs of baseball, with some players having a marginal value but not much of a value. Should we have the price of signing them to $250K for the rest of the season? That's the going rate for these replacement-level players (at least if we use the price from week 7 of free agency). If the idea is to have teams have better planning during free agency, I guess that's a reason, but since you can't count on signing players during in-season free agency, that's a risky strategy for a GM to pursue.

As for the draft picks for playing time, I guess, I don't know. I understand the reasoning, but I feel we keep throwing picks into the draft that have very little to do with how the teams perform on the field. We already penalize teams for going over playing limits with the performance penalties that DMB throws onto players. I agree that most teams would gain a pick from this plan, and not many teams would be penalized (I would have been, but looking at my team, I think one of my roster changes never went through on pitchers, and I never noticed). So, I guess I'm "meh" about this idea, although I think penalizing teams is not right.