A month or so ago I posted some ideas I had for tweaking the league. Here is an updated list, with updates:

1. Put cleaned-up rules on the website.
2. Draft Dates:
   1. At each Winter Meeting the league will adopt a calendar for the year’s drafts.  Unless approved otherwise, the dates will be: (Update: these dates are only proposals — they are not set in stone until the owners act on this proposal.)
      • Winter Meeting/Rule 5:  First Saturday after New Year’s Day
      • Rookie Draft:  Second Saturday in February.
      • Free Agent Draft:  Second Saturday in March.
      • Monthly Manager’s Meetings (May – Sept): First Saturday after the first of the month (i.e. 2d – 8th, depending) with rosters AND allocations due by midnight Sunday evening. (NOTE: The League will try to approve earlier midweek meeting times when the regular Saturday meeting would be more than 1/5 of the way through the month.)
   2. Once approved the calendar can only be changed if no owner objects.
   3. To maximize attendance meetings can start at a civilized (e.g., 9 am) or a bohallian (e.g., 7 am or earlier) hour.
   4. Draft lists will close no later than 5 days before the draft.
   5. Owner is responsible to “attend” or give instructions. (Will need debugged and simplified instruction form?)
3. Give expansion teams 5 roster moves per month their first year and 4 their second year.
4. Make roster moves tradeable. Update: I am cooling on this idea. I love creating more marketable assets to give teams more ways to improve. But this one might be cumbersome to track. It’s also unrealistic: there’s nothing analogous in MLB.
5. Revise the database; base it on one master player file with all the stats, defense, and contract info in one place.  Update: Dave proposed this in our meeting on Oct. 19. It’s a lot of work for him but will make our league standings updates easier, with fewer errors.  and it makes possible proposal # 6.
6. Change how we update the database so we do each day separately rather than cumulatively by the month. We would still total up each month and start the next month with a clean slate, for several reasons. But if we keep a record of each day’s stats, we can try proposal #7 . Update: This was my idea. Dave says it is probably feasible.
7. Simplify and make more realistic our roster move rules.  If we keep daily stats on the database, we should be able to start and stop players on specific days within the month. We would still limit moves to three a month — we don’t want this to be a daily management league.  We would still allocate percentages so you can have part time players. But it wouldn’t be percentages of the entire month. It would only be percentages of the player’s production on the days the player is active.  This would allow us to return benched players to action later in the month. It should even allow us to move a player from one defensive position to another, or switch in an out of the bullpen.  Update: Dave will check into this when he gets the database master database file done.
8. Update minimum bids for free agents.  Update: I did the research and reported to you the findings, which suggest that 2 year contracts should start at $1,500,000; 3 year contracts at $2,500,000; 4 year contracts at $6,000,000; and 5 year contracts at $10,000,000. Current contracts would be grandfathered.
9. Limit Commissioner-authored updates to 3 per week while GF is in session (April and September). Others could still write updates if they want.  We would still update the stats and standings every day — Dave might do this.
10. Invite the last two expansion teams to join us. For fun and temporary competitive rebalancing with MLB and within EFL. Update:  I’ve proposed two names for your consideration.  We are awaiting comments and questions in the email thread. 
11. Create two divisions with an October playoff.  We could do the divisions a number of ways:  AL v. NL; Upper and Lower with relegation and promotion; Veterans v. Newbies (oldest franchises v. newest ones).  Division winners and the two next-best records would make the postseason.   We would run the playoffs in October in two best-of-seven rounds, teams going head-to-head.  We would get stats for each playoff game by picking dates in September at random.  So the first day of the playoffs we might pull Sept. 18. The stats for that day would be consulted,  RC/G v. Runs Allowed calculated, and the teams with the better predicted winning percentage would win their games.  (Alternatives: We might require an EFL team to qualify in MLB for the playoffs to be eligible for the EFL playoffs. Or we might do the playoffs as an alternate-reality MLB playoff, with EFL teams being seeded into the MLB playoffs according to the MLB/EFL standings, replacing some MLB teams, and some games being EFL teams v. MLB teams .)  Update:  So I ran with Tom’s idea of divisions and this is what I came up with.  There could be other ways to do it.  I am by instinct a purist, with the view that how baseball was structured from 1962 -1968 was the way God intended it.  But I think we’d like the enhanced races this would create. It would give more than just the Duopoly a chance. If you like this idea in general we could have a subcommittee propose a design. 

Please use the comments to discuss these ideas.

Note: I’ve dropped four ideas.

• Cut Rule 5 protected list to 18 players.  We already have a much richer Rule 5 draft than MLB.  I think making more players available makes our experience less comparable to MLB general managers.
• Limit rosters to 20 players after the Winter Meeting. Ditto — plus it’s fun to have the option of hanging on to project prospects in the off chance we can be brilliant for once.
• Explore making roster moves self-service? Dave says this is impossible to set up reliably.
• Require the reigning champ to be responsible for updates and commentary one week (of his choice) every month. Ask all other non-expansion owners to sign up for at least one week of updates and commentary each season. Dave says he doesn’t feel like he could do daily updates. This is discouraging since Dave’s our second most prolific poster.  John thinks we could get by with written updates every 5 days or so. See Idea 9 for my current proposal.