[TimGuru]

A few comments on the comments on my comment:

I am shocked to witness Alan's opinion, because it is the first time in my involvement in FOOL that I think it is conceivable, even likely, that he is either wrong or unintentionally being disingenuous. (NOTE UNINTENTIONALLY, I don't want anyone riding to Alan's rescue). Yes, perhaps the compensation risk hasn't caused you to NOT sign a guy. But there is a very clear economic cost to draft pick compensation especially in the current bugged format. Draft picks in a real-player historical league are gold. Players are much more known commodities and more importantly, most first rounders are major league ready. Its the whole point of the rookie draft in a historical league. They were ROOKIES the year they enter the database, they don't need seasoning at AAA. To give up a draft pick, you are implicitly assigning a cost to that signing...not only are you giving up the pick but the roster spot, which would be at league minimum for 3 years as opposed to free agent $. In collectible card game terms, you are giving up a resource generating card (boring, cheap, common) for a rare....under the right conditions, you play and win the game. But the rare, you have to tailor your whole deck around, the resource base supports everything else.

It is also contradictory to suggest that the compensation is worthy of being in the league, when the free agent talent pool is meh at best. With a league awash in cash (only the Whales are anywhere near the cap, as far as I can tell), there are no little sisters of the poor who can't keep their own future free agents. Instead, we are all chucking guys to the free agent list, and offering the type A arbitration, hoping someone will snap them up and reward us with an extra draft pick. FA compensation is intended to help a rebuilder, by letting them have an extra cheap, reasonably talented guy while they part with an established player who heaving dollars at during a rebuild would be fruitless. With no real logic other than german engineering assigning the type A tag, it IS better to sign a guy with a slightly less sexy avoid Ks or a 2 stuff instead of 3, and hope for the best.

And on a less contentious note, but still disputatious, it doesn't get better anytime soon, depth of talent wise. I participated in a historical league from '28 to '40, and especially with pitchers, they ALL have the same ratings for decades to come. Get used to 3/9/8 2/9/7 etc guys. Get used to power of 3 being a monster. Except for the Iron Horse, I can't recall a guy from that era who overwhelmed with his power stat (by then the Babe was in decline). X may hav ea different database set, but...thats what it was in 09.