Changes for the 1983 season

[Alan T]

Please note, the following changes are not for this upcoming season (1982), but they are announced a year ahead to give everyone a fair and advanced warning.

CHANGE #1: Starting in 1983, the playoff format will switch to the top two teams in each league making the playoffs and facing each other in a League Championship Series. The League Championship series will be a best of 7 game series and the winner of each will win the right to face off in the FOOL Classic, which will remain a best of 9 game series.

The initial planned schedule to accommodate the extra playoff series will start off unchanged. Both the League Championship Series AND the Fool Classic will be simmed on Sunday evening. I will allow playoff participating teams to send me a PM with any simple pitcher or lineup conditional changes for if they happen to make it to the FOOL Classic under various scenerios.

We will re-evaluate that schedule once Thanksgiving is done with to see if the league would prefer adding an additional Saturday sim for the purpose of the League Championship series instead. I do not want to expand the schedule prior to Thanksgiving however.


CHANGE #2: Starting in 1983 (or technically the offseason after 1982 has ended), there will be a fairly minor change underneath the hood for player's self worth evaluations. Currently players feel that they are worth far less than what they actually will receive in offers in free agency. In order to improve realism and to also increase competitiveness the top three categories of the eight that exist in OOTP will have a small bump to their values.

Currently the top three are set to:

"Super Stars" = $8 million
"Stars" = $6 million
"Good" = $4 million

These categories are some what misleading for our league as the insane talent curve that our leave has throws this out of whack. In all of the tests that I ran, only one player on this past season's All star team ended up being a true "Superstar" level player. Most of the better players, including the Hartford or Toronto pitching staffs, the top MVP candidates, etc all ended up being somewhere between "Good" and "Stars" levels, with some trickling a bit higher. Please note, this is not based on what the players ask for as many players in the "Stars" range actually ask for higher than "Superstar" level cash, but instead it is based on which modifier increases their demand.

Starting in the offseason leading up to 1983, the new values will be set to:

"Superstars" = $10 million
"Stars" = $7.5 million
"Good" = $5 million

This will allow for teams to still receive a home town discount over free agency, but should also cut down on the number of all star level players that offere to re-sign for $2 - $6 million per year. This also should not affect Free agency that much other than possibly adding more players to the pool. Free agents are automatically coded in OOTP to lower their demands over time if no one meets it.

If you have any questions regarding either of these changes, please let me know.

[Tasan]

Interesting there on the second one. I can't wait to see what this does.