Rule Changes in Review

With Floored now entering its 10^th year, I thought this would be as good of a time as any to revisit where we’ve come from.

Floored started way back in the days of Michael’s long hair. He is picture with Floored’s original 8 league member Cory Meyer

For those of you who weren’t around from the beginning, here were some of the landmark changes that took us from a startup league to…well…where we are now.

2008ish:

We expanded the league from a weasley 8 team league to a more standard 10 teamer. Michael tried to standardize the categories (get rid of Hits and Earned Runs), but ran into significant resistance. Now, these categories shape who we are as a niche-y, complicated league. POSITIVE CHANGE

2009ish:

We expand rosters slightly. I think we added something like an OF, UTIL and a BENCH spot. This made the waiver wire a little trickier to navigate, but it also lessened the impacts to injuries and it would keep one or two players from dominating a lineup. Adding roster spots in fantasy decreases the role luck plays in determining a champion. POSITIVE CHANGE

2010ish:

We make Floored a keeper league. This was one of the watershed moments, it didn’t go over smoothly nor did many people really get what it meant until the next year when it came time to select keepers, but since then this has been the best rule change we’ve ever made. POSITIVE CHANGE

2011:

We add draft pick trading and get rid of the trade deadline. In hindsight, maybe we should have just done away with one of these and tried the other one the next year. Draft pick trading without restrictions was another one of the rule changes that took about a year for people to understand what could happen, but the year after it was allowed, it was like the wild west. In 2012 Miguel Cabrera was traded 3 times after September 1^st. In 2013 Cy Young Clayton Kershaw was traded late in August for a keeper in Hisashi Iwakuma that turned out to have next to no value the next year. Anyway, it was a mess. It was what capitalism might look like if you had 10 year olds spending their parent’s 401k money to buy Hotwheels and Fortune 500 companies at the same time. NEGATIVE CHANGE

2013ish:

We tried to put limits on what round picks you could trade away. This was an attempt to limit the value of player that you got in a trade. What we/I didn’t realize, was that the best players have zero value to a team playing for next year, so they will still sell them, just for lesser draft picks. The intent of the rule was that a team could only trade away one of its top 5 picks the next year so they should only be able to get one top 50 level player. Well, instead, the bad teams only got one top 5 pick, but the good teams still just loaded up in an arms race by trading away lower level picks as well as their top 5 pick. GOOD IDEA, NO IMPACT ON A NEGATIVE CHANGE

2015:

We add a DL spot, increase the innings pitched minimum to 20, and limit the number of transactions in a week. This led to a competitive playoff race and hotly contested playoff matchups. I was very happy with the effect it had. POSITIVE CHANGE

This year we are trying out off-season draft pick trading. I have no idea how this is going to work out. I’m nervous, to be honest.

NEXT WEEK: We will get into the business of the year. We will start picking draft slots, we will announce the trade(s) that have been agreed to already and start bidding wars, and then we can all take turns yelling at me and the trading parties…because the one trade I’m aware of is a doozey.