[IBL] What if.....no 2020?

[Russell Peltz]

I thought of a couple other things.

One is that we have precedent for abbreviated MLB seasons.  MLB played
about 115 games in 1994 and about 144 in 1995 due to a player strike, and
the 1994 playoffs were not played at all.
In both cases, the IBL played a full 162 game season with playoffs.

My other thought was an additional possibility for playing if MLB 2020 is
not played -- we could create cards based on 2020 projections (ZIPS,
Steamer, some other projection system or a combination of systems).
Then our season would be sort of a "what if" scenario, more closely
simulating what might have happened had the season been played.

-Rusty




On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 2:27 PM Sean Sweda <sweda at ibl.org> wrote:

> I've been thinking a lot about how to handle no 2020 MLB.  The solution I
> would propose looks something like this:
>
>
> The 2021 IBL season would be played with 2020 cards (2019 MLB).  Owners
> would decide whether they want to participate or sit out the season.  I
> think whichever direction we go we have to give owners the ability to
> opt-out if they aren't interested.  In the end, we need people who are
> motivated to play their games if we want to meet our deadlines.
>
> Teams that sit out the 2021 season would retain all of their players on
> their roster without usage requirements.  Teams that sit out the season
> can
> still sign free agents and make trades.  If a team that sits out the 2021
> season trades a player away during the season they may not re-acquire
> that
> player until the start of the 2023 season.  This is explicitly to
> discourage player "rentals" during 2021.
>
> The 2021 season would not be a full 162 game schedule.  Perhaps a series
> of
> short "sprints" of round-robin play to win spots in the postseason?  I'm
> not really sure what the best solution looks like, it depends a lot on
> how
> many teams are playing.  The goal would be to implement a schedule that
> increases the role of randomness.
>
> We would also come up with some single season rule changes for 2021 that
> make it easier to compete.  Perhaps teams that did not make the playoffs
> in
> 2020 would be allowed to designate a certain number of players as "usage
> immune", meaning they could go under/over our usage thresholds and still
> be
> retained.  Perhaps these teams would also be allowed a higher max cap on
> usage (currently 150%) so they could abuse short sample size players to a
> larger degree. The key principle for these rule changes would be to give
> the teams that didn't have as many good 2020 cards a better chance to win
> games in 2021.
>
>
> The reason why I think this is the way to go is that it maintains the
> "this
> year" vs. "the future" balance that underpins our league structure.  Any
> season played with ephemeral rosters (e.g. re-draft the players for a
> single season) is going to break that fundamental dynamic because those
> teams have no future.  In my view we need a resolution for 2021 that
> maintains a functional market for both buyers and sellers throughout both
> the 2020 and 2021 seasons.
>
> Anyway that's a rough sketch of the idea.  I haven't wanted to get too
> far
> into the weeds on this stuff because there are still so many unknowns.
> FWIW, I think no 2020 MLB is actually a less thorny issue than a very
> abbreviated 2020 MLB.
>
> Sean
>
>
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