[IBL] Newsletter - August 15, 2024

[Sean Sweda]

comments on selected issues:


2024-02 / injury reduction

If you want randomness with injuries then you have to accept that some players will go over their MLB injury day totals.  There are multiple ways to get good injury luck (you can never get hit by a wild play or roll one of the non-100% outcomes) whereas the only way to go over is to get hit multiple times.  I have a spreadsheet where I broke down the injury day totals from a full IBL season from a few seasons ago if anybody wants to see confirmation that players are more likely to go under their injury days.  Fundamentally, anything you do to mitigate players going over that doesn’t shift those days to players who avoided injury just results in fewer days missed overall.  Maybe that is the goal since everyone hates injuries, but let’s be clear that this change would make the current randomness even less likely to reproduce MLB results.

One final point, durability is a skill and has value.  When you mitigate injuries you’re also reducing the value that a durable player provides over one with injury issues.


2024-03 / limit use of fatigued pitcher

There are two ways a pitcher fatigues, hitting their max BF or giving up 5+ runs.  As others have commented, this proposal doesn’t really handle the latter case properly.  If your SP gets shelled early it seems unfair to be forced to remove him before he’s even reached the max BF on the card.


2024-04 / drop max usage to 125%

I believe the original Constitution allowed player retention up to 150% (with 200% the overall limit), so this has already been changed once before.  One thing to consider is that the tighter the bands are for usage the more it matters who has the very best players.  I don’t know what the best settings are for optimal competitive balance, but we don’t currently seem to be in a situation where part-timers being over-used is a key to winning.


2024-07 / corner OF starts

Very few MLB players have been played exclusively at one corner OF position in their career because of an actual limitation of their own ability.  The most obvious reason is a player with a bad arm being limited to LF, but the game already accounts for this with the +1 adjustment on throws to 3B from RF.  There are obviously lots of players who get moved between LF/RF based on their MLB team's decisions, why shouldn’t IBL teams have the same flexibility?


2024-09 / playoff tier based on wild card winner

It appears that there have recently been teams in the hunt for wild card spots that try to avoid making the playoffs.  I’d hope that this rule change would change the calculus so that borderline teams would try to win. We had a similar rule for the covid season (7 teams made the playoffs).


2024-10 / IR

It is a bunch of work to implement this so I’m somewhat ambivalent.  I do think the restrictions are sufficient such that it would not be used very often. If you use one of these IR spots you’re locking a player onto your roster (barring an off-season trade) until week 8 of the following season.  I suspect an owner who used it whenever possible just for the extra roster spots would come to regret it in short order.