This is Bill James. The game that I am going to outline here is very complicated, and it is very different from any fantasy baseball game that has existed before now. You may also think that it is too complicated to be fun, and that may turn out to be the truth. It may be also that it just seems that way because it takes a while to get your mind wrapped around it. Anyway, I’m going to explain the game here, and you feel free to respond, and then we’ll see whether it makes sense to try to actually develop the game.

Fantasy baseball games are based upon the fantasy that the General Manager is the Lone Ranger. If you’re the GM, you can do anything you want. If you don’t like a player. . .boom, he’s gone.Cut him; draft somebody else. A negotiation over a trade involves two people, and two people only: the two all-powerful General Managers.

Real baseball isn’t like that. In real baseball, the General Manager operates within an organization, which means that he operates under the restraints of the organization. He can’t do things that the team’s owners don’t approve of. He can do things that his subordinates don’t approve of, but, generally speaking, he doesn’t. A General Manager can make a trade that his staff doesn’t like—but he almost never will. He has to build a consensus for the deal before it happens. A General Manager can’t turn his back today on the support of people that he will need tommorrow.

What if a General Manager was like a real General Manager, who has to build consensus for a deal before it happens? What if, in running your fantasy team, you had to work with other people and build consensus among them, just as a real team has to do?

What if, in steering that team, you had to pursue multiple objectives at the same time? What if you had to run a farm system and a scouting department as well as a major league team? What if there were multiple parties who had input into the same decisions?

In this game, which I am going to call The Company, no one can do anything on his own. That’s an overstatement; there are some things you can do on your own, but. . ..in fantasy baseball in general when you join a league, you “get” a team. Here’s your team, do what you want with it. In this game, you don’t “get” a team, you JOIN a team. You become a PART of the decision-making process, a player in the cast. You don’t get a team; the team gets you.

In traditional fantasy baseball games, you succeed by competing with the other people in your group—in other words, by working against them. In this game, you would succeed by co-operating with the other people in your group. Your contact with people in other organizations, while there would be some such contact, would be limited. Most of your contact would be with the other people in your own gang.

As I envision this game, there would be eight teams in each league. ..actually, eight organizations, because each organization would have five teams—a major league team, a AAA team, a AA team, an A-level team, and a college team. Each organization would consist of eleven players:

• The Principle Owner
• Two Minority Owners
• The Team President
• The General Manager
• Two Assistant General Managers (a First Assistant and a Second Assistant)
• The Farm Director
• The Amateur Scouting Director
• The Professional Scouting Director
• The Manager

Each of these eleven positions has specified powers within the management of the team.

My notion is that the jobs would rotate twice a month, on the 1st and 15th of the month. On the 15th of July, for example, the person who was the Farm Director would become the Principle Owner, the person who was the Principle Owner would become the Professional Scouting Director, the person who was the PSD would become the Team President, the President would become the Second Assistant GM, etc. I assume that we have to do something like that, because the jobs are not equal.Being the Manager is going to be more fun than being the Amateur Scouting Director.By rotating the positions on a fixed schedule, everybody gets a chance to be the GM twice a year for two weeks at a time. . .a little more than twice a year, a little more than two weeks at a time.

Some organizations might decide to stop the rotation and fix the positions. I think that the league could agree to that, but I think we could only agree if it was a unanimous request. Otherwise, we’d have unhappy customers. We’ll have unhappy customers anyway, of course, but. .. .hopefully not too many of them.

Also, there is a question of whether the customer is randomly assigned to a company, or whether a group of friends form a company of their own. Obviously, if people want to join as a group, we would put them together. But I think our idea is more that this is a way of forming baseball friendships, rather than a way of trading on friendships already formed.

Anyway, we would start each company off with a roster of players—a major league roster and a minor league roster—and then these 11 club members would have to co-operate to build up the rosters Each of the eleven positions would have certain designated powers. I don’t know where to start explaining these; it’s kind of a circle. Let’s start with trades.

The General Manager, and only the General Manager, can file trades of major league players.

However, if the players being traded away

1. are listed in the team’s starting lineup, or
2. are covered my multi-year contracts,

Then the Principle Owner has to sign off on the trade. This is an affirmative responsibility; the P.O. has to sign on to BJOL and register his approval. Otherwise, the trade doesn’t go through.

Even if the Principle Owner signs off on the trade, a major trade (a major major-league trade) can still be vetoed by the combined action of the two minority owners.

More minor (major league) trades do not require affirmative approval, but can be vetoed by the Team President.

Also, trades—all major league trades—can be vetoed by the combined action of the two assistant General Managers. In other words, if they both register themselves against the trade, the trade does not go through.

Trades of players at the AAA level are initiated by the First Assistant General Manager, and can be vetoed by

1. the General Manager, or
2. the combined action of the Second Assistant General Manager and the Farm Director.

But this requires an affirmative action by the GM or the combination, rather than merely a non-agreement.

Also, all minor league players can be traded by the General Manager if the trade involves a major league player, either coming or going. But these would be considered major league trades, and would be approved by the rules applying to major league trades.

AA players can be traded either by the Second Assistant General Manager or by the Farm Director, but can also be vetoed by either party, and can also be vetoed by the General Manager.

What has gone unstated to this point is that The Company is not trying simply to win the major league championship; they are also trying to win the AAA, AA, A-level and amateur championships. What level of effort the organization wishes to put into each of these goals is up to The Company to decide. If you want to try to win the minor league championships by acquiring veteran minor leaguers, you can do that. If you want to treat the minor leagues strictly as a developmental tool, you can do that. It’s up to you—but to decide this by yourself is of no use. What counts is the agreement of the eleven members.

A-level players can be traded only by the Farm Director, and these trades can be vetoed by the Second Assistant General Manager.

The amateur roster is a draft-and-hold thing; there are no trades there.

At each level you can also sign players and release them, and there are some rules there that will have to worked out, but the general rule will be that:

1. You have to release a player at the same time you sign one, and
2. Different people have the responsibilities for signing and releasing players.

It might be, for example, that at the major league level only the General Manager can file to sign a free agent, but in order to sign a free agent there has to be a roster spot open, and only the Manager can release a player. At AAA it might be that only the Farm Director can sign a player but only the First Assistant GM can release one, at AA only the Professional Scouting Director can sign a player but only the Second Assistant GM can release one, etc. The game would be designed to force the members of The Company to work together to get anything done.

There would be a budget for the team, of course. . .each player would have a salary, assigned by the league. The function of the “salary system” in this game would not be simply to equalize the teams, as was done in the Bill James Classic Baseball and has been done in other games, but to make the game more realistic. You can sign a free agent, for example, but if you want to sign a big-name player. . ..let’s say Jose Reyes. . .you have to sign him to a multi-year contract. To sign any decent player, you have to sign him to a guaranteed major league contract—as you do in real life.

Once you take on that player, that money is spent. You can’t release that player and get the money back. It’s like real life, in that way: that before you act, you want to be careful, because you can’t easily take it back. You need to build a consensus, within The Company, that this player represents a good investment, because once you have made that investment, you’re stuck with it. The dollar signs are in the game to discourage The Company from acting precipitously, acting without thought and without debate. Like real baseball. In rotisserie leagues these are casual decisions. You go to draft day, and you come home with 25 players. It’s not that way in real life, and it’s not that way in this game. Every decision is hard; every decision requires careful thought.

A third function of the dollar signs, in this game, is to keep the quality of the teams within realistic bounds. We’re choosing eight teams from 30. There will be a large number of players, at all times, who are free agents, but the teams won’t be able to build super-teams because they won’t be able to afford them. The top free agents might be available for $20 million a year for six years. Your team might have a budget of $100 million, $98 million of which is already spent.

There will be a period, during the winter, when you can sign premium players to multi-year contracts. Once that window closes, you can’t get to those players anymore, until the next winter.

Each company will spend a lot of time, in this game, trying to figure out how to get rid of bad contracts. We’ll give you some bad contracts to start with. Some of the contracts that you sign will turn into bad contracts. You’ll find that you spend a lot of time trying to negotiate the disposition of bad contracts.

As in real baseball, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to build up your minor league system so that you’ll have players to include in trades. When I first joined the Red Sox, the top prospect in our system was Josh Hancock. It’s a lot of work, trying to get into the position, as a company, where you have prospects that other teams want.

It was my notion that you should be able, in this game, to put a player at whatever level of the system you wanted him to be. In other words, you could take a player who was playing in A ball, if you want to, and put him on your major league roster—and you can take a player who is on your major league roster, and send him to your minors. But to make that work, we’d have to have “adjustment ratios”, like this:

In other words, you CAN take a player who is hitting .360 at A ball, if you want, and move him to the majors. The only thing is, his stats are devalued by 60%. There would be some sort of point system. . .each player gets 2 points for a run scored, 2 for an RBI, 1 for a hit, something like that. If your major league team doesn’t have any other way of getting a right fielder, because of an injury, you can move a minor league right fielder into that spot if you want to. He’s going to be kind of a weak link, once you de-value his minor league stats, but you can do it. We’d have to have some sort of control on it—maybe budget caps for the minors--to keep companies from concentrating their talent at one level to compete for the AA championship or something.

Another innovation that would be new to this game would be the inclusion of college players. John Dewan, years ago, wanted to start some games based on college players, NCAA players, but I was always opposed to it on the grounds that the NCAA would sue us. But there was a lawsuit a couple of years ago in which a judge ruled, as best I understand it, that players have no rights to and no control over the use of their statistics in fantasy games. This seems to me to change the equation on the use of college players, and I think we could do it now, at least on a limited basis.

My notion here is that we should take the three or four major power conferences in college baseball—the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Pac 10, perhaps—and list the players in those conferenes, and start keeping up-to-date stat records just for those players. There are 900+ college baseball teams, and updating all of their stats every day, while it is something that I expect to have here within a few years, is too big an assignment for us right away.

But with a manageable number of teams—let’s say, 40 teams—we can keep track of that many teams, that many players. Each company could then, as a part of the game, “claim” up to 15 college players (one per position including DH, four starters and two relievers). There would be a “college championship” for the Company with the best college players, but, perhaps more importantly, the company would retain those players when they entered pro ball.

I say “perhaps” more importantly; you can decide what counts for your company. If you want to try to win the College Championship, that’s fine; if you want to use the college team strictly as a developmental tool, that’s fine. It’s up to you—collectively. It’s up the members of the company.

On a day-to-day basis the manager would control the deployment of players on the roster. My notion is that we (BJOL) would maintain stats for each team not by what the PLAYERS had done, but by POSITION. . ..in other words, each team would have points for their first basemen, their second basemen, etc. You’d have a 25-man roster, but not everybody would be playing, in that there would be only about 15 positions.

The manager would decide which players occupied which positions. In other words, if the manager logs in before noon and says that he wants Sean Casey playing first rather than Kevin Millar, then, effective that day, Sean Casey’s stats go into the team’s “first base” stats or first base points, while Kevin Millar becomes inactive. The manager makes these decisions, and there is no appeal, no veto. We might make the minority owners the “managers” of the lower-level minor league teams, which is a little unrealistic, but then, that’s why they call it fantasy baseball.

Another thing the manager would do would be to designate his cleanup hitter, his leadoff hitter and his #1 starting pitcher. Then we could, for example, double the points given for RBI by the cleanup hitter, and double the points given for runs scored by the leadoff man (except for runs scored on home runs), and double the points given for a win by the #1 starting pitcher. We’d have to have some rule that you could only re-designate your #1 starting pitcher once every two weeks or something.

Well, that’s my idea for a game. It would cost us tens of thousands of dollars to develop the game in fact, and at this time we don’t have any idea what the market for it would be. of the good things about having an on-line is that it gives us a chance to hear what you have to say about it, and go from there.

One of the things we would have to do is to develop “e-mail groups” for each company. When you sign up to play the game, we put you in a company, and we put your e-mail address into a group where people could discuss and debate what needed to be done with their company. It seems to me that this would be a lot of fun. . .that it would in essence magnify the enjoyment of having a fantasy baseball team to share that experience with ten other people. But . ..some people like getting e-mail, some people don’t have room for any more of it. We’ll see what people think, and then we’ll talk about how to proceed..

Bill James
August 7, 2007