Ultimate Strat
By David Welch - Editor at-large
06/05/2006
Second guessing a professional sports franchise’s managerial moves both on and off the field is a time-honored tradition whether its pro football, Major League Baseball or say, the Scottish Premier League. Maybe you have mused that Brian Sabean and the Giants’ brain trust is stupid for spending so much money on Barry Bonds that they have to Band-Aid a team of 38-year-olds with the few remaining millions. If only he were as smart as Oakland’s Billy Bean. Hell, he doesn’t even run the Giants as well as you run your Strat team, right?
It is the very desire to run your own ball club that makes Strat the great game that it is. That desire separates Stratheads from the casual baseball fan and even from the fantasy player. But in most Strat leagues, managers have it easy. They don’t have to deal with cash. We sign players as if cash were a limitless resource, or, better yet, irrelevant. This wasn’t even true in Babe Ruth’s day.
If you really want a good idea for how you’d do if you had to deal with salaries, cash concerns, long-term contracts and free agent markets, you need to get into a salary league. To me, it’s Ultimate Strat. It’s the final word in testing your general-managing skills and baseball knowledge. It requires you to make long-term bets, assume risk and balance a budget.
A note, dear reader. This is not for the novice Strat manager. You need experience and deep knowledge of Major League players and their future values.
But experienced managers should not shy away from a salary league. It takes a bit more time but not much. You just have a weigh a few more factors when you make trades. You need to bear in mind how much a top-shelf starter like, say, Pedro Martinez, will cost you this year and down the road. But if you’re playing in a non-salary league and reading this website, chances are, you’re already doing all the research you need.
I play in a salary league called the Confederate Winter Baseball League. It’s a 30-team league with salaries, contracts free agents and the like. With 30 teams, even garbage utility players have value because you need every inning and at-bats you can scrape up. Strat does not get more realistic than this.
Here’s how it works: Each team starts out with $55 million plus $20,000 for each win and $50,000 for each playoff win. You also get to carry over any dough you didn’t spend the year before.
Say you draft a rookie like, Jonny Gomes. This is his first year in the league so, like the Devil Rays, you get him cheap until his rookie contract is up. In the CWBL, he costs you a scant $200,000 a year for two years. Then you must ink him to a long-term deal.
You have a few options. You can go 1 year for $500,000 a year, 2 years for $1 million a season, 3 for $2 million, 4 for $3 million and a max of 5 years at $4 million a year. If you think Gomes is going to produce year-in, year-out then you lock him up for five years at $4 million each.
Say that’s the bet you place. Once that 5-year pact is up, you have a few options. You can keep exercising option contracts on Gomes for up to three years. The first year adds $1.5 million—giving him a salary of $5.5 million for the year—the second option year adds $2 million more and the 3rd option adds $2.5 million, which pays him $10 mill! That’s the max salary in the CWBL.
If you don’t want to pick up pricey options, you can release Gomes to the free agent market. That means anyone in the league can offer up a contract. You get the right to match any deal. Releasing Gomes to the free agent market with the intent of resigning him is essentially a bet that none of your competitors will outbid you for Gomes, or bid enough to make resigning him to more than an option contract would have cost.
There is one more downside to putting him on the free agent market. To keep an opponent from stealing him away, you may have to sign the player to a long-term deal. Then you could be paying him a lot well past his days as an effective ballplayer. With some veterans, an option contract is a good idea because you can release him after one season on option. These are the kinds of decisions you must make.
When you trade any player, the contract goes with them. Another manager just offered me a deal with Jason Schmidt. He is throwing great this year, so it’s a nice pickup.
But here’s the problem. The GM who is offering him just signed Schmidt to a free agent deal at $8 million a year for five years. He’s 33 now. That means I’d be stuck paying him $8 million—about one-seventh of my annual revenue—when he is 38. Do I gamble that Schmidt will be posting a sub-3.00 ERA and WHIP under 1.20 at 38? No sale!
You get the idea. If you want to get into a game like this, there are a few of these leagues out there.
Here comes the public service portion of this column. The CWBL could use a couple managers. If you want to get in, drop me a note at dave@stratogists.com. Thanks for reading.