IMPORTANT: change in playoff plans
Aug 1, 2011 13:31:48 GMT -5
Post by Ben (Rays GM) on Aug 1, 2011 13:31:48 GMT -5
This is going to be a long post, outlining some issues that came up regarding the playoffs, our decisions on how to deal with those issues, and the reasons behind our decisions. If you don't want to read the whole thing, skip to the bold part at the end, where you will just see the decisions that were made and won't have to read about why they were made that way.
There are no ties in baseball, but there are ties in fantasy baseball...
As you know, our plan was to conduct the playoffs in a separate, third Yahoo league. However, I was looking at Yahoo's tiebreaker rules recently and realized that they posed a problem: for tiebreakers in the playoffs, Yahoo first looks at the teams' records against each other during the regular season. But, in the playoff league, there would be no way for Yahoo to know how our regular season head-to-head match-ups went, because they would have taken place in an entirely different league. As a matter of fact, the Yahoo playoff league has been running since June, because I needed it to generate playoff seeding that we could then use by transferring the teams over to our playoff teams and plugging in their rosters. So, rather than using our head to head match-ups as tiebreakers, the playoff league would use arbitrary head to head match-ups between made up teams, effectively making it a kind of perverted coin flip that favors teams with better records. While this might not be the worst solution ever, the three co-commissioners deliberated and we all decided that we'd hate to see teams' hard-fought seasons ending in arbitrary tiebreakers.
So, we've decided not to hold the entire playoffs in a separate league after all. We will be holding the playoffs in the AL and NL yahoo leagues. 4 teams will make the playoffs in each league, and they will be held in weeks 23 and 24 (the weeks starting with September 5 and September 12). Then, week 25 (which actually runs September 19-28) will be the World Series, and it will be held in the third Yahoo league (the playoff league). So instead of the entire playoffs being in the third league, only the World Series will be. Also, this means that week 22 (August 29-September 4) will be the last week of the regular season instead of week 21.
This opened up a couple new things that we needed to think about. For one thing, we needed to decide how playoff seeding would work. Obviously, the playoffs will have four teams from each league: the three division winners and one wild card team. Yahoo provides two options for playoff seeding under that format:
Option 1 gives the division leaders the top seeds, with the wild card automatically getting 4th seed. At first glance this might look like the way MLB does it, but MLB has a rule that the wild card team can't play a team from its own division in the first round of the playoffs, and Yahoo doesn't do that.
Option 2 does the seeding entirely based on record, so the playoff team with the best record will automatically face the one with the worst record. The Wild Card could be seeded as high as second.
The three of us unanimously decided that we preferred the second option. Even though it's different from the way MLB does it, we all decided we may actually prefer it to the way MLB does it, and definitely prefer it to the other option for the way Yahoo does it. If we went with option 1, we could potentially see the two teams with the best records play each other in the first round of the playoffs, and we feel that this would not stand true to the way MLB does it in real life or the competitive nature of the league.
The other thing we had to consider is what to do in the case of a tie in the World Series. Now, we can't control who Yahoo decides is the "winner" of the World Series. If the World Series ends in a tie, Yahoo will claim that one team or the other won based on the same arbitrary perverted coin flip that I mentioned before. But frankly, once it comes to the end of the World Series, we don't need to care what Yahoo says. We can crown a World Champion here at Proboards and give them the 5% discount based on whatever tiebreaker we want. But the more we thought about it, the more all three of us realized that all tiebreakers are kind of arbitrary when it comes down to it. The three of us all decided that if the World Series ends in a tie, we'd rather see the teams crowned co-champions and give both the 5% discount than have one of the teams lose based on an arbitrary tie-breaker. However, unlike the other decisions that I've mentioned in this post, we feel like this one has high enough stakes that we should put it to a league vote. So, though the three of us want to make it clear that we all prefer the idea of co-champions, I will be posting a poll shortly and will be asking you to vote. If the league decides that they don't like the idea of co-champions and would rather have some sort of tiebreaker, we'll need ideas for what that tiebreaker is going to be, because we haven't been able to think of anything that we think would be fair yet. We welcome your suggestions though, because maybe if we get one we like we may even be convinced to vote for a tiebreaker instead of co-champions ourselves.
Anyway, that's the end of this post. I know it was long, so as promised, here's a summary of the decisions we made:
Decisions made
1) The playoffs will not take place in a separate Yahoo league. They will take place in the AL and NL yahoo leagues in weeks 23 and 24, with just week 25, the World Series, taking place in the third league (the playoff league).
2) week 22 (August 29-September 4) will be the final week of the regular season instead of week 21.
3) playoff seeding will be based entirely on overall record. The three division winners in each league will all make the playoffs, but won't necessarily earn the top seeds. The wild card club may receive the 4th seed, but it may also receive the 2nd or 3rd seed. The 1st seed will play the 4th seed and the 2nd seed will play the 3rd seed.
4) We've decided to put the issue of a World Series tiebreaker to a vote, even though all three of us prefer the idea of co-champions to the idea of a team losing based on an arbitrary tiebreaker, especially since we can't come up with a good idea for what that tiebreaker would be. We will be creating a poll shortly.
There are no ties in baseball, but there are ties in fantasy baseball...
As you know, our plan was to conduct the playoffs in a separate, third Yahoo league. However, I was looking at Yahoo's tiebreaker rules recently and realized that they posed a problem: for tiebreakers in the playoffs, Yahoo first looks at the teams' records against each other during the regular season. But, in the playoff league, there would be no way for Yahoo to know how our regular season head-to-head match-ups went, because they would have taken place in an entirely different league. As a matter of fact, the Yahoo playoff league has been running since June, because I needed it to generate playoff seeding that we could then use by transferring the teams over to our playoff teams and plugging in their rosters. So, rather than using our head to head match-ups as tiebreakers, the playoff league would use arbitrary head to head match-ups between made up teams, effectively making it a kind of perverted coin flip that favors teams with better records. While this might not be the worst solution ever, the three co-commissioners deliberated and we all decided that we'd hate to see teams' hard-fought seasons ending in arbitrary tiebreakers.
So, we've decided not to hold the entire playoffs in a separate league after all. We will be holding the playoffs in the AL and NL yahoo leagues. 4 teams will make the playoffs in each league, and they will be held in weeks 23 and 24 (the weeks starting with September 5 and September 12). Then, week 25 (which actually runs September 19-28) will be the World Series, and it will be held in the third Yahoo league (the playoff league). So instead of the entire playoffs being in the third league, only the World Series will be. Also, this means that week 22 (August 29-September 4) will be the last week of the regular season instead of week 21.
This opened up a couple new things that we needed to think about. For one thing, we needed to decide how playoff seeding would work. Obviously, the playoffs will have four teams from each league: the three division winners and one wild card team. Yahoo provides two options for playoff seeding under that format:
Option 1 gives the division leaders the top seeds, with the wild card automatically getting 4th seed. At first glance this might look like the way MLB does it, but MLB has a rule that the wild card team can't play a team from its own division in the first round of the playoffs, and Yahoo doesn't do that.
Option 2 does the seeding entirely based on record, so the playoff team with the best record will automatically face the one with the worst record. The Wild Card could be seeded as high as second.
The three of us unanimously decided that we preferred the second option. Even though it's different from the way MLB does it, we all decided we may actually prefer it to the way MLB does it, and definitely prefer it to the other option for the way Yahoo does it. If we went with option 1, we could potentially see the two teams with the best records play each other in the first round of the playoffs, and we feel that this would not stand true to the way MLB does it in real life or the competitive nature of the league.
The other thing we had to consider is what to do in the case of a tie in the World Series. Now, we can't control who Yahoo decides is the "winner" of the World Series. If the World Series ends in a tie, Yahoo will claim that one team or the other won based on the same arbitrary perverted coin flip that I mentioned before. But frankly, once it comes to the end of the World Series, we don't need to care what Yahoo says. We can crown a World Champion here at Proboards and give them the 5% discount based on whatever tiebreaker we want. But the more we thought about it, the more all three of us realized that all tiebreakers are kind of arbitrary when it comes down to it. The three of us all decided that if the World Series ends in a tie, we'd rather see the teams crowned co-champions and give both the 5% discount than have one of the teams lose based on an arbitrary tie-breaker. However, unlike the other decisions that I've mentioned in this post, we feel like this one has high enough stakes that we should put it to a league vote. So, though the three of us want to make it clear that we all prefer the idea of co-champions, I will be posting a poll shortly and will be asking you to vote. If the league decides that they don't like the idea of co-champions and would rather have some sort of tiebreaker, we'll need ideas for what that tiebreaker is going to be, because we haven't been able to think of anything that we think would be fair yet. We welcome your suggestions though, because maybe if we get one we like we may even be convinced to vote for a tiebreaker instead of co-champions ourselves.
Anyway, that's the end of this post. I know it was long, so as promised, here's a summary of the decisions we made:
Decisions made
1) The playoffs will not take place in a separate Yahoo league. They will take place in the AL and NL yahoo leagues in weeks 23 and 24, with just week 25, the World Series, taking place in the third league (the playoff league).
2) week 22 (August 29-September 4) will be the final week of the regular season instead of week 21.
3) playoff seeding will be based entirely on overall record. The three division winners in each league will all make the playoffs, but won't necessarily earn the top seeds. The wild card club may receive the 4th seed, but it may also receive the 2nd or 3rd seed. The 1st seed will play the 4th seed and the 2nd seed will play the 3rd seed.
4) We've decided to put the issue of a World Series tiebreaker to a vote, even though all three of us prefer the idea of co-champions to the idea of a team losing based on an arbitrary tiebreaker, especially since we can't come up with a good idea for what that tiebreaker would be. We will be creating a poll shortly.