NFBC Post-Season Game Concept

[Greg Ambrosius]

If there's one area of the market we've failed to cover in the NFBC over the last nine seasons it's the MLB Post-Season. I've never quite come up with a good post-season concept that would work under the NFBC format and I haven't even attempted to create a post-season game.

It's probably too late to do one for this season, but I think it's about time that we make the post-season part of the NFBC's Schedule of Events. Help me devise an easy post-season contest and we'll get it set up for 2013 and beyond.

With 10 teams now making the MLB post-season, there are many ways you could do this. You could easily do a salary cap style game where everyone builds a roster of 10 to 12 players using the same imaginary budget. That's not really a concept we do in the NFBC, but it would be one option.

The other option is possibly a draft consisting of 12 owners building a roster of 10 to 12 players from post-season rosters. You could create a roster of the 8 position players and 4 pitchers. Not everyone would have starters at every position, but that's what makes it tough. Everyone would still try to cover the 10 Rotisserie categories with limited players. These would have to be online drafts with strong league prizes, but obviously you could have an overall contest as well.

You could probably do a few more simpler games again where everyone builds a roster without having to show up for online drafts. The time between the end of the MLB regular season and the start of the MLB post-season is narrow and you can't really host drafts until the field of teams is set. That makes it tough to get too many online drafts in overnite. So I'm open for any suggestions on a format that would make sense going forward.

Thoughts? What do you have for me? And is this something you'd be interested in if we could program it? Thanks for any feedback here.

[KJ Duke]

thoughts ...

It would make the post-season more interesting to watch, I think most of us have been re-programmed to watch intently only when something is on the line - especially after 26 grueling weeks.

Allowing NFBC credits for entry fees (based on the season's winnings) would be a help too, as many of us are heavily invested in two sports at this time of year.

I'll try to think of a format that might be interesting ...

[Cocktails and Dreams]

What about something along the lines of the playoff football game they run across the street. Not sure 911 format would play as well in baseball. You start C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, O, O, O, SP, RP. Ten positions for the ten teams represented in the playoffs. You can only use one guy off each team to fill in that lineup. Points style scoring system.

point per total base, walk, HBP, Run, RBI, 2 for steal,

1 for K
1 for IP
something like 7-10 for a win and save

Negative in baseball is that there is little time to get entries in between regular season end and the start of playoffs.
Also live scoring an extremely critical thing for playoff contests. Probably a million better ideas, just one that quickly came to mind. I am sure KJ will come up with something better. Back to regularly scheduled madness of fixing a million shitty football teams.

[Greg Ambrosius]

What about something along the lines of the playoff football game they run across the street. Not sure 911 format would play as well in baseball. You start C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, O, O, O, SP, RP. Ten positions for the ten teams represented in the playoffs. You can only use one guy off each team to fill in that lineup. Points style scoring system.

point per total base, walk, HBP, Run, RBI, 2 for steal,

1 for K
1 for IP
something like 7-10 for a win and save

Negative in baseball is that there is little time to get entries in between regular season end and the start of playoffs.
Also live scoring an extremely critical thing for playoff contests. Probably a million better ideas, just one that quickly came to mind. I am sure KJ will come up with something better. Back to regularly scheduled madness of fixing a million shitty football teams.

Yeah, something simple like that probably would work better than our progressive scoring that we use in the NFFC post-season contest. I like the one player per post-season, but I wish we had another pitcher or two. It might be boring with just two pitchers on your post-season roster. But it's a good starting point and something to consider.

Like you said, it needs Live Scoring and it needs a quick turnaround for entries, which makes it tough to guarantee too big of a grand prize. But we'll try to figure it out going forward and maybe folks can sign up early and take the 24-36 hours after the regular season to set all of their rosters. It's tougher than a football post-season contest, but I think we all agree that it would make the MLB playoffs more enjoyable to watch. We all need a little skin in the game.

[ToddZ]

Just something to think about when designing a contest.

What drove me away from the old CDM playoff games was if you have the capital, you could "game" the system by overloading on one team and submitting multiple entries. I realize lots of folks have multiple entrants, but in the season long contest, it doesn't matter as there really is no way to increase your odds of winning with multiple teams other than the obvious of just having more teams.

Choosing one team to go to the World Series and submitting multiple entries, with each one loading up on a different opponent increases your chances of both winning and losing, but if several people do this, one is bound to hit on the right World Series participant.

So am argument can be made that in a vacuum, if you do this, there is a huge risk as well as reward, but chances are, the winner would come from the pool of teams whose owner submitted multiple entries. At least this is what happened in the old CDM game. It was fun to play the first year, but once I realized my single entry had no shot, it was no longer as much fun.

Doing something like Chad suggests - one player per team, could be fun.

I also wonder if a "survival" element could be incorporated, where you can only use the same player once per "round".

[Scared $ Dont Make $]

Something along the lines of how they do football...

So take Chad's idea and multiply it by 2(less chance of identical teams being matched)... you pick a full lineup for AL side AND NL side

Two players from each team... this solves Todd's dilemna of loading up... but adds more combinations/points to have less chance of duplicated entries at the end for tiebreakers

NL - C,1B,2B,SS,3B,OF,OF,OF, SP, RP
AL - C,1B,2B,SS,3B,OF,OF,OF, SP, RP

And device a simple scoring system based on points (scrap the calculated categories such as BA/ERA/WHIP)

Offense
Have these all = 1 point
TBs
BBs
RBI
R
SB = 2
CS = -1

Pitching
W = 10
L = -5
Sv = 5
BS = -2
ER = -1
K = 1
IP = .5

Just have people fill out teams and submit them. And setup a tiebreaker in case identical lineups are submitted such as World Series winner and total runs scored in WS.

But again you may have one night if their is a play-in game to get this achieved. But worth it to keep playoff interest for the junkies.

[Greg Ambrosius]

What about something along the lines of the playoff football game they run across the street. Not sure 911 format would play as well in baseball. You start C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, O, O, O, SP, RP. Ten positions for the ten teams represented in the playoffs. You can only use one guy off each team to fill in that lineup. Points style scoring system.

point per total base, walk, HBP, Run, RBI, 2 for steal,

1 for K
1 for IP
something like 7-10 for a win and save

Negative in baseball is that there is little time to get entries in between regular season end and the start of playoffs.
Also live scoring an extremely critical thing for playoff contests. Probably a million better ideas, just one that quickly came to mind. I am sure KJ will come up with something better. Back to regularly scheduled madness of fixing a million shitty football teams.

Even though we didn't get an NFBC Post-Season Contest going this year, I have been giving this a lot of thought recently because I want to get this to the IT department in plenty of time to build this for 2013. Actually, I think there is an easy way to do this, still make it a fun contest and not have everyone with the same team. So how about something like this:

Since there are 10 MLB teams now in the Post-Season (don't expand it anymore Bud!!), you would get the chance to take any 3 players from each team to fill out a normal NFBC 30-man roster. All 30 players' stats count for the duration of the MLB Post-Season, so obviously we'd either have to designate what those last 7 spots would have to be or just let it be a free-for-all to let owners decide if they want a balance of hitting and pitching with those final 7 spots or load up on side or the other. That would be the Wild Card in this game. There would be no moves made during the post-season as what you draft is what you've got. Obviously with pitching, you could build your staff any way you'd like. We'd run overall Rotisserie standings for the 10 categories just like we always do and limit the number of entries per person so that someone couldn't just roll every possible superstar into rosters. Thoughts?

No points system, straight Rotisserie scoring for all 10 categories just like we always do it. You'd select your 30 players while creating a legal lineup and then just those last 7 spots to create the best team possible. When MLB teams are eliminated then your players on those teams are done, but then so is everyone else's 3 players from those teams.

Seems easy enough to construct, to understand and to compete. Thoughts?

I'm open for any and all ideas to go along with those already on here. It just has to be something that can be done quickly because there really is only 2 days between the end of the MLB regular season and the start of the MLB Post-Season. Something like I described above seems like something that can be done easily. We'll see.