Highly Custom League: Owners and Managers
The Highly Custom League series is back with my most ambitious design yet. Previous entries covered 2×2 Roto, Split Auctions, Roto-to-Head, Rotating Divisions, WAR wars, Category Wars, Public Trade Negotiations, If Only, Elimination, and Home Team.
Today we’ll focus on a league that forces owners to choose their partners – and pay for the privilege!
Design Aesthetic
Draft Type: Any
League Type: Redraft recommended
Teams: 10- or 12-team recommended, any number
# of Participants: 2X number of teams
Scoring: Roto, Points, or Head-to-Head
Waivers: Any type
Trading: On
Compatible Modules: Roto-to-Head, Rotating Divisions, Public Trade Negotiations, Elimination
Using a 12-team league as the example, 24 participants will contribute to a prize pool (for example $50 each). Prizes will be awarded normally. For roto, the top two or three rosters are paid. For head-to-head, awards may be split between the regular- and post-season. Just do whatever you’d usually do.
Every season, 12 participants will be designated as Owners. Their job is to “hire” a manager to help with the running of their club. Owners may choose to be hands-on (i.e. handle most duties) or let their manager carry most of the weight. Ostensibly, this will affect how much they’re willing to pay a manager.
Hiring is done through a one-week bidding process in the offseason using real money. I recommend using Discord or Slack for the negotiating phase. Optionally, an upper limit may be placed on the cost of a manager, although this is probably not strictly necessary. If somebody wants to bust open their wallet to hire the best perceived manager, let ’em. Take it as a challenge to outperform them then put it on your resume for next winter. A lower limit might be desirable as well i.e. a “league minimum salary”
As an additional wrinkle, one option is to send half of the manager’s pay into the prize pool to be divvied up accordingly. The role of Owner or Manager could either rotate each season or be randomly assigned.
This concept could probably use some additional crowdsourcing to polish the edges… so let’s do that!
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Trying to figure out the incentives here…
Owners are, generally, less active and are mostly just making a bet on someone they’ve chosen to win a fantasy baseball league?
Manager are, generally, more active and are hoping to secure a winnings floor (their salary) to offset their own entry into the league? And maybe bonuses for good performance?
If you have a bifurcated fee structure where owners pay in significantly more than managers do, then I see the attraction for the managers. I’m not sure I see the appeal for owners, however, unless there is an untapped market of people who enjoy gambling on fantasy sports that they are not actually participating in.
Is that a thing? Or is it just a sign of a gambling problem?
While there’s a distinction between owner and manager, what the owners are really doing is selecting a co-manager. From there, it’s the same as any co-manager relationship, which is to say highly varied based on the individuals involved. These roles would rotate year-to-year thus everybody gets their shots in both jobs.
I’m still struggling to see the appeal. Isn’t the entire point of fantasy baseball to prove that you’re the smartest guy in the room? Who wants to share that? Generally I only see co-owners in a few situations:
a) One (or both) of them lack the time, interest, or experience to be a full time owner
b) A hugely popular league that won’t expand and an owner let’s a newbie co-manage with them
c) A hugely expensive league where co-owners split costs to join.
None of those lend themselves to being the basis for league structure.
If owner/manager roles are fluid and undefined, then all you’ve got is a league with a bunch of co-owners. Boring, and why would 24 people want to do that, rather than just have 2×12 team leagues?
If owner/manager roles are very strictly defined, then now you have essentially two different games running simultaneously. That might have appeal, but how the heck do you enforce it?
Am I missing something? It doesn’t sound like the Owner does much other than pick someone else to run their team.
I like the idea of using GMs & Managers more than of Owners & Managers. GMs are responsible for roster construction only and Managers are responsible for lineup setting only. Sure, a good unit would talk about everything and be on the same page, but…
See the above comment. You’re free to set any division of labor you so choose once you’re paired.
I think you’d need to clearly define roles to avoid this just being like any other co-managed dynamic. Most people will want to choose someone they’re already comfortable with, but if say, Managers were only allowed to edit the lineup and had to petition their owner/GM to make a trade or pick up a free agent, that creates an interesting dynamic.
I love this — when I have a major change in strategy (eg a few years ago when I stopped looking at batter v pitcher matchup stats) I think of it as “firing my manager” lol
I’d prefer to see a post on Otto – keeper strategies or trade/cap ideas heading into keepers or somesuch.
Not sure who the target market is here. Certainly not for some $50 entry. I think there are probably a lot of older mid/big money folks who would love to really just be an owner and see it more as a business – and wanna-be managers who want to see what sort of team they can put together with serious scouting and salary caps and negotiation and such . But that just seems to be substituting fantasy for the real-world barriers to entry created by MLB’s anti-trust exemption.
Yeah – maybe if you’re talking a $20,000/year entry, then division of labor however negotiated begins to be based on making economic sense. But again the issue re ‘expansion’ in that sort of game is more the huge gulf between an MLB league limited to 30 sociopathic billionaires (and their 200 or so farm puppets) who won’t let anyone else run a competitor league in any meaningful/legal sense vs an actual free market for real baseball where there might be a few hundred professional leagues and a few thousand pro/semipro teams. A lack of real world options doesn’t really make big-money fantasy viable .
I love these series of articles, but I don’t really get this one, unless I’m missing something. It’s just forced co-ownership of a team, basically. The auction for managers doesn’t seem interesting enough to make it worthwhile.
If somehow there were 20-24 independent people willing and able to run a team in the same league, there are lots of more interesting ways to do it.
I feel like calling it GM and Managers might be easier. Have the GM pick his manager, and then he handles most of the roster decisions (trades, add/drops, etc.) while the manager handles most of the day-to-day lineups for optimization based on matchups, opponents, etc. Maybe something like a 70/30 split each way (or whatever) so each have a say in both, but they have the final decision in their respective fields.