Why all the rules?

Why so many rules? Are you a control freak?

Okay, it is a lot of rules. Yes, some of them seem, on the surface, to be rather convoluted. No, I’m not a control freak. I do like to control some things that are worth controlling, and that can be controlled. I’m a control fan. I have a cap and a T-shirt but I don’t wear them everywhere I go and I don’t have my whole house decked out in Control paraphernalia and I don’t have a daughter named “Controlla”. Fan. Not freak.

I would love to have a league whose rules were few and simple, if such a thing wouldn’t lead to chaos and non-fun. Having been in a league or two, I know why you need more than a few simple rules:

  • If you don’t control the number of superstars available, before long every team is wall-to-wall superstars. Then there's no room for guys like Herman Pillette, Rudy Kallio, Ray Brubaker, Truck Hannah, etc. These were good players; good enough to have 20-year careers in the PCL, anyway. They weren’t great players, though, and that’s part of why we need them. In a superstar league, it’s almost impossible for the superstars to approach the level of statistical achievement they accomplished in real life, when they actually got to face some non-superstar competition. In effect, when almost everybody’s a superstar, almost nobody’s a superstar. Many of our rules are designed to address this.

  • You can’t close every loophole, but damned if I don’t try to close almost every one I see coming. A league without competitive participants is no fun; the trade-off is that competitive people almost always try to get away with whatever the rules allow them to get away with, which can also be no fun to those who either didn’t see that particular loophole or just thought it would be obnoxious to exploit it. You need to have rules which anticipate exploitation.

  • This is not an exaggeration: if the San Francisco Seals of the '20's and '30's hadn’t been selling all of their best players to major league teams almost every year, they would have been better than the Yankees. Or they would have been the Yankees, since that was who they sold most of their players to. Why is this relevant? Well, one of my rules makes it so most PCL players move around more or less as they did historically. It’s a little confusing; the simplest rule would be for all the players to debut with their historic teams, and then to allow those teams to control those players’ careers as they saw fit. And the Seals, thanks to this simple rule, would simply dominate the PCL like the Yankees dominated major league baseball, and then everybody who wasn’t the GM of the Seals would simply quit. To prevent this, I’ve had to devise a set of rules that a) moves most of the players around while still offering GMs some control; b) addresses potential conflicts and parity issues, and c) maintains the superstar/good player/okay player/bum balance.

  • Some of the rules exist because OOTP wasn’t specifically designed to accommodate this particular project and therefore didn’t program in all the stuff that would have made some of the rules unnecessary.

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