Wrigleyville Compromise Proposal

In light of the current climate of this very prestigious world, there are talks of "tanking".  The idea of minimum win requirements (MWR) and/or a salary floor have been discussed.  Some of that discussion has been curbed in order to sling personal attacks and the discussion part of fixing things has really come to a halt.

I have come up with a point/strike system that I think would be beneficial to this league.  While it combines components of MWR and a salary floor, neither are the end all, be all of how a team can be ran.  Bear with me as I lay out the plan.  The first thing I wanted to do was to get an idea of exactly how successful and unsuccessful the teams in Wrigleyville have been.  To do this, I compiled the lowest win total and the highest win total for each of the 23 completed seasons for Wrigleyville.  Here are the numbers.

As everyone can see, the average wins between the low end and the high end is 82 per year.  The high was 91.5 and the low was 72.5.  Taking the average of 82 and doing a simple subtraction of 32 (1 per each team in the league), that leaves us with an MWR of 50 wins per year.  This should be a fair total for everyone to agree upon.

If a team fails to hit the MWR of 50 in a season, then this is 1 point/strike (whichever you want to call it) for that owner.

If a team fails to hit the MWR of 50 wins in a season, then that team will not be able to spend more than 15 million in prospect budgeting.  Why 15 million?  This is the average prospect budget by all teams during the 23 seasons of Wrigleyville.  No money can be transferred into the prospect budget UNLESS it is to sign that teams draft picks.  Prospect budget cannot be used on International Free Agents if a team failed to hit the MWR the previous season.  If an owner with an MWR failure uses prospect budget on an IFA, then they are subject to dismissal from the league.  This helps avoid the notion of tanking and also requires the owner to improve their team through trades and free agency.

While a "salary floor" has been discussed, it is harder to implement since teams can build their roster in completely different ways.  One team might want to spend $100 million or more, while some want to spend $20 million.  However, if a team does not make the MWR and has a salary of less than $50 million, then that is 1 point/strike.  Where did I get $50 million?  I used the average player budget for all teams for all seasons, which came out to $82 million.  I used the same subtraction method that was used to get the base MWR.

If an owner accrues 3 strikes within 2 seasons, then they will be replaced immediately.

This isn't meant as a punishment, but it does show, to the league, that everyone is playing on somewhat of a level playing field.

Of course, tweaks can be made to this system, but this at least gets the ball rolling in a productive manner.