Before making a formal proposal, I would like to solicit thoughts on the following:
Issue: The C Auction has been getting bigger and longer each year, to the point where it becomes more chore than fun drama. When I started it was a two drink affair, but now it seems like I go through almost half a bottle of bourbon.
Possible solution 1: Limit the number of players each team can place in the C auction. What would be the ideal number? 5? 7?
Possible Solution 2: Reduce the $ teams receive from 'lost' players from 50% to 33%
Possible solution 3: Teams pay a non-refundable fee of $40 for each player placed into the C auction (I kinda like this one).
To be fair, any change should probably be effective in the 2025 Auction, I would think.
1: Fine by me. There is something of a team preference involved where a few teams each year put like 12 guys on Cs. Not always the same teams though, I think it would depend on how a roster falls out more than anything. I think it would have marginal effect though.
2: I would rather not do this - I think the 50% rule encourages player movement through the C which is one of the things I really like about this league.
3: I also kinda like this one. Nice outside the box thinking.
The C auction is meant for a way for a team to cut salaries and also gain a little bit of wealth by putting players into the auction. Alternatively, teams can really generate wealth one other way - interest. Yes, they get some money for wins and playoffs if they are lucky, but that is honestly fairly minor.
ARBA as a league is extremely poor right now. Only 9 teams gained enough in interest last year to cover a B1 salary and only Davenport and Mudville got enough to cover two B1 salaries. This means that most teams are going to have to put more players in the C auction in order to save a few dollars.
I believe each of these proposals will do the following:
Shorten the C auction. This is the reason behind the proposals and I agree it should work.
Make the league poorer. Teams will carry higher total salaries each year.
Lengthen the FA auction. Teams will outright cut mediocre players instead of placing them in the C auction since they will need to save dollars. These cut players will find their way to the FA auction instead and they will still be bid on.
Give rich teams more of the ability to snag whoever they want from the auctions. With overall poorer teams, teams with money can not only easily win auctions, they can do it for a fraction of the cost allowing them to save more money.
Honestly, I think the proposals, while good-intentioned and do address a problem, are overall harmful to the league (#2 would be most harmful, #1 the least harmful). I'd likely vote against each of them, but as the owner of two of the three richest teams in the league I think I would have the most to gain if one of them were passed and also be the least impacted.
I do think we need to do something about the C auction. I don't really know how though.
Yes re: FA would be longer -- but FA is always more efficient because of lower salaries, no matching, and the efforts of the Commissioner. Its a good tradeoff.
Until you start adding more desirable players, available at a lower starting bid, thus adding more bids to the FA auction (minus the matching option). In my mind the time saved would be minimal, but I guess I could be wrong.
So I was either interested enough in this, and/or unable to get out of my chair anyway cause of the cat in my lap, that I decided to spend a few minutes looking up stats. The number of players in the C auction was
145 in 2023
153 in 2022
Can't access 2021, not sure why
146 in 2020
119 in 2019
131 in 2018
126 in 2017
So, yeah, a bit more in recent years, but I personally don't see it as all that big a contrast to the past, and to the degree that it is a problem, I feel like we already fixed it by splitting the FA auction to a different day.
Regarding proposal #1, last year the vast majority of teams put 5-9 players in the C auction, one team did 10, one team did 11, and a couple teams did less than 5. To me, the scenario where a cap might make sense is if the long player list was driven by a small number of teams doing something abberant, which is not the case, at least not last year.
Regarding proposal #2, in addition to Tom's point, I think it would lead to significantly more matching of bids than we usually have, so it might be a case of creating a slightly shorter but significantly less impactful auction.
Regarding proposal #3- dubious about this actually shortening the auctions globally. If we encourage owners to cut marginal players rather than putting them on C, then they end up in the FA auction. The question you have to ask yourself is which takes longer: (A) player either gets crickets or only gets one or two bids, ending at 150 or 170K, and then the team makes a matching decision, or (B) no matching decision, but the bidding starts at 40K, goes in increments of 10K, and likely still ends someplace in the 125-170K range. There might also be players for whom this rule tips the scales towards a B contract instead of a C contract, which really would shorten the C auction, but I suspect the other would be far more common.
