Nine-week season?

[Jefe]

So they're saying that the season starts 7/24 and ends 9/27, correct?

July 24 is a Friday, so if you lump that weekend's games in with the next week, as we've often done in the past, it's just a 9-week season for fantasy purposes.

The MLB trade deadline is 8/31, the start of week 6.

So if you're in a H2H league like me, and need 3 weeks minimum for playoffs, it's a 7-week regular season. We usually play 2 games a week; i think we may have to go to four. An argument could be made for five. Jeez.

[Sour Masher]

So they're saying that the season starts 7/24 and ends 9/27, correct?

July 24 is a Friday, so if you lump that weekend's games in with the next week, as we've often done in the past, it's just a 9-week season for fantasy purposes.

The MLB trade deadline is 8/31, the start of week 6.

So if you're in a H2H league like me, and need 3 weeks minimum for playoffs, it's a 7-week regular season. We usually play 2 games a week; i think we may have to go to four. An argument could be made for five. Jeez.

I think the only way to make it not completely random is to, yes, play more teams a week. You might consider what my h2h league decided to do just for this year. The season is just too short to play just a couple of teams a week. It would not be fair and far too random. So, we will be playing everyone each week. We have 14 teams, so you can go 13-0 all the way down to 0-13. We will do this for 7 weeks, which adds up to 91 games for us. Again, with such a short season, and h2h being inherently random, I think that is the only way to do it.

Then, we currently have up for a vote two options for playoffs:

Option 1: Drop from 6 team playoffs to 4 teams over just two weeks. This isn't great, because one week playoff rounds are random, and we usually have 6 teams make it.
Option 2: Six teams make the playoffs like normal, and weeks 8 and 9 will be cumulative scoring, to make it less random. The top 2 seeded teams are guaranteed to make it to week 9, no matter what they score in week 8. Then the top two scoring teams of seeds 3-6 will also make week 9. The champion will be the team out of those four that score the most points in weeks 8 and 9 combined.

[cavebird]

But how does MLB avoid making it completely random?

[Jefe]

I think the only way to make it not completely random is to, yes, play more teams a week. You might consider what my h2h league decided to do just for this year. The season is just too short to play just a couple of teams a week. It would not be fair and far too random. So, we will be playing everyone each week. We have 14 teams, so you can go 13-0 all the way down to 0-13. We will do this for 7 weeks, which adds up to 91 games for us. Again, with such a short season, and h2h being inherently random, I think that is the only way to do it.

Then, we currently have up for a vote two options for playoffs:

Option 1: Drop from 6 team playoffs to 4 teams over just two weeks. This isn't great, because one week playoff rounds are random, and we usually have 6 teams make it.
Option 2: Six teams make the playoffs like normal, and weeks 8 and 9 will be cumulative scoring, to make it less random. The top 2 seeded teams are guaranteed to make it to week 9, no matter what they score in week 8. Then the top two scoring teams of seeds 3-6 will also make week 9. The champion will be the team out of those four that score the most points in weeks 8 and 9 combined.

So I've thought through this a bit today. I'm not TOO concerned with the increased "random" factor as our pot is usually split 50/50 between H2H results and overall points. For this year I think we're going to make it more like 60/40 in favor of points.

We have 15 teams in 3 divisions of 5. We'll have a single wild card this year. Week 7 will be playoffs with the 3 division winners and 1 WC, and week 8 and 9 will be the World Series (we always do cumulative scores for the WS, and it's usually 3 weeks.) Though your option 2 is interesting. I need to think about that.

We also usually have a double-elimination consolation tournament for the teams who don't make the playoffs. We'll just do an 8-team single elim in weeks 7-9 and make that winning amount a little more than usual to keep it fun.