New Idea for Offseason - Hot Stove League

[FightingBillini]

The season will be over no later than seven days from tonight, but I thought it wasn't too early to start this. I have an idea which I think would be really fun, though I am sure I'm not the first person to think of it. Since the minute my White Sox were eliminated, I was looking on various message boards, talking to friends, and planning out the Sox' offseason. I always like to assemble my "ideal" roster for the next year on MVP, and it always ends up being wrong.

Anyway, my idea is that we enact the hot stove league on this message board. A poster can play GM of a given team. All 30 teams need to be represented.

GM's can post in a thread about their needs (such as "we are looking to upgrade at lead-off"), and a lot of dirty work will be done through PMs. We wouldn't know who went where until the deal was made official. Of course, if I am trying to move a player, and one GM PMs me an offer, I am going to PM his rival GM and say "here is what he offered, can you top it?"

We could either play it legit, and try to make realistic moves that GM might make, or do crazy things to completely reinvent the team (i.e. the Cards trading Pujols).

I think it would be a fun idea, so I just want to find out the level of interest. There would be a lot of kinks to work out, such as how free agents are signed. For payroll, we could determine a number, say 10%, which payroll would increase from the 08 season, and the GM of that team has to work within his limitations. All finances would be tracked in a thread, with real salaries. The game wouldn't be able to keep track of money being exchanged in a trade, but we could keep track right here. For instance, if I trade for Johan Santana plus $5 million a year, we would subtract $5 million from his salary, and just debit it from the Mets' total payroll.

We would have to decide on a standard roster to use, so we all rank the players the same way as everyone else.

I think this could be a very interesting experiment, and it could be a lot of fun. It would be interesting to see at the start of spring training which GM came the closest to building the team the actual GM did. At the end, we could sim a league to determine how the season went.

So, who is interested?! Call your team. And does anyone have ideas for working free agency?

I call White Sox :D