Improvements to Expansion Drafts

[algon3]

Allow teams to protect additional players every time they lose a player in the expansion draft.

[LeeDorm8185]

To append on to this thread, this is the way I'd like to see an expansion draft coded, based more or less on how the most recent MLB expansion draft was done.

Say you add two more teams to the current 30 teams. The expansion draft would add 35 players to the roster of the two new teams. The draft would consists of two full "rounds" where the new teams alternate picking a player from each of the 30 existing teams, so that no existing team loses more than one player per round. The existing teams would protect 20 players initially, plus any players drafted and signed the previous two years, then be allowed to protect 3 more players after each round. Then there would be a third round of 5 more players for each expansion team, picking "the best of the rest", but again with no existing team losing more than one player in that third round.

To make it even more interesting, I'd code it so that the expansion teams have to fill out an entire 25-man roster out of their 35 picks, i.e. pick at least 2 catchers, 3 corner IF, 3-4 middle IF, 5 OF's, 5 SP's, 6 RP's, etc. so that they truly have to "build a team", as it were, and can't just simply raid the other teams for the best talent regardless of position.

I realize that the draft structure would be a little different if you didn't have 30 existing teams, but this is just an example.

[Germaniac]

Expansion is one of the most important topics for me - as I stated earlier, it would be great if you could take over the expansion team during the season prior to the real expansion.

Say you take over the Toronto Blue Jays, then you could take them over in 1976, hire coaches, set ticket prices, etc. and then do the expansion draft and so on ...