Valen wrote:With a live draft I am more inclined to fall on the side of the stadium having to be picked first. In fact I would go so far as to make the first round be selection of a park. Then subsequent rounds pick players. It is not like the GM of the Rockies does not know in advance when building his team what park he is going to be building it to play in. And with a live draft you have complete control over what players you select.
There's two problems with making the first round be a selection of a park. The first is most people don't want to play in exclusive park leagues. The second is the people picking at the bottom of the 1st round are likely to be screwed from the get-go, as they are stuck with a park they don't want while other players got their preferred parks.
And the comparison to the GM of the Rockies--or any MLB GM--is not an apt one. The GM of the Rockies already has an organization full of players, including a full 25-man major league roster, when he picks his players. The players in a live draft start with
nobody. So If an SOM GM had to pick stadiums beforehand, the player would have to worry about park-compatibility, as well as one's picks, and the players left on the board
without knowing he already has a full roster of players appropriate for his park. Being able to pick your stadium afterwards allows that GM to just focus on one's picks.
Finally, everyone has been pretty much happy with being able to pick stadiums after the auto-draft. You'd be making them change from a system with which they're happy. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that.
Valen wrote:I might be more inclined to allow a park change in autodraft because you often only get about half the players you really wanted.
This can happen in a live draft as well. In some live drafts, you can watch your top ten players taken before you get your first pick. So, if you want to grant post-draft stadium picks to auto-drafts for that reason, you should want to grant it to live drafts as well.
Of course, all this can be solved by granting both options to either drafts. That should make everybody happy.