Will This Keeper Format Work? Please Look and WHIR!!

[Strained Oblique]

I am a commish in a first year keeper league and while its tough to try and keep everyone happy when making the initial rules for the league, I have came up with this format when keeping players. It allows there to be alot of star players to be drafted the following season as well. We will be drafting 28 players this year which allows for alot of young sleepers to be kept for next season.

Anyways we will be keeping ONE PLAYER from each of these Rounds:

1 Player kept from draft Round 1-4
1 player from rounds 5-8
1 player from 9-12
1 player 13-16
1 player 17-20
1 player 21-24
1 player 25-28

This will allow us 7 keepers.

***Having said this, is there a different type of draft strategy I should take when drafting this year OR do I just do like I would every other year and draft best available. When do you take fliars on guys like Longoria and Bruce and Votto etc.

Thanks for your help guys and Will Help In Return as always!!

[lsommerer]

The owners in my league would want to know things like this:

If we don't want to keep someone from rounds 1-4 can we keep two from 5-8 as long as we don't go over 7?
Can we keep a free agent instead of one of our round picks?
What happens next season? (since I picked Pujols up in round 17 in 2000, can I keep him as a 17th rounder forever?)

I actually prefer keeper rules like, "keep up to 7 players for up to 4 years. Each player you keep counts as your draft pick one round earlier than they went the year before."

[talan37]

You should make the "round penalty" greater at lower rounds.

So if A guy is drafted in round 1-4 he moves up 1 round for next.
If a guy is drafted 5-8 he moves up 2-3 for next year so
So on and so forth.

So if you drafted a guy in round 23, and kept him for 4 years, by the 4th and 5th year you have him(1st doesn't count as a keep year) your actually paying decent value for him.

A 1 round penalty is meaningless once you get past round 10 or so. I guess some people like this, but Imho if you get lucky on a prospect you draft in the 23rd round(regardless of how much research you do, not all prospects pan out, hence the luck) you shouldn't be able to keep him for 4 years at basically 0 cost. A few saavy owners can quickly become "unbeatable" and it ruins the parity in the league imo.

Most people around here seem to do a 3-5 round penalty at the back end of the draft.

Just my .02