Rules of SimBase:

1. We have 16 teams in 3 divisions of 6, 5, and 5 teams.
2. The schedule is 50 games. You will play every out of division opponent twice and every in-division opponent 6 times (6-team division) or 7 times (5-team divisions). Games will be played twice per real day, at 4 AM and 4 PM Pacific time.
3. There are no off-days. The schedule has a template and will be permuted each season by a random member of the group of automorphisms of the league.
4. There will be 4 playoff teams: 3 division champions and a wild card. The team with the best record will get to choose their first-round opponent. They are allowed to choose the second-best team. All playoff series will be 7 games long in 2-3-2 format with the higher seed (division winner, then better record, then head-to-head, then division record if teams are in same division, then further tiebroken by coin flip) having home field advantage.
5. In the event of a tie for one or more playoff spots, tiebreaker games will be played. Tiebreaker games which would only affect playoff seeding will not be played. No team that ends the season tied for a playoff spot will ever make it in or be kicked out without playing at least one game. In-division ties will be broken first. Homefield for tiebreaks will be determined in the same fashion as homefield for playoff series.
6. The trading deadline takes place immediately following day 35's games; in other words, the last trades are the ones made during the day 35 play period after the games. There will be no trades allowed between then and the end of the World Series (trades are allowed for the following season during the playoffs), and no waiver claims; however, you may shuffle players to and from the minors (respecting the 10-day rule). Trade discussion is permitted at all times.
7. Any player demoted to the minors must stay down for at least 10 games before getting called up This does not include players demoted at the beginning of the season, and does not include players traded or waived. You may set your roster for the first postseason series respecting the 10-game rule (the first day of the playoffs is considered day 52 for all intents and purposes) and may set each subsequent round's roster with free disposal. Roster moves are not permitted during a playoff round.
8. All trades and managerial changes are made using the on-line webtool, with the exception of trades made during the draft.
9. We no longer have a cap on number of managerial moves, but we ask that owners respect the intent of the rule, which is not to micromanage (e.g. to put a flyball defense in when your flyball pitcher starts). Exceptions to micromanaging are allowed for very important games, like the deciding game of a playoff series. Moves are tracked, although imprecisely, and further investigation may be made if abuse of the system is suspected.
10. Waivers: instructions to claim players (waiving as appropriate) are processed immediately following each day's games. The first process happens after day 2, and the last after day 36. This does not include beginning-of-season waivers to get down to the roster limit, which is 21 for the major league roster and 5 for the minor league roster; these happen immediately before day 1.
11. Position and pitching role changes will be possible once a season, immediately before aging and scouting reports are generated. You can submit these at any time, but they only take effect after the season. The deadline for changes to take effect in a given year is the end of the regular season of the previous year.
12. The draft will be four full rounds. The draftpool will consist of 80 randomly generated players with random ages between 17 and 21 (uniform). You will get a personalized scouting report on the draftpool. You may NOT share this information with anyone else privately or publicly until after the draft, and from there onwards may only do so publicly. Doing so will be an extremely serious offense with major penalties. You can also not imply anything about your scouting report, such as "Well, I figure #161 will go first, so...", no matter how innocuous or obvious it may seem. You may not share information about who you are planning to draft, either. We have developed an informal convention that after five full years, a player is basically fair game for discussion as far as scouting reports go.
13. In each round, teams which have made the playoffs least recently will draft higher. All ties are broken at random, independently in each round. Performance in the playoffs is immaterial.
14. If there is an unrecoverable irregularity, the entire segment will be replayed. For instance, if the playing of a game crashes, the entire day will be replayed. If there are errors but they haven't affected the playing of the game (e.g. uninitialized value instead of 0), the results will stand. If the errors are in recoverable things (e.g. stat post-processing), the results will stand. Generally, if only one day needs to be replayed, it will be replayed; if multiple days need to be replayed (e.g. uncaught bug), they will generally all stand unless the results are considered egregious. (An example of an egregious bug would be if pitchers didn't tire. An example of a non-egregious bug would be if in-game fatigue weren't taken into account for hitters.)
15. (Thor Rule) At any point, a team may only be two full drafts in the hole as far as future traded draft picks. For the purposes of this rule, a traded away pick (say, a first-rounder) counts as its stated round, but incoming picks count as one round lower (so an incoming 1R counts as a net positive 2R on our ledger). This is lexicographic; so, for instance, a team can't have traded away 3 first-rounders even if it's picked up an infinite number of picks (all of which count as a second rounder or lower).
16. Also, you are not allowed to trade picks more than 10 years in the future.