I also think we should start preparing rules, or at lease come up with a general idea, for a potential 2019 expansion draft if we decide to go into this season with 17 teams.
Would be good to have general rules down so people don't try to tweak it too much to their specific roster at the time. I'd suggest something along the following lines
-I don't necessarily like the expansion team getting the first overall pick by default. I'd throw them into the lotto, though with as good or better odds of getting the top pick as anyone else.
-Going from 17 to 18, with a total roster size of 55, logically the new owner should probably draft 3 players from each team. Roughly speaking, it would be one major league player, and 2 minor league players (or maybe 1 minor leaguer + 1 bench bat).
-Although once you get to the bottom roster spots, those are more or less interchangeable. So maybe best if the new owner officially drafts 2 players from each team (to build to a roster of 34), and then we find a way to give them more picks to fill out the roster otherwise. We could even do something like give them an extra 2-3 picks per round of the draft, so at least they can fill out the bottom of their roster with players who weren't from anyone else's roster.
-The 2 choices for doing the draft I think would either be in a rounds format, where each team would protect, say 15 guys, then have one drafted from the team, then maybe you can protect another 10 guys, and then have someone else taken. Or the second option would be each team simply submitting a list of 20(ish?) keepers, and then they would pick 2 players from each team (maybe with limitations, so must be one major leaguer and one minor leaguer, one hitter and one pitcher, so that I don't lose 2 guys from my bullpen, for example)
I don't know where the limits should be. We don't want a Las Vegas situation where they come in, poach an insane amount of talent, and become the dominant force of the league. But we can't give them scrubs and expect to draw new interest.