RADIO
Kyle Bishop offers his thoughts on some insane fantasy baseball league rules in this week's edition of The Friday Meta.
Earlier this month, I wrote about the madness of league commissioners who believe that one IL slot in enough in the year of our lord 2019. The end of that post included a link to a Twitter thread wherein I solicited from the commentariat the worst, dumbest, and/or most inexplicable rules they had ever encountered in a fantasy baseball league.
Y'all did not disappoint. There were a few rules proffered that inspired mere raises of the eyebrow, and even one or two that sounded intriguing. But there were also some real doozies in there.
Without further ado, here are some of the rules that readers have suffered through in the course of their tenures as fantasy baseball owners. Prepare your faces for some palming, friends.
What Is This I Don't Even
In most cases, rules or settings that encourage increased owner activity or engagement are good and worth having. This is, uh, not one of those times. Making trades mandatory every week strikes me as excessively burdensome, and I'm enough of a fantasy baseball degenerate that a) I currently have nine teams and b) I've written over a thousand articles about it for this here website.
People have lives outside of this game, and trades can be a long, involved process. Obviously I'm not in this league, but my guess is that trade negotiations tend to move more quickly out of necessity. Still, savvy owners would most likely keep a couple of fringe/streamer-class assets at the back of their roster and just trade from that pool to meet the requirement. And if that is the case the rule doesn't really accomplish what it ostensibly sets out to do; it simply serves as an annoyance.
What possible purpose does this rule serve? Not all injury replacements turn into rosterable assets long-term - depending on your league, it's possible that most of them don't - but this kind of restrictive policy is just unnecessary and capricious. All it ends up doing is punishing owners who made smart decisions when they encountered the inconvenience of an injury to one of their players, and giving their rivals an undeserved second chance at a player they could have plucked from the wire themselves if they'd had the foresight to do so.
Not even sure how this would work. How often are teams drawn from the hat? Do you just go down the team's entire roster until nobody wants to nominate a player from it anymore? Whatever the precise mechanism might be, the experience sounds infuriating.
One of the most appealing features of auctions is the degree of freedom afforded to draft participants; as long as you have enough cash, you can own literally any player on the board that you want. This rule fundamentally contradicts that principle and is therefore terrible. It's another one that feels completely arbitrary and pointless. I don't know about you, but I encounter more than enough of that in daily life without inviting more of it via hobbies.
As we've discussed, there is no one right way to play fantasy baseball, but there are plenty of wrong ways. This is a textbook example. If somebody posts a screenshot of the scoring categories and a magnifying glass is required to read it, there are too damn many categories! Fielding percentage is bad enough without also including putouts and assists (for both infielders and outfielders). Some of these things (grand slams, cycles, balks, and complete games) are such rarities as to be more or less pointless to include. And why are no-hitters and perfect games worth the same amount of points? I have a headache, and not just from squinting really hard.
MLB teams are constantly having to shuffle or adjust their rotations to deal with injuries, callups, rainouts, marathon games, and so on. This rule could completely hamstring an owner through no real fault of his own, and probably has many times. I can scarcely imagine anything more maddening than, like, starting Max Scherzer against the Marlins and benching Jon Gray against the Dodgers at Coors, only for Scherzer to get shelled and Gray to twirl a gem. We're going to make plenty of mistakes throughout the season; there's no need to increase both the odds of them occurring and their ultimate impact. Yet this rule does precisely that. No thank you.
Not having waivers is certainly not great, but I don't have an issue with the lack of a transaction limit. I just wanted to include this because 2,700 moves in a season is the absolute height of absurdity. It's simultaneously impressive and utterly terrifying. This dude averaged 15 moves a day for the entire season, which I am comfortable suggesting is serial killer behavior.
I completely understand how this could be frustrating for an owner who went to the trouble of initiating and muddling through intense trade negotiations, only to get snookered by a rival during the two-day counter period. On the other hand, for everyone who is not that guy, this sounds kind of awesome.
The Friday Meta is Kyle Bishop's attempt to go beyond the fantasy box score or simple strategic pointers and get at the philosophical and/or behavioral side of the game. It is hopefully not as absurd, pretentious, or absurdly pretentious as that sounds.
