By Mike Podhorzer
Though there is no money on the line in professional expert leagues such as Tout Wars, pride, reputation and bragging rights are significant motivating factors. In fact, some might argue that it is more gratifying to beat the best of the best in a fantasy baseball league than winning your local league and taking home a $2,500 prize. I would tend to agree with this. Given this assumption, one would expect that the industry vets lucky enough to be invited to participate in a prestigious league like Tout Wars would be active all season long. Unfortunately, in the inaugural Tout Wars mixed draft league, one owner has left his team for dead. Aside from leaving three injured players on his active roster for several weeks, this owner has not made a transaction of any kind (FAAB or activate/reserve) since the end of April. Quite honestly, this shocks me. While this type of behavior happens all the time in more casual leagues, I cannot comprehend why an owner who is well known in the fantasy industry would completely abandon his team just a month into the season.
A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing my competitors’ teams searching for trade opportunities when I noticed this owner’s team starting those aforementioned injured players. At first, I thought, okay maybe it’s just been a week and there were some extenuating circumstances that caused this owner to leave the trio of disabled players in his lineup. So I decided to then check out his year to date transactions, and that’s when I realized that he hasn’t been playing since the end of April. I immediately notified commissioner Peter Kreutzer explaining the situation. I have been the commissioner of my own local league for over 10 years and so have unfortunately had experience dealing with this issue. The question that now arises is whether we should just leave the team as is or develop some sort of system to ensure the dead team has a healthy lineup each week.
Of course, the downside of leaving the team the way it currently stands is that the other fantasy teams now have an opportunity to gain free and easy points in the standings in the counting stat categories. It is rare that a team will make it through the season without multiple injuries. Without any replacements being added, the dead owner’s team is going to be taking zeroes in several lineup slots, killing his chances of accumulating the various stats and competing with other teams. Furthermore, the players on this owner’s team are essentially eliminated from the player pool. Want to trade for an underperforming Jason Heyward or Matt Cain (examples)? Tough luck, he’s on the dead team.
So given the undesirable side effects caused by leaving a dead team’s roster alone, I developed a system that I have used a couple of times in my local league, which I described to Peter. The goal of the system is simply to ensure the team has a fully healthy active roster each week, with no concern being paid to the actual quality of the players. These are the steps that I follow:
1) Check for any injured players currently on an active roster; contact owner for an explanation and if no response, consider the team dead.
2) If the team has a replacement for the injured player on his bench, activate that player. If he has more than one option, activate the player started in the highest percentage of leagues. If the start percentage rate isn’t available, then activate the player currently ranked highest by either the site’s ranking system or another agreed upon ranking system or the player performing best season to date based on a subjective determination. The goal here is to makes the best attempt to mirror what the owner would do if he was actually paying attention.
3) If no replacement is found on the dead team’s bench, then a free agent must be acquired. After the FAAB process has run as normal, then depending on which data is available on the league site, add the player with the highest ownership percentage or with the highest season to date ranking at the position needed. Since this process is done after FAAB has run, there is no worry about other owners also bidding on the same player as the dead team. So the replacement gets added to the dead team for $0 and no one can complain since they were not outbid for the player.
While there is clearly no perfect method to handle this situation, I think the process I described above is the fairest and certainly a better way to maintain the integrity of the league than allowing a team to field multiple injured players and dramatically affect the standings. Unfortunately, Peter advised me of the following:
“The LLC consensus is that it is inappropriate to take action, that the remedy for a player who doesn’t play is to not be invited the next year and to let his team float for this year. We do have a precedent for this.”
I obviously disagree with the decision, but would love to hear your thoughts on handling an inactive team in this type of league.
We don’t know why this is happening, and the zombie team is in the first division, so I’m not comfortable shaming. There may well have been a method to his madness, though in a 15-team mixed league it’s hard to imagine what that is.
You can’t make someone play. And if he stops managing, it’s not an advantage or disadvantage–in general–to the other owners. So I don’t think you can, or should, do anything about it.
(If I had a personal emergency or situation that would prevent me from continuing to manage a team, I’d ask someone to take it over for me.)
Assuming this person didn’t have an emergency, in addition to not inviting him back, public shaming isn’t a bad thing. Who is it?
Tout Wars managers need to meet professional writing/broadcasting requirements as well.
But it’s an interesting idea to have relief on tap to takeover a zombie team. The question is, under what circumstances would the league take over the zombie?
Death of an owner, or medical issue that necessitated withdrawal. Would failure to make some DL moves be enough? Failure for how long?
Sounds like it’s a good time to call the fantasy bullpen. I have over 10 years of experience playing fantasy baseball and will gladly step in to wrangle this zombie team!
Nope. They are of no relation to the commish. However, the commish’s wife does play in our NL-league and she definitely knows her baseball and her players quite well. She’s finished runner-up in the league the last two years, once to her husband (the commish). I will give them tons of credit in that they don’t collude in any way. Our league has an ‘official unwritten rule’ that says they cannot trade with each other at all under any circumstances, and it’s worked out great. As I write this, it looks like he’s on his way to his 2nd league title in 3 years (He’s leading 2nd place by 24 pts.), where as she’s currently sitting in 5th, 3 points out of the money.
It sounds like your decision is to either play in the league or not. What I would worry about in your situation is that one of the zombie’s rare moves will change the winning outcome. But if your commissioner is married to this guy your only power is in walking away.
One other thing, by the way, about our Tout zombie. Checking the stat service logs, he seems to be checking in every day, one assumes to monitor the standings. In Colson Whitehead’s fantastic zombie novel, Zone One, there are two types of zombies. The skels are like the walkers in The Walking Dead. They slowly inexorably move forward toward the living. The stragglers, on the other hand, are trapped mindlessly in the repetitive actions of their sentient days. A straggler who was a clerk in a drug store will now repeat the process of ringing up and bagging an order over and over and over. We don’t know yet what type of zombie we have.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that has to deal with this same kind of frustration. I have played in an 11-team NL only league the last 3 years and every year we have had to deal this a ‘zombie owner’ and worse yet, it’s the same person every year. He will show up for the auction, but once the auction is over, he disappears. You can’t contact him for trades and rarely makes any roster moves past the first week. I have brought this up to our commissioner’s attention every year to vote on replacing him (our league constitution states that a 3/4 owner’s majority vote for removal is required), but the commissioner refuses to bring his removal up for vote, simply because he views this owner as simply a yearly ‘donor’ for the league’s prize pool (It’s $125 per team, with top 4 getting paid).
And to make things more frustrating, some of us in this league joined with some players from another NL-only league here in town to start up a 12-team Mixed League this year……and this league’s commissioner had the audacity to bring this ‘zombie’ into the Mixed League for the exact same reasons…….cause he’s a ‘donor’.
It’s frustrating. But what can you do, right?
Is this person active online outside the league, or has he disappeared generally? Maybe something is going on in his life that caused him to change his priorities.
Regardless of that possibility, I agree with the laissez-faire approach. I sympathize with Mike and I can see the advantages of his system, but if something that interventionist is to be used, I think it should be in the rules, agreed upon before the season.
Better to suffer foreseeable unfairness from a dead team that unforeseeable effects of intervening. When players signed up, they knew there was some small chance of a neglectful owner; they didn’t know that such a situation might have led to the team being put in fantasy receivership.
I just wanted to fill in a little bit of what the Tout LLC is thinking. After Mike brought this situation to my attention I was shocked. As far as I can recall, only once before has an owner stopped playing totally, and that time it seemed like a bit of intellectual hubris (that didn’t work out).
But the point here is that whatever action we take we will artificially affect things. If we maintain the team in the manner Mike suggests, we’ll be making it harder for teams lower in the standings to catch the dead team. If we let the team languish we make it easier for teams with fewer stats to gain points.
The LLC discussed this and we all thought that the right action here was to not intervene. Not to notify the owner that he was being neglectful, and not to do anything to prop up his team (which is doing quite well despite not having made any transactions in a month.
I did tell Mike I would run his story, if he were to write it, because I think there is more to be said about this issue, and I wouldn’t blame him if he tried to wake the zombie owner up, since his is most definitely a team that has more to lose than gain from having a zombie team out there. But that’s part of the battle in Tout Wars Mixed Draft and the way that league is playing out its season, and not the LLC trying to micromanage an unfortunate situation.
Our rules say that the zombie owner won’t be invited back. Do you think there is a different or better way to handle this? We would like to hear about it.
Sincerely,
Rotoman