Delinquency
Today’s post was supposed to be about the weird keeper position I find myself in my home league. That will have to wait until tomorrow because three owners failed to select their keepers. One of them has yet to pay. I’m grumpy about it, but I decided to put off being really grumpy until tomorrow. I’ve extended the deadline one day.
Some people legitimately enjoy running leagues. I am not one of those people. I commissioned at least one league every year since I was 12, mostly on Yahoo. My so-called home league – which features only three of the original owners including a guy who left and came back – is the only one I run now. I’ve been trying to offload it for years. Every year, my patience for cat herding dwindles.
The commissioner of a keeper league has three main duties.
- Harass people into agreeing to a draft day
- Harass people into paying before the draft
- Harass people into making keeper selections before the keeper deadline
Ultimately, it’s about harassing your fellows. What do you do when the cats wander off and don’t complete those three tasks? Like many leagues, I use Doodle to set the draft date and time. Owners who fail to participate don’t get a say. One such owner can’t make the draft. Too bad. Don’t worry, I’m getting him a surrogate.
I take a similarly hard stance on late payments. In the past, I’ve worked with owners who’ve said “you’ll get your money today, tomorrow, soon” for weeks and weeks. Then their draft goes poorly and *poof*. The owner who didn’t pay me this year said he’d submit it yesterday (the deadline). I’m giving him until the end of today. Then he’s getting replaced. Over the years, I’ve grown very aggressive about replacing owners for any number of reasons.
As a fantasy writer, I have an advantage when it comes to replacing owners. I have a deep pool of colleagues and readers to draw upon. Many of you may be more constrained with your replacement options. My recommendation is to cultivate a short wait list.
The third type of delinquency is the trickiest. It’s tempting to take a hard line – if you fail to meet the keeper deadline, you don’t get any keepers. However, that really screws with competitive balance. It’s also a good way to create a spiteful troll. Today, I brainstormed a few penalties for my league. Yours will probably be different.
First, a brief explanation of our keeper mechanics. We have a $310 budget for standard two catcher deep rosters. Any number of players may be kept at a price of previous auction price plus $7. Those are the broad strokes.
Since most teams keep an average of 10 players, I enacted the following new rule for owners who miss the deadline.
To better facilitate competition, owners who miss the keeper deadline will have the option to manually email me the names of up to 5 keepers prior to 3 days before the auction. Missing the deadline means you may NOT keep more than 5 players.
It’s not perfect. There may be scenarios when an owner with fewer than five keepers decides to wait until after the deadline. I’m not married to sticking with this option, but it is what I’ll use for this spring. The goal is to keep spacebrained owners from rioting because they lost their cheap Kris Bryant due to a scheduling technicality.
Instead of limiting the number of keepers, a penalty can be applied to an owners auction budget. For example…
Owners who fail to make keeper selections before the deadline will be docked $10 from their auction budget per day. They will be replaced if they do not make selections within 3 days of the deadline.
Or, if you prefer a real financial penalty…
Owners who fail to make keeper selections before the deadline will be assessed a $10 fee which will go towards the prize pool. Failure to pay the fee and submit keepers within 3 days will result in the owner being replaced.
In my experience, owners who miss deadlines eventually need to be replaced. You’ll have occasional one-off mistakes, but it’s usually a signal that the owner is either not engaged enough to be an asset to the league, or they think they can get away with advantageously acting late. Seeing all other keepers before making your selections is a huge advantage. And wouldn’t you love to see the outcome of your draft before deciding to pay?
Who else has developed their own techniques for handling delinquent owners?
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We freeze rosters if the dues aren’t paid by opening day. Seems to work!
That’s what I’ve done in the past. Sometimes it works, sometimes it lingers into fullblown abandonment.
Each potential keeper’s cost goes up by $X for every Y days late the owner is to declare.
Alternatively, each potential keeper’s cost goes up by X rounds for every Y days late…
The single best piece of advice I have is to start the whole process early.
January is the right time to confirm membership, make new rule proposals, select a draft date, and send in payment for the coming year. Allow a few weeks for discussion re. the rule proposals, then vote.
Whatever your draft date is, subtract 3 weeks as a keeper deadline so that everyone has ample time to look at the pool of free agents. If a team misses the keeper deadline, well, that owner has at least already paid so that helps; and I would be inclined to give a 24-hour reprieve before the Commish makes the keeper choices on that owner’s behalf.
If the same owner misses deadlines every year and you’ve given that person fair warning, then don’t lose sleep over replacing them with a more active/responsible owner.
I couldn’t agree more about starting early. I run a couple of redraft free leagues myself, and I find starting in January and chasing hard then reaps real benefits, particularly when it comes to finding replacement managers.
I echo lesmash’s comment of starting early, making January a good month to discuss the upcoming season. Right after the winter meetings, when people get a blip of interest about baseball again, seems like a good time to strike before everyone goes back to football, basketball or hockey.
I have lucked out in that all owners seem to be engaged, and if they’re not engaged they’re willing to bow out. I use a Doodle poll as well for draft days. As for keepers, I threaten that if someone misses the deadline (a week before draft), I will choose their keepers with one particularly odd choice involved. This could be a dud veteran or 7th inning situational lefty that makes the roster for next year. No one has given me a chance to do this, (un)fortunately.
Really makes me appreciate running a league with people who at least know each other. It’s sometimes a struggle to find quality replacements if we have any turnover, but having people who have reputations with at least a portion of the group goes a long ways. I won’t always get paid by draft day – some will string me along until July but it’s never actually a worry someone won’t pay by payout time.
Never had issue with the other two 1. draft day is always the same Friday relative to season start and isn’t negotiable 3. Owners are so excited to overkeep their guys they relish the chance to lock it in.
Well this post succeeded in making me double and triple check that I entered my keepers correctly the other day.
As a commissioner of two baseball leagues, this is the best fantasy article I have ever read.
Solution: don’t play for money. Do you really need the money anymore ? Did you ever ?
I have some free leagues like both Ottoneu FanGraphs Staff leagues. But that’s a unique batch of people.
I’ve been running a Yahoo league since at least 2000. I use “Evolution in Action.” Any manager not signed back up 3 weeks before the draft can be replaced. Any manager who gives up during the season is not invited back. The league size has varied between 9 and 16 teams. We seem to have stabilized at 12 the last couple of years with trustworthy managers.
Is this a redraft league? If not, how do you handle expansion and contraction?
No keepers.
I tried to set some rules for people who don’t keep up with their teams, and in our inaugural season, I’ve already booted three managers for not paying attention to league and personal emails that I sent out to ensure that they will be active for our live draft.
For our future linear slow drafts, if they run out their clock, their pick is skipped and moved to the end of the round. If they run out the clock at the end of the round, they then forfeit the pick entirely. Two more missed picks can result in being kicked from the league.
I also strongly encourage our managers to send a list of players that they would like to draft, listed in order of priority, to myself or a fellow manager (after letting me know first) to have them draft as a proxy if they even suspect that they will not be able to make their pick in time. We’ll see how it works, but in other leagues that I’ve been in with similar rules, it’s gone very well.
Also, having some general ‘catch all’ punishments seems to be a good idea to help with rules that don’t have any specific actions for a violation.