Highly Custom League: Public Trade Negotiations
Welcome back to the Highly Custom League series. Today marks the seventh installment, one that was teased in the comments of the last post. It’s Public Trade Negotiations! Previous entries covered 2×2 Roto, Split Auctions, Roto-to-Head, Rotating Divisions, WAR wars, and Category Wars.
Design Aesthetic
ANY!
Unlike past custom leagues posts, this one isn’t about changing the fundamentals of categories, drafting, prizes, or positions. Do whatever you want with those. Instead, the focus is to turn trading into a public spectacle.
This is a fantastic setting for leagues with uneven ownership quality. If a few top performers consistently pick upon the also-rans, this rule is for you! It’s also ideal for unusual formats that produce strange-looking trades. A lot of keeper formats fall into this bucket as do several of the aforementioned custom leagues.
It’s pretty simple too. The following parameters are meant as an example. They can be tweaked according to your whims.
Once a trade is reached, it’s immediately up for a 48-hour rebuttal period. Every other owner may submit their own counteroffers. The original two parties may continue to negotiate as well. From here, there are a few ways this can play out.
Execute Trade
If Teams A and B prefer the original agreement to all counteroffers, they’ll execute the trade. Alternatively, if they receive NO counteroffers, they would be compelled to make the trade. This is to prevent teams from entering into dummy trades.
Accept New Trade
If either Team A, B, or both receive a better offer, they can accept it and rescind the original offer. I’m calling these “replacement trades.” At this stage, there are some league design considerations to, uh, consider.
Option #1 is to immediately execute new offers upon acceptance. In essence, once an initial trade is announced, all owners involved are working with final binding bids. There’s no safety net if you overbid to prevent the original deal from going through.
A strength of this first option is that trades resolve quickly. A weakness is that uneven replacement trades can’t be disputed via the same mechanism.
Option #2 is to make this process iterative. Basically, it starts over every time a new trade is agreed upon. For example, Teams A and B agree to a trade. Team B accepts a new offer from Team C. Team C accepts a new offer from Team D. Team E jumps in… So on and so forth.
On the upshot, every trade is price enforceable. Unfortunately, the process could become drawn out. It’s also easier to pull off shenanigans. You may opt to reduce the bidding time to 24 hours to help speed things along.
Additional Considerations
Beyond the basic mechanics, a few issues need to be addressed. Although the rule itself is simple, the execution of it is not.
First, what does it mean for a a team to accept a new offer? Let’s say Team A traded Rhys Hoskins for Team B’s Blake Snell. Several owners then make new offers to Team B. Team C offers Andrew Benintendi for Snell. Team D offers George Springer for Mike Clevinger.
In all cases, we have an “outfielder” offered for a good pitcher. However, Team D chose to move a tier down the rankings sheet from Snell. Do only offers for Snell count? Must offers involve only Snell i.e. the exact package originally traded? Can similar trades like the Clevinger scenario count? When is a trade too dissimilar to count?
Because this gets confusing rather quickly, I recommend setting the rules such that deals cannot expand. However, I believe it to be more reasonable to have trades become smaller. For example, Team B traded Snell and Clevinger for Christian Yelich then later decided Snell for Benintendi was a better use of resources.
I think you can see, this part of the rule can get very sticky. As such, the most important part is to have things clearly explained in your league constitution. Yes, you definitely need a constitution if you’re using this rule. Any time an unforeseen situation arises, it should be included in the constitution along with the proscribed way to handle it.
A second issue is with execution. Even highly flexible platforms like FanTrax aren’t designed to handle this setting. As such, I recommend a process using a third party message service like Slack or Discord. Trades are posted to a league trade channel set to email all members. That starts the clock. After all the bidding is done, whoever won the trades execute them via your fantasy platform of choice.
The commissioner should prepare to be active with enforcing this rule including but not limited to manually executing trades.
Poll
Public Trade Negotiations is a complex setting. While there are plenty of benefits to turning trades into a pseudo-public bidding war, I could see some leagues going full Thunderdome. Or at least It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily! It’s up to you to judge if you have the right group of people.
Would you like to try this format? Take the poll!
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I absolutely love this idea, but I don’t think I’d be able to get it voted in to my league for one specific reason – streamer trades. We’re a weekly H2H matchup league, so a lot of trades (especially for borderline stream-worthy pitchers) are made with instant gratification in mind. For instance, last season I traded Joey Lucchesi on some midseason Sunday for whoever was pitching against the Tigers on that day so I could secure Ks and hopefully a W and QS against a top tier team. These types of trades are common and I doubt the league would be willing to get rid of them.
I agree. This rule probably isn’t playable for H2H redraft.
I’m going to propose this in my dynasty league as there have been some really bad trades over the years by the bottom feeders.
Other settting you could impose to make it work in H2H with streamers: 1. 48 hours for review in the off season, 24 hours for review mid season. 2. Only trades involving prospects or one or more of the top X players (150? 200? based on league size) according to whatever site you are playing on.
The 24 hours would definitely make it more reasonable, albeit with some griping. I could see not running ticky tack deals involving players that don’t have keeper value / minimal full season value through review. It’d probably need to be based on the commissioner’s judgement, which our league has never had issue with.
I might propose it at the pre-draft league meeting in a few weeks – the more I think about it, the more I love instituting something that makes executing a trade more competitive.
I tried to submit this idea years ago in my 20 team dynasty, but instantly got a ton of push back.
It’s frustrating because at least once a season we have questionable trades come through that everyone is irate about, but they refuse the most obvious solution.
I also don’t see the problem with allowing trades to modify (i.e include different players). If the point of the rule is to ensure that each manager is getting the best value for their roster (vs getting poached), shouldn’t that include whatever pieces makes the most sense, even if those pieces don’t include the ordinary players?
Also, you can easily do this even in Yahoo. Just set your trade review window to the desired time frame and commissioner veto. If the original manager receives a better offer, the original trade is vetoed and replaced by the new trade.
That assumes the commish is really on the ball. I know I’m not.
As for the modified trades, my brain instantly goes to:
1. Submit really bad trade (i.e. I offer Snell for Luke Voit)
2. Collect new bids
3. If I don’t like the bids, negotiate Josh Harrison for Jaime Garcia or some such nonsense
Sure, it’s not foolproof. You can’t make a bad negotiater make a good trade, but at least it opens up communication, in lieu of the endless “I didn’t know X was available, I would have offered you A,B, and C.”.
It would force sellers into exploring the market, mitigate collusion (intentional or not), and make all the complainers put their money where there mouth is (i.e put up or shut up).
At any rate, you’ve inspired me to campaign for this rule to be implemented again (I try to keep my leagues democratic, rather than pushing things through as commissioner).
This is an awesome idea! Hopefully requiring trade partners to provide league-wide justification for ANY trade would go a long way towards cutting back on lopsided deals and resultant heartburn. It would be great in keeper league deadline deals that involve studs for prospects. It probably requires sharing some strategy, but thats probably a good thing…
I’d love to see my current Ottoneu H2H league implement a simple version of what you described, maybe something like:
1. Option #1 from above, and counteroffers must include at least 1 player(s) from accepted trade.
2. 24 hour rebuttal (allows more flexibility for H2H), if no accepted counters original trade must be executed.
3. All offers and counter-offers must include justifications from offering team.
I don’t know that I’d worry a lot about an endless stream of counteroffers drawing things out. Players aren’t locked, after all, and anyone who needs to make some more immediate roster move just drops out of the bidding.
I have a weird trade idea. You would have the option of putting a player or package of players on an irrevocable trading block. During a time period (4 days?), people could submit offers – as many as they want. At the end of the period you would have to pick one.
This sounds like the quickest way to dissolve a league.
Trading is already a dark, ever-present part of our game. 90% of owners in redraft leagues look at a trade, no matter who is involved, and mutter under their breath “collusion.”
Making it public, I think, would heighten the senses and also piss off previous trading partners who thought they had a deal, only to have someone swoop in. They will absolutely think their original deal was better.
Egos, pissing contests, name-calling, it will all be there.
What you describe is a feature of the league. You do need the right group of owners – either people who know what they’re getting into or a tight group of friends. I did mention the Thunderdome/Always Sunny outcomes in the outro.
I love the idea, but the execution is indeed tricky. Maybe when the initial offer is accepted, each team has to identify a key player from their side that they feel is central to the deal, plus maybe one player not included in the original deal they consider a comparable asset and would swap in. In that case, I’d allow players to be added, because if I’m trading Blake Snell for Trevor Story, but somebody comes along and says they’ll give me Correa if I throw in a prospect, that’s still a comparable deal. Or, if I identify Kluber as an alternate player I’m willing to trade and get a offer for him I like better, I can take that and cancel the Snell trade. Any trade not including those named players is a separate deal and starts its own counteroffer period if accepted, though. I suppose there’s the risk that a trade of backups turns into a trade of superstars with a backup thrown in, but I think that’s an acceptable risk.
I think I like the option that the replacement trade is final when the owner tells the commissioner that it’s accepted and final. So if my key player in the deal is Blake Snell, and somebody offers me Vladito, I can say “accepted and final,” and that deal goes through immediately. Or, if I think I might do better, I could say “I’d take that, but I’m still taking counteroffers,” in which case the process continues until I either finally accept an offer or the 48 hours runs on the original trade. The risk, though, is that if I don’t jump on that offer, somebody else could make that second owner a better offer for Vladito in the interim, and that offer could be withdrawn. I think you’d want a well-defined protocol for posting and accepting offers on Slack/Discord, so that if somebody says, “Offer: Vladito for Snell,” that’s on the table until they say its withdrawn, and if I say “accepted and final,” that’s binding even if they try to withdraw it before the commissioner sees the message.
I spent way too much time thinking about this.
Didn’t take the poll because it is a pain, but, our keeper league has used essentially that very rule for 10+ years. Not for all trades, but for most, involving either prospects or highly salaried players or players with expiring contracts. We had a real problem with inattentive owners dumping several star players to the first inquiring owner and that is certainly fixed.
I really like the idea. One point that I think is being looked over is that it takes the onus off of the Commissioner to veto trades that are seen as unfair or lopsided, if that rule already exists. I have a keeper league where I feel that the commish has vetoed some trades that were relatively fair while allowing some others that were rather dubious. This would take away some of the ‘authoritarian’ power of the commish in regards to trades.
As a commish who takes veto power upon myself, I’m almost certainly removing any owner who causes me to veto a trade. I’ve never had to use my ban hammer.
I like this idea but it sounds like it would get too complicated. I don’t think it sounds realistic for an actual league as much as it is a cool discussion idea. I think this is a veto in disguise. I believe that as dynasty leagues gain popularity and owners lose interest, vetos will become a necessary aspect of long-term leagues. Many owners are anti-veto and I think the roots of that are in are in the redraft format, but dynasty leagues have more severe consequences to lopsided trades. Vetos are ugly and complicated – I like this as an alternative, but in practice I think it would get weird. It is a good idea though!