On Charging a League Inactivity Fee: A Follow Up

Yesterday, I shared my plight as the commissioner of my local league and complained about the difficulty of finding good owners who remain active all season long. I made the decision to charge a preemptive league inactivity fee, whereby owners would add a quarter of their entry fee into the pot as we head into auction weekend. If an owner remains active all season, his money is returned. If he goes inactive, he will not be seeing that money again. This seems like a straightforward idea, but the biggest question is how to define inactive. So I asked you all for help, and help you provided, with 66 comments so far as I type this follow up.

Rather than respond to a myriad of comments that most will likely never read, I figured I would respond to select comments here so we can continue the discussion. Several comments related to similar themes and as usual, I feel I may not have been perfectly clear about the timing of the owner inactivity or even our league format. Before I get to the comments, I did want to clear one thing up:

Owner inactivity is not an issue only in September when it’s typically very clear who has a shot at a money spot and who doesn’t. I can actually understand how an owner can lose interest if he’s in last place and will suddenly lack the motivation to even check his team for the final month. However, I’ve had owners disappear in May! This needs to be prevented.

I don’t think I stated it, though some have in the comments. The worst part of owner inactivity is the possibility their lineup holes affect the standings. How pissed would you be if the team right behind you gained several points to move ahead of you by passing the dead team, while you didn’t benefit at all because you were already ahead of the dead team in all the counting categories? That doesn’t fly in my league.

Now in Fire Joe Morgan (I still miss you) style, here we go…

…In this vein, to make the rule objective – and reasonable in a league where attention is required – you might set a minimum number of days that a player might be on the DL ahead of when lineups are set. Exceed that number of days, and you’re dinged for inactivity; but if the player is on the DL for fewer than that number of days ahead of setting lineups, the league’s position is that one could plausibly have set lineups for the coming week and simply let it ride for a weekend with the family/in the country/at the ballpark.

Already, the first comment was a very useful one. It gave me an idea to perhaps set a deadline for when a player hits the DL by which a team owner must ensure the player is not in the active lineup for the following week. As an example, assume a deadline is set for Friday night. If an owner keeps a player active in the following week’s lineup who was placed on the DL by that Friday night deadline, he will be deemed inactive. However, if that same player was not placed on the DL until after Friday night, the owner would be allowed some leeway and would not be required to move him out of his active lineup for the following week.

Obviously, if a player is expected to come off the DL at some point the following week, then the owner would not be required to reserve the player.

…though recently in one of my leagues we finally just agree to take a blind “stay or go” vote on every owner at the end of every season. Certainly not an incentive, but should make inactive owners at least consider the possible consequences of going AWOL.

I’m not sure this actually works. Every time I recruit new owners, I speak to them on the phone and stress how important it is to remain active. I tell them that if they are not, they will be kicked out of the league. Like clockwork, there are still those new owners that become inactive after seeming so fantastic during our phone conversation.

I don’t like it. Presumably, the paid incentive comes from the winners’ shares, which is not justifiable or fair. Public shaming from multiple owners is often effective. Reminding them of how would THEY feel if THEY were trying to win and someone negatively affected their chances by not making lineup moves. But, ultimately, you hold your nose during the season and give them the boot when the season ends and keep working on ownership until you’ve got everyone solid. A great league takes time to develop.

This is not how it works. In fact, a response to this commenter summed it up well:

It didn’t sound to me like money was being taken from the winners. In my head, it seems more like:

If the agreed upon entry is $100, then everyone puts in an additional $20 or something which is returned to each owner that remains “active” throughout the season. Anyone “inactive” doesn’t get their money back and only then does it go into the prize pool. Sort of a security deposit for your fantasy team. If you “break” your team by leaving guys in your starting lineup that are DL’d, you don’t get the deposit back.

Furthermore, the idea isn’t to be reactive and do something after the fact (give them the boot after the season), but be proactive and prevent such inactivity from occurring in the first place.

you can see activity logs on your site i am sure. If an owner has not made a significant move in 2-3 weeks?

This may or may not be a sign of inactivity as a fantasy team doesn’t necessarily need to shake things up every single week. Perhaps all the owner’s auctioned starters are healthy and performing in line with expectations, so there’s no need to make any transactions.

…picks 2-6 go to teams that finished in 6-10th place but are based on transaction fees. So whoever spent the most in transaction fees between 6th-10th place will get the #2 pick and so on.

This comment received 8 upvotes, but I’m not sure why. I think tying transaction fees to draft pick order is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. The owner with the most transactions is either the one bitten most often by the injury bug, or the impatient one who drops every cold player to pick up the hot player of the last three days. You want to reward the behavior from the latter owner? Personally, I don’t make a lot of transactions because I exercise excruciating patience with my players and trust my projections. Obviously, it’s not because I’m simply less active than other owners.

I’ve found myself keeping a DL player active if my current DL is full, but I don’t want to just dump the players onto the wire. In these cases, the rest of my lineup changes around the DL’d player and I’m usually working on trades or have good reason to believe that one of my other DL’d players is about to be activated within a few days. So it’s not that I’m inactive, but that my alternatives suck and finding a better one takes time. So as long as you give a manager 4-7 days to figure out what they’re going to do, I see no harm.

This is an important point and something I completely forgot. My league has two DL slots. If you have terrible luck, you may end up having four or five guys on the DL at the same time and not enough slots to stick them in. So then you have to make the tough decision on whether to drop a reserve player you might want to keep or leave the injured guy in your lineup. This is precisely why I wanted to determine an objective rule set so arguments don’t stem from situations like these.

if its a single season league… then I don’t blame the bottom half of the league for going inactive in the final months. The issue isn’t with the owners, its with the nature of the format. You are trying to turn a casual, low commitment format into a serious one. Not going to work.

A single season redraft is basically an elimination format… there is a point where you are mathematically eliminated and time to move on with you life. Adding some artificial incentive to make a guy check a team that will be disbanded at the end of year should be in violation of some kind of inhumane torture laws.

I’m not a high roller by any means, but I would gladly pay $25 to not have to check a redraft league that I’m mathematically eliminated in.

When you join a fantasy league, you make an unstated commitment to remain active all season, regardless of how your team is performing. I have been invited to join leagues in the past and have turned those offers down because I wasn’t sure I would have the time to pay attention all season long. Yes, this is casual, but no, it’s not low commitment. There is meaningful money on the line and no one wants to see their potential winnings taken away because of the effects a dead roster had on the standings.

Clearly, you would not be the right owner for our league. And that’s fine. Not everyone is like me when it comes to running a fantasy team! Again though, don’t join a league if you know you’re just going to quit several months in if you cannot finish in a money spot. It ruins the league for everyone else and it’s not right.

Yeah, I think that gets at the question of how to define inactivity. We first have to define why inactivity is bad. Because I think the real incentives issues here is not inactivity per se, but rather that people are not incentivized to care about where they finish in the standings once the odds of winning drop to a low level. This is not the fault of the inactive owners; they are responding rationally to the incentives of the league.

So if it’s a non-keeper money league, there seems to be an obvious monetary solution: make the standings matter all the way from first to last. Have every finish offer a different payout, not just the top.

I understand where you’re coming from, but we’re not going to pay out more than three places in a 12 team league. Second, I’m not requiring owners read a 1,000 page book every week for the entire season. All they need to do is log in before the weekly lineup deadline on Monday and ensure their active lineup is a healthy one! That takes two minutes of their precious time.

the team in our league that finishes in last place is fined a specific amount.

That is an awful rule. You’re equating finishing in last place with poor in-season management and/or inactivity, and that’s just wrong. In any given season, there is so much luck involved that any owner could conceivably finish in last just due to an unfortunate rash of injuries.

I don’t think an inactivity fee will help in a redraft league. Owners at the bottom of the standings dropping out is a hazard of the format, and in all fairness, it isn’t particularly fun to play out the string and put the necessary level of attention into a league that you’re no longer competitive in. At that point, it feels like a chore. Maybe money incentivizes an owner to do that chore, but probably it just creates more resentment.

Honestly, I think your desire to find a solution to this problem is out of proportion to the seriousness of the actual problem. Yes, it’s annoying when an owner affects the playoff race by being inactive, but other owners probably picked up wins against that team in the preceding weeks, and they all count the same in the end.

I get the viewpoint that an owner has an obligation to the league to be active the whole season. But the baseball season is long, and it’s really no fun to manage a team that’s completely out of it. I’d probably drop out of a league that actively punished owners like this, simply because I don’t need my hobbies turning into chores (or another person in my life getting mad at me for not doing chores).

Sure, the format probably makes it a touch easier for owners to justify going inactive, but there’s still no excuse for inactivity, regardless of what form we choose to play our fantasy sport of choice in.

I failed to specify our scoring format as I sometimes forget that H2H leagues exist (I absolutely loathe that format), and you seem to be making the assumption that this was ours. It is not. We are a 5×5 roto league. Playoffs are not a thing in our league. Anyhow, justifying a dead owner affecting the playoff race with the fact that the same dead owner probably affected other teams as well doesn’t make it okay. Two wrongs don’t make a right…right?!

Whether it’s fun or no fun is irrelevant though. By paying your entry fee, you are making that commitment to remain active all season long, regardless of your team’s performance. It’s not fair to the other, active owners if you decide to suddenly go inactive because it’s a chore to manage a poorly performing team.

If you have to hold a bond on them just to guarantee they’ll stay active, aren’t you better off replacing them anyway? I’m in a long-time dynasty league that’s enacted measures like this throughout the years, but with every new trick to cajole people into being better managers it makes the environment less fun, more work-like.

The point is to bring in a new owner with the inactivity fee enacted to prevent inactivity from happening in the first place. I’ve already replaced countless owners over the years and I’m tired of it. I don’t see how asking owners to remain active is more work-like. That’s just asking them to honor their commitment when they paid their entry fee.

Also, to the author – this stuck out in the article:

“At that point, he usually gets the boot…mid-season, which isn’t good for the league.”

Who runs these teams that are unceremoniously yanked from their owners? Do you find people willing to come in and deal with someone else’s unmonitored castoffs? That seems even more difficult than getting someone to draft and shepherd a team; at least they drafted the players and thus (purportedly) have some investment in their performance.

My league has been in existence for 12 years and I have kicked out a number of owners midseason. I cannot recall what I did in the early days, but a couple of years ago I developed a set of strict rules to follow when this situation occurs. I technically take over the team and we do not search for a replacement owner. I then make minimal transactions according to guidelines I created just to ensure the best lineup from the dead owner’s team is active.

I don’t see an inactivity fee as being quite the incentive you hope. How many people sign up for a 6-month gym membership and quit going two months in anyways?

Ha! We’ll see. Even if all owners remain active this season, we all know that one season is still too small a sample size from which to judge the effectiveness of the inactivity fee.

This comment may not be toward the authors’ orignal request, but I’ll throw out one thought I haven’t seen here: I commish a 12-team HTH re-draft league that has been in existence for 16 years with very minimal owner turnover. They key to our success is clear: All of us play in JUST ONE OR TWO LEAGUES. I know many owners love to play in a huge number of leagues across sometimes many formats. But I think one key – not the only one – to successful HTH re-draft stuctures is to seek out folks that would prefer quality of league and league experience over quantity. Sometimes, I think fantasy players get too enchanted by trying to win at least one of the leagues they play in rather than trying to win THE league they plan in. Our league has had some inactive owners, but as I read this thread I realize that we have to be in the lower 10% or so of all leagues for inactivity… and I think it’s b/c we can focus on few leagues rather than fracture out attention. I realize this isn’t for everyone, but I believe seeking out owners that prefer playing in few leagues per year is a possible solution to inactivity. Our league is very competitive and rarely suffers from guys at the bottom ruining matchups for guys in contention. I screen prospective new owners based on how many leagues they play in and historically.. adding guys that would rather put a ton of effort into making the best single team they can – win or lose – has worked out best for us. Again, I know not everyone is wired like that.

This is a fantastic comment and talks to something that has not yet been mentioned, but is definitely true. I alluded to earlier that I have turned down league invites because I know I couldn’t possibly pay as much attention as I would want to playing in that many leagues. I would much rather focus on two or three leagues and perform my best than join 10 leagues and embarrass myself because I couldn’t keep track of all my rosters. Perhaps a simple question asking how many other leagues the owner is involved in would be a good one to add during my initial phone conversation.

I thank you for all your comments, this has certainly helped me think about how to shape the rules in as an objective way as possible.