On Charging a League Inactivity Fee
As the founder and commissioner of my local fantasy baseball league, perhaps the most difficult part of my job is to police owner inactivity. That actually falls under the larger challenge of simply finding good owners. One of the traits that makes an owner a strong asset to the league is that he is active. By active, I mean that his lineup is always set with healthy players, he manages his DL slots, and he makes transactions that are logical, like dropping the guy just demoted to the minors who is clearly not going to accrue any value for the rest of the season. Every year, we have owners either drop out for personal reasons or kicked out because they violated my most important rule of remaining active. Why is it so difficult to find an owner that pays attention for the entirety of the season?!
Last year, I penned a similar article, but the focus was more on keeping owners interested during the last month of the season, even if they had no chance of finishing in a money spot. In that post, I shared three ideas I came up with to ensure owners remained active and asked readers to weigh in with their own.
After reading through all the comments, I had seemingly made up my mind on the best solution — the preemptive inactivity fee. I described it as follows:
Add a small, but meaningful additional amount to the entry fee which will be refunded at the end of the season if the team remains active all year. This fee will not be returned if an owner is inactive, with specific rules to be developed to determine “inactivity”. Inactivity fees collected go into the final prize pool.
Pros: This attacks the issue head on with additional money tied directly into an owner remaining active. If an owner knows that he won’t get his money back if he becomes inactive, he’ll be significantly more motivated to stay active.
Cons: Some owners in my league, and I’m sure yours, have sometimes expressed financial difficulties, in that they need some extra time just to pay the entry fee. If the entry fee itself has to be scraped together, then requiring owners to come up with even more could be problematic.
I am most concerned with the Pro here. This truly attacks the issue straight up. You stay active, you get your money back, you become inactive, you lose your money. It should be motivation enough to stay active, as long as the fee is high enough. The Con can certainly be an issue, but the inactivity fee I proposed to my league would be just a quarter of the entry fee. If you cannot afford another quarter of that entry fee, then your entry fee is probably better spent elsewhere to begin with. I am purposely not divulging the entry fee or inactivity fee because I don’t want this to be about whether the inactivity fee is set at a proper amount.
So now the questions are as follows:
Is charging an inactivity fee before the season even begins fair and an effective way of preventing owner inactivity?
How do I define “inactive” and make the determination that an owner will not be getting his fee returned at the end of the season?
My goal is to create rules to add to the league constitution that are as black and white as possible. I want to leave little, if anything, up to interpretation that could lead to a debate. I don’t want to have to make an executive decision or put anything up to a league vote on whether an action or inaction would be considered inactivity.
Here’s the background of my league — single-season (no keepers, auction entire player pool every season), 12 teams, standard 23-man active roster, 6 bench slots, 2 DL slots, FAAB for free agents, anyone can be picked up, weekly transactions with lineups locking on Monday just before the first game of the day (this is important, as you have a much greater chance of inactivity in a daily transaction league because it’s easy to forget setting your lineup on any given day…I know, I’ve been guilty and I’m sure you all have as well)
The most obvious sign of inactivity is when I find an injured (is actually on the MLB disabled list) player sitting in an owner’s active lineup for several weeks. In the past, I would send the owner an email asking him why he is starting an injured player. Invariably, I’ll get some excuse and an apology, he’ll fix it, and then a month later, there’s another injured player sitting in his lineup. At that point, he usually gets the boot…mid-season, which isn’t good for the league. Whatever rules are created to define inactivity must include a provision for players on the official MLB DL and found in a fantasy owner’s active lineup. There is almost no excuse for such action.
I say almost no excuse because of course there will always be the possibility of extenuating circumstances. Sh*t happens, and often times it’s unexpected. No one sets their lineups days in advance in case something crazy happens that would prevent them from setting it just before the deadline. So I’ll need to add something that allows for some believable excuse.
There is also the case of an owner going on vacation or knowingly being without Internet access where he is physically unable to make the necessary moves. If this was planned, then the owner should notify me beforehand so I know in advance and don’t accuse him of inactivity. This is really easy to do, but I feel like most owners will just disappear and then a week later pop back and apologize for being on vacation. Great, I hope you enjoyed your vacation, but tell me before you go so I’m not wondering why you aren’t responding to my emails!
What I do not want to include in this rule is anything relating to keeping specific players active or on the bench that a competitive fantasy owner would question. No, I have no idea why you have been holding onto Javier Baez on your bench all season long in a shallow league in the hopes he eventually gets the call. Unfortunately, this is something I cannot include a provision for because it becomes subjective and I would like to avoid that.
So at this point, I think I have laid out all my thoughts and the groundwork for a clear set of rules added to our league’s constitution. Now I would like your help to guide me and my league on exactly what I should include and how to word the terms. So I ask again…
How do I define “inactive” as objectively as possible and make the determination that an owner will not be getting his inactivity fee returned at the end of the season?
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
I agree with the idea that, if a player is on the MLB DL, there are few reasons for why he would be in a starting lineup. One of the best reasons might be that the player went on the DL within some number of days of lineup-setting – like, for instance, Sunday night, or even Monday morning. In this case, I think it could be forgiven.
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.
if a player just went on the DL (let’s say before Sunday to give some leeway) and it’s a 15 day DL (no chance of returning), require the owner to remove him from the lineup, even if there is no replacement. That at least shows signs of life, and makes him think about finding a replacement the next week
My concern is that there are only 2 DL spots and 6 reserve spots in this league. Forcing a team to remove a guy who is on the DL is, quite possibly, disadvantageous to that team.
Let’s say Posey hits the DL. The team’s 2 DL spots are already full so now he has to use a reserve spot. But wait. He has some great bench guys that he rotates in and out based on weekly match-ups, plus a top prospect who might get the call real soon . . . and now he has to drop someone (say, Lucas Giolito?) for some bozo replacement catcher (Robinson Chirinos?) that he has no interest in and who is just as likely to hurt his fantasy team as he is to help it.
My point is that, in this league with its smaller roster sizes, I would not support making it a rule that you have to switch a player on the DL. If you want this rule, then increase the number of DL spots to 5 or more.
Good post Mike. We have this same debate annually in my Ottoneu leagues and have tossed around everything from minimum GG and IP thresholds to spot checking lineups, etc. Agree creating an incentive is the right route to take, 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 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.
these rules can apply to leagues with real friends, where you can’t be so liberal in giving someone the boot. You can, however, nudge them to be better owners
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.
you can see activity logs on your site i am sure. If an owner has not made a significant move in 2-3 weeks?
but maybe someone doesn’t need to make a move for a few weeks?
I’m not at all convinced this is a good idea. Fantasy leagues are kind of like the MLB. Teams vary in how active and competitive they are. It’s the nature of things. If you’ve got a consistently useless owner and a better option replace him/her at the end of a season. This game we play is for baseball nerds. An inactivity fee seems to move one from being nerdy to be a scold. It’s fantasy baseball, for goodness sake!
One of my leagues uses a strike system, and it seems to work pretty well. In this case, something like “If a player goes on the DL more than 24 hours before lineups lock, but remains in an active spot, the owner receives a strike. Each week said player remains in an active spot the owner will accrue another strike. Upon receiving a third strike, the owner will be replaced” would be a starting point. There could also be a clause about extenuating circumstances, viable excuses, etc.
instead of replacing them, why not just fine them (preemptively as described). Maybe the next year they do a better job, or maybe they leave on their own, avoiding a headache
I agree that the fine (preemptive) is much more of an incentive. The thing is, you want to encourage owners to be active. For owners who go into a deep hole early and lose total interest in the league, the specter of getting the boot at the end of the season is not large at all. They’re gone on their own by then.
But the threat of not getting back their money might be enough to at least get them to be nominally active (not starting injured players). Their “activity” may be quite minimal, but it’s better than nothing.
I’m in a 10 team keeper league, we pay out top 4 spots, 5th place gets #1 pick the next season and 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. Picks 7-10 go to reverse standings of the top 4. We haven’t had an issue with teams not being active because it’s in your best interest to stay active as it will help you the next season.
We do a similar thing…consolation bracket during the real, fake playoffs. Winner of the consolation bracket gets the option of an additional keeper.
This has kept owners active, and limited horrendously lopsided trades.
My 12 team keeper league (where players are kept for 4 years at the most) awards the top 3 picks next year to those finishing 4th, 5th and 6th. This has had a tremendous influence on keeping teams active as they know that a top pick will net a superstar. Trout will go 1.1 next year, so there was a battle for 4th this past year, believe me.
The other 6 teams are in a non-weighted lottery for picks 4-9, with 10th – 12th being the top 3 finishers in reverse order.
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.
I use games played and innings pitched as a proxy for activity. The thresholds are VERY low in the league I run, but that’s to allow flexibility to rebuilding owners (it’s a keeper league). If it’s a redraft, you can set taut targets. Like within 100 IP of the cap or an average of 15 games of the position player GP cap (I would exclude catcher).
One way I have incentivized teams to stay active is by altering how the final standings lead into next years draft order. This method only really works in a roto straight draft league, but I think you could alter to work in a head to head and auction league. I’m not sure I like the idea of an inactivity penalty. If it comes to that point, it probably means you just have a bad owner. I’m not sure.
Basically, first pick in next years draft goes to the team that finishes first out of the money (5th place). Picks 2-8 then go to those who finish in 6th – 12th. Picks 9-12 go in reverse order of the top 4 teams. In short, this seems to really keep teams in my league playing to the bitter end, even when it is obvious that they don’t have enough to win it all. It also completely gets rid of any reason to tank.
Here is how the draft order plays out. The first four teams make money:
5th place – 1st pick
6th place – 2nd pick
7th place – 3rd pick
8th place – 4th pick
9th place – 5th pick
10th place – 6th pick
11th place – 7th pick
12th place – 8th pick
4th place – 9th pick
3rd place – 10th pick
2nd place – 11th pick
1st place – 12th pick
I dunno, in my league 5th place money doesn’t even cover half of the entry fee. Given a choice between finishing 5th and receiving a token payout or having the #1 pick the following year, I might seriously consider tanking for the top pick.
then have the 5th place team pick first. that was easy
In my league, 4th place gets their entrance fee back plus a little bit more. So, it is not an easy call. Furthermore, tanking from 4th place to 5th place is not the end of the world. It’s much better than tanking to try and get last place.
Yeah, I’m not in favor of pay outs that are less than the entry fee. I would prefer the owners/players that win to actually “win”, not “lose less”. Plus it provides a better payout to the top 3-4.
This is the smartest scenario I’ve seen yet. If you are doing non keeper/draft, this would be my vote. I haven’t played one of those in years though. I might suggest this in my super casual work football league.
My league is a long-term keeper league and is actually a pretty serious league (although we have still had some owners check-out in the past). I don’t see any reason why this would work better in a more “casual” league.
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’d agree, except for the fact that the dudes who are mathematically eliminated are still very much involved in the playoff chase for those that are still in it.
I’ve lost many a fantasy football/baseball playoff spot because my competition for said spot was playing some a-hole who didn’t set his lineup for the final week of the season.
if you join a fantasy league, you’re committing to playing for the whole season, whether you’re out of it or not.
Single season is just a long drawn out version of DFS. When your SP gets injured in the first inning and your Rockies stack gets rained out… FanDuel doesn’t force you to keep looking at your score for the remainder of the night. I get your point about the playoff run… but that’s why head to head is dumb, especially head to head combined with single season. Its just a terrible format to begin with. Making up dumb rules to try to validate your terrible format just makes it worse.
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.
That is rational… but not really in the spirit of fantasy sports. Most people don’t play fantasy as a source of income. The money aspect just makes it feel like less of a waste of time. In a keeper league, losing is part of the game and knowing how to manage your team in a losing season is as much a part of the game as knowing how to manage your team when you are in the hunt. I feel like unless the solution matters in the spirit of wins and losses… people will just be annoyed and it will cause dissention.
In other words… I believe attacking the problem through money is a bad choice. If you decrease the chance of winning the league next year (and winning the grand prize), then you are doing it right.
Agreed. My preference as well is to have this season affect future seasons. But I thought the author was specifically interested in how to make one-and-done money leagues more engaging.
Honestly, now that I’ve been exposed to keeper/dynasty leagues, it seems the obvious solution to long-term, sustained engagement. I don’t really get the point of making trades in-season in redraft leagues, and I don’t think money is a motivational factor unless the sums involved are substantial. At that point, you pretty much rule out casual fans. (Which is a pro, not a con, if that’s the intent.) But I would point out that ‘substantial’ varies from person to person, so it may be that a difference of $50 between 8th and 12th place keeps those bottom teams engaged. Or it may take $250 – and if you’re a group of high income baseball lovers, that may work, too. (some) People pay a lot of money for playoff tickets and extensive cable packages, after all.
While others of us look for the $3 blackjack tables at the back of the casino and complain about MLB blackout rules…
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.
Social pressure is far more effective than a fee, especially one they have already paid. Paying the fee is almost like them getting permission to be lazy about it.
well if they were going to be lazy anyway, and social pressure hasn’t/won’t work, then at least you get more money
Not everyone responds well to social pressure…
Social pressure could be in the form of increasingly heinous punishments the lower you finish. Next to last has to do something fairly innocuous like buy a round of drinks, last place has to get a tattoo of the winner’s choosing at the loser’s expense. You would definitely have a dogfight at the bottom.
the team in our league that finishes in last place is fined a specific amount. their roster is frozen until the fine is paid. if the fine is not paid during the off-season, the team is eliminated from the league and goes to the end of the line of the waiting list of owners wanting to play in the league.
some of our best battles have been among the bottom teams in the standings; similar to the relegation zone in the EPL.
just a thought.
We have an owner that has been guilty of inactivity many times. He’s been in the league for at least 15 years and is considered a friend to many of us. He always pays his dues. We’ve razzed him before about it, but the situation came to a head this past season. His inactivity came during the final weeks of a tight playoff race. The owner was called out publicly on our site, and got angry about it. If we push any harder, he may quit.
We’ve already installed consolation brackets for draft order to discourage late season apathy. I don’t think any rules we could install will change the owner’s behavior.
It puts us all in a tough position. I think we’ve reached a point with him where we either kick him out of the league or just accept that this is what we get from him. I’m torn on how to handle this and which side to take…
I’m curious about the structure of what you’re doing. It sounds like you already have a playoff bracket if you added a consolation bracket. So a tanking team can’t keep out the best teams no matter how egregious the inactive owner is. At most, it may flip the last team in or affect seeding.
At that level, do people care that much? The whole fantasy baseball season is unbalanced in head to head formats, from player injuries to pitching matchups to opponent scheduling to when drafted minor league players get called up.
Like others have been saying, I feel like the best solution is either to accept the inactivity or to make it a keeper league. Give people an opportunity to build for the future. Then picking up that marginal player may be worth something because in two years he might be more valuable. If you can keep 20-25 players (or more) over the offseason, that gives owners something to do in July and August, both in terms of free agent pickups and in terms of trading present production for future production.
It’s already a keeper league. The situation I described could have affected who won the wildcard.
While our 3 division winners and wildcard play in the real playoffs, there is a 5-8 bracket and a 9-12 bracket who play for draft slots. If you win the 5-8 bracket, you get the 5th pick. It was created to mitigate tanking.
My point was, if the bracket thing didn’t work, what will make the guy change?
Yeah, I hear ya; the two extra brackets seems like a great idea. So I’d cast my vote for the accept it side. Make it a running joke or something in the league about how little he does. Personally, it strikes me as not worth it to be stressing real world relationships over minor schedule imbalances.
“If we push any harder, he may quit.”
Would that be such a loss? It doesn’t sound like it would be. I mean, you can still be friends with the guy, you’re not breaking up with him in real life; but why have someone who obviously doesn’t care (much) continue to muck things up for the rest of the league?
He seems to be taking the whole thing pretty personally. A few owners share your attitude on the subject and have been vocal about giving him the boot. The commish doesn’t want to have to boot the guy.
On the other hand, if 10 minutes a week to set your lineup is asking too much of your time, why are you playing this?
I just wish the guy would play the right way…if he would, then we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Has anybody talked to him about, sort of calmly, quietly, on the side? Not “set your lineup you deadbeat or we’ll sh!tcan you!” I’m just wondering if a discussion between cooler heads can help him understand how it’s hurting the entire league by him not setting his lineup, and maybe everyone else can better understand why he insists on playing if he doesn’t pay much attention.
All that said, I don’t think people really change that much, at the end of the day. People are who they are. He’s inattentive and will always be inattentive. The rest of the league has to decide whether they can live with it or not.
If your fantasy league is for fun and bragging rights then don’t worry about it.
If there is some decent cash on the line and this owner’s inactivity is effing it up for the other 11 owners . . . I’m sorry if he’s your friend, but he’s got to go. And I’m only saying this because it seems you have tried to get him to change and he has demonstrated that he is unable/unwilling to do so.
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).
If you really need to do something, I’d support adjusting draft picks as other commenters have suggested. That feels more like a carrot than a stick, and that makes all the difference.
I don’t run any leagues, so from the perspective of a more casual player, I’d offer this observation: the problem isn’t inactivity. The problem is that in a league where money is the only factor and only the top finishes pay out and there are no keepers to next season, then there is literally no point in being active if you can’t finish at the top.
Instead of charging for inactivity (a negative consequence attached to the wrong metric), how about paying out each finish (a positive incentive that allows each owner to employ whatever strategy they prefer)? So in a 12 team league, do something like this: 1st place gets 30%, 2nd 20%, 3rd 13.7%, 4th 8.3%, then 5th through 12th get 7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0%. That way players 5-12 are paying for the winnings of players 1-3 while player 4 gets their entry fee back.
Now every rung of the final standings matters. The only variable is deciding how much in absolute dollar terms is meaningful and then setting the entry fee accordingly. I’d be curious to know what you think of this kind of method. I usually am involved in casual/social leagues, not money leagues, so this may not apply as neatly as it appears to me.
I can’t imagine the 11th place team rushing to his computer every week in an attempt to win $24 instead of $12 or something like that.
If the pot was large enough that a 1 or 2% difference in winnings was significant ($500+ entry fee?), then in all likelihood all of the owners would be really serious to begin with.
I think we’re in agreement there. My interest was comparing payouts to inactivity fees. I think the underlying solution is playing for fun, pride, and bragging rights rather than playing for money, or playing a dynasty format rather than a redraft format. Personally, my least favorite league I’m in is one with an entry fee.
The author intentionally left out dollar amounts, so yeah, if $12 doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. But that’s $12 every level, and that matters to some people. Or don’t denominate it in dollars if that cheapens it. Denominate those smaller payouts in shots at the bar for the offseason party or something like that.
And if the goal is to make a money league that is a major focus of activity, why not have a much higher entry fee? Even a $500 fee (ridiculous, right?) – isn’t so much when you put it in a context of things that people do once they have money. That’s noticeably less than, say, season tickets to real life baseball. Nevermind NY or LA (or good seats), to simply sit in the left field bleachers in Minnesota next season will run you $1,701(!). The very back of Safeco is $1,352. If you’re in a league of people making $75K a year, and you want money to be a motivating factor, you do have to make it a larger amount of money than if your leaguemates make $25K a year.
Agree with Brett. OK idea in theory but assuming a $100 entry fee, there just won’t be any real incentive from 5th down through 12th places where the payouts are shifting by just $12 per slot.
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.
I play in a *GASP* H2H league and intentionally do not share my periods without Internet access. If your opponent knows you can’t change your lineup it’s a HUGE advantage.
Just curious and maybe I’m a bit slow today, but why is it an advantage? Wouldn’t your opponent still set his best lineup regardless of what you’re doing?
Might impact how many SP or RP your opponent starts, or how many basestealers vs boppers. Stuff like that is impacted by your opponent’s lineup.
This isn’t the answer you want to hear, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s anything you can do. If people aren’t into it, they just aren’t into it.
I’ve played in leagues with many of the rules suggested here, and that doesn’t work for some people. I’ve played in “expert” leagues (i.e. you would know the names of some of the owners based on their public writing) and even those can’t attract 12 active, good owners.
The best thing you can do is to make a constant effort to increase the quality of owners in your league. Simply put, if you want a highly competitive league and one of the guys who’s out of it isn’t constantly trying to improve his team for next year through dump trades and free agent pickups, then he shouldn’t be in the league. You should mention something in the rules about “owners who are deemed to be inactive will be given several warnings, and if inactivity continues may be asked to leave the league.”
That’s probably better than trying to quantify things. Even the best owners get home late on a Sunday sometimes and can’t get their moves in. If you like, have some rough guidelines for “inactivity”, but in general, you should only be kicking someone out after multiple conversations with them.
The only other thing I can think of is to automatically make moves for teams. Something like: if they have a player on the DL for two consecutive FAAB periods, then they automatically get the free agent with the most AB (or IP) at a cost of the minimum FAAB bid.
Wholeheartedly agree with this. If an owner can’t be bothered with putting forth a little effort in a WEEKLY lineup league, then fantasy baseball just isn’t for them. You don’t have to cajole them, beg them to set lineups, just give them the boot and find someone who can at least act like they give a crap.
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.
Here’s the friction that I’m seeing, and it’s coming through in many of the (very good) comments:
In a non-keeper, total redraft league, it becomes very difficult to incent behaviors (or disincent inaction) among the bottom half of the league as the season wears on.
On the other hand, I would struggle to be enthusiastic in a league with many, many keepers if somehow I had a pretty bad team with little to get excited about in the future. I can handle one down season, but if the league is keeping something like 40-80% of their roster every year and my keepers pretty well stink…well, that’s just too big a hill to climb for me.
On balance, I like non-keeper, total redraft leagues – you always have a fresh start every year whether you had great luck or rotten luck the year before; you have a shot at obtaining new and different players, guys you’ve never owned before, maybe your favorite players; you can experiment with different strategies from year-to-year (pitching heavy, hitting heavy, stars n’ scrubs, up-and-comers, LIMA plan, whatever). But I think to make non-keeper work really well you need 12 committed owners who can be counted on to put in a modicum of effort even if they are out of the running one year. If they are only interested when they’re doing well, that’s just not worth keeping around. Even if they’re your very bestest pal.
Totally agree. Re-draft is the most balanced from a competitive standpoint and if you get good owners you can run a league for a long time. However, a lot of people crave all the additional frills that come with keeper/dynasty leagues. The problem with those leagues is the imbalance that can build up in as little as one season, even with just a few keepers.
Personally, I wish I could be satisfied with just doing weekly re-draft leagues but unfortunately I keep chasing the holy grail of keeper/dynasty leagues that continues to elude me.
Hey, this is getting a bit far from the original post, but I noticed that both of you commented about imbalances building up with more keepers. I agree that once a league goes from redraft to keeper, a certain amount of imbalance is inherent because the slate is not being wiped clean each season. However, it seems to me that, all else being equal, the number of keepers does not affect the competitive balance. Rather, it affects the concentration of value in the player pool. Fewer keepers means elite players are more valuable, while more keepers means a broader range of players have value.
I don’t think one approach to the number of keepers is inherently more prone to imbalance than another. If anything, if I were taking over a currently bad team, I think I’d rather have a deeper player pool because that means more options for trading and/or drafting future value. I guess as a player I understand redraft leagues, and I understand having lots of keepers, but just having a few keepers doesn’t make much sense to me. It takes away both the fun of dynasty and the fresh start of redraft.
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?
Hell it’s a business model that Planet Fitness thrives on; charge little enough that people can’t be bothered to go cancel the thing even though they haven’t been to the gym in eight months…
Check out Derek Ambrosino’s Hardball Times article from February 2010 titled “Bucking the System”. http://www.hardballtimes.com/bucking-the-system/
He discusses enacting a tiered payout system. It’s not an activity penalty, per se, but it amounts to basically the same thing. The further behind the pack you fall, the more you owe.
I hate inactivity as much as anyone, but the main time it has a huge effect is in H2H leagues i.e. somebody has 3 DL’d players on their active roster and lose 3-7 (5×5 old skewl) to your closest opponent. Those 3 players come of the DL within the next 4 weeks and he ends up beating you 7-3. To combat that, in my H2H league, we just started paying X amount if you win a week, and also have a pot for the final 4. We pay at the end of the season, but if you don’t know everyone in your league then you’d have to collect all the money up front, which could be problematic. So $50 and $10 are easy numbers:
There are 21 weeks x $10 per week = $210. Add $50 for the final pot = $260 entry fee. For every week you win, you get $10 back. The final pot for the top 4 teams in this case is only $600, but we don’t pay 3rd and 4th much. Also, the 1-4 teams have won a lot of weeks, so they may be getting $170 back if they won 17 weeks. The bottom teams may get $80 back, but at least they stayed active.
In the end, the 1st and 2nd place teams don’t get paid as much as they used to in our league, but you may have to sacrifice some prize money in order to keep everyone active. It just depends what’s more important to you.
Also, this league is a dynasty, so people have incentive to hang around and make their squad better for the following season.
And I understand the frustration of inactivity, but if it’s not H2H then it effects all the other teams equally. It’s not “unfair.”
This is false, James. A team’s inactivity may benefit one opposing team by a net gain of 6 points, and another team with only 1 point. All depends on the standings at the time that one team checks out.
We have 2 auction leagues with weekly transactions, both with a schedule of fees for FA adds, WC adds, trades and move to reserve etc. Drops are free.
We also have a 2 week rule. If a player is sent to/called up from the minors or put on/taken off the DL etc., the owner has two weeks to take appropriate action with that player. If the owner is tardy, we will do it for him…at twice the transaction fee. All fees go into the prize pool. If a guy is on the active roster we replace him with a stiff from the FAP and move the guy we are replacing to the owner’s reserve(2x both fees). If he’s already on reserve and is not activated, he is released into the FAP and a fine assessed along with 2x the acquisition fee. Bottom line: it is cheaper to pay attention.
The winner of each week gets a weekly prize and the winner of each category gets a fairly generous prize…total of the 10 category prizes would be about half of what the 1st place team would get.
Works pretty well..maybe twice a year we have to make a move for a tardy owner.
Our keeper league is going into its 5th year will the last ownership change three years ago. Our redraft league had two new owners last year, looks like both will be back again this year.
If someone has thrown in the towel and it’s not a H2H league, then what difference does it make how active they are? And if they’re paying their dues, then they should be free to run their team any way they want.
Where does the extra 20$ go if you deem a team inactive? The problem is, now you’re creating a motivation to “find a team inactive” and keep their money. What do you do if the team is still doing ok, even in their inactive state? What if I am active but truly suck?
Getting invited to play again next year is incentive to not be a bad player. Set some limits, if they break those limits it automatically triggers a league vote on kicking them out. Then move on. Better yet, effectively communicate your issues about inactive teams ahead of time to your owners / potential owners. Interact with them regularly. Encourage interaction between owners.
An alternative would be to require payment in 3 installments. Those who want to discontinue simply don’t pay the subsequent installments. Of course, the overall cost to play should reflect the extra work to process, so it should be higher. For those who don’t bother to continue, the question becomes do you drop the team from the league or have the league owner manage it.
The inactivity fee is probably the best idea. It simpler and does not penalize the active players with higher prices.
I dont play fantasy anymore since the season is too long and I get distracted and would likely be inactive, especially if my team stinks.
It’s hard enough to get everyone to pay once, I can’t imagine the headache of trying to collect money multiple times during a season…
(I think a simple “you pay or you don’t draft” is the best and really only way to handle that issue.)
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.