"Illegal" Rosters (continued)

Continuing the inexplicably closed discussion about “illegal rosters”…

What we’re talking about are players who haven’t been bothered to be owned in September. How much value do they really have going forward? Best case scenario if I do this strategy is I get some previously unowned prospect for $1. A few days later he’s $2. $2 for a player no one wanted to pay $1 to a day before! This type of player is likely a cut come 1/31. But there might be an owner out there who thinks that player is worth $2 now. That player is trade bait.

Most of the time though, other teams can block deals like this. Put a $5 bid in for every prospect auctioned on the last day of the season, win them all, and then cut them all to deprive your opponent of a $1 guy. There are such easy strategies that owners can use to block this approach, it’s just a matter of those other owners considering it and doing it.

I’ve done this for the second season in a row now. I’ve gone to about 60 players as of the last day of the season. I think I’ve been able to flip maybe one (?) of these guys in any off-season trade. It’s an extreme edge case attempt at an advantage that rarely pays off and doesn’t hurt any other team that pays attention.

I can’t say I’m sympathetic to the argument that this strategy complicates arbitration. You may not know exactly who you want to throw dollars at, but there’s very little chance that someone being auctioned on 30 September is worth arb dollars. This just isn’t a valuable player. And, the vast majority of times this strategy is used, the roster in question has 60 or fewer players. This isn’t a burden. Even the notional 90 player roster shouldn’t be too difficult to cull through in about 30 seconds.

And just an aside, Niv, I’m not sure how this conversation can be “closed” since we seem to still be debating this issue. The idea of closing a conversation is another reason people are skeptical of leaving Slack for something that has overmanagement of speech. I’m here because I see some of the super-users here are trying to fix a problem that isn’t broken and want to weigh in but if we’re discussing it we should be able to actually talk it out.

8 posts were merged into an existing topic: Cracking Down On Illegal Lineups in 2017