Auction tiebreaker should go to the nominating team

Should ties at the price of $1 go the the owner that puts the player up or auction. He is the one that actually thought to put the player up. I am 0-3 in losing coin flips on players I put up for bid. Doesn’t seem fair the second guy to bid $1 get the same rights. I mean he didn’t even bid $2.

I don’t agree that there is any intrinsic value to nominating a player, compared to being willing to pay the player the most.

This is really bad luck and bad luck stinks, but bad luck is not a great reason to change a system.

You didn’t either, though.

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Bid $2, if nobody bids you’ll get the player for $1. I’d be surprised if many players pass through with only one $1 bid, there seems to be a lot of strategy and gamesmanship in the nomination and bid process. At least half on the owners in my league actively try to enforce prices.

This is a good article from a couple years back that discusses bid price enforcement. (google search “Ottoneu 101”, even the old articles are incredibly helpful!!!)

Other teams strategies may include waiting to nominate certain players. Just because you force somebody else’s hand with a nomination doesn’t mean you should get “dibs” on the player. Random is really fair. Bummer on the bad luck!

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Just to add on to my initial point, I think a lot of owners conflate nomination with “discovery”. This is a mistake, and if you really want a player you nominated, you should bid more than everyone else to remove the chance of tiebreakers. No Ottoneu owner is discovering a baseball player, unfortunately. The fact that they are in the player universe is an indicator that they’ve already been discovered.

I’m not saying that OP is doing that, but making this point for posterity.

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I’ve been curious about tiebreakers after the first 2 games in Japan this year - this triggers a change in the standings from which tiebreakers / waiver claims are oriented, but are quite arbitrary with such little stats to go off of. In my league, a couple more clearly bad teams ended up in first place and lost waiver claims based on 2 games of stats! You can play gamesmanship and avoid these first 2 games, but that devalues those players. Ever thought of continuing random tie breakers in the preseason up until true opening day?

The word “real” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. MLB games started on March 20, that’s about as clear-cut as it gets.

EDIT What I mean by that is how does one define “real” Opening Day? MLB is going to mess around with starting the season in different places to expand their business interests, and if the games count, so should your standings. I don’t think any owner’s strategy relies on winning tie breakers, so it’s more of a good luck/bad luck thing early on, if its a coin-flip or if its Piscotty hit a homer in Tokyo. I say this as the owner of a bad team that was in first place for a week because Piscotty hit a homer in Tokyo.

I think a lot of owners conflate nomination with “discovery”.

I certainly never mentioned it in terms of discovery. Although I get your point.

If an owner low on money can just bid $1 on an already nominated player he could still have a chance to win by a flip of the coin. Not a bad gamble on some players.

Sure, if no one else in your league believes that player is worth more than $1.

This thread is basically a duplicate conversation of this one from a couple years ago. For anyone who is curious about why in-season auctions work the way they do, please read through the older thread - there are some more links and conversation there that may be relevant.

I just got burned by this and it’s super frustrating. Shouldn’t it default to the owner who nominated the player? They do the leg work to find a player they like, they have the right market price on him, but they still lose out. I’m guessing the coin-flip rule is in place for competitive balance reasons, but I don’t think it’s working the way it was intended.

This thread covers your concerns and the arguments made here remain true.

not only is this the best approach, nominate at the relative value to your own roster, but enjoy the protection that you get from “overbidding”…you’ll never pay more than $1 over the next highest bid

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