Why could one not use Madison Bumgarner in DH in the year he was a league average and a 13% better than league average hitter? (That’s an admittedly kinda sarcastic question to head off the “we are just mirroring Real Baseball” argument that sometimes is used as justification for decisions, without acknowledging the myriad ways Ottoneu doesn’t mirror Real Baseball like the lack of a MLB salary cap, the draft, free agency, the capacity for an owner to spend the floor or multiples more than other teams to try to win, etc.)
My concern is that this works if and only if your league will be Year One in 2023 or maybe Year Two. For leagues that are older, we didn’t auction Ohtani in 2018 at a value reflective of his value next season, and we didn’t apply arb dollars to him as if he’d be potentially the system’s first and only 2000-point player, while occupying one roster slot. This is not a question of a player, whoa, blowing up like Soto or Trout. It’s a thing of shifting the rules around one player. In a league I play there is a 47 point gap between first and third. The guy in third has Ohatani, so it’s a rule that impacts one player and has a tangible impact.
Seems the fair thing to do would be to put a league out of arb for the year and do a vote-off so that Ohtani can be voted off, with every other team losing a player as well to balance it out, so that he can be auctioned off at a fair market value. Upthread there’s reference to his salary being $60 on average in first year leagues. His overall salary is 1/3 lower, a pretty good indication that in older leagues his salary is quite low.