Designated for Assignment?

This might be an extraneous feature but would a ‘designated for assignment’ roster option be worth exploring?

Real world baseball teams effectively get to use that option to get an open spot on their team while losing the ability to use the designated player.

In Ottoneu, I image it working like so:

  1. A team exceeds its roster or salary cap limits, they must cut or designate player(s) until conditions are met.

  2. Designating players would effectively remove the player from the team’s roster - making them able to make moves & set lineups again - but the player would actually be slated for being ‘cut’ / waiver wire bound some amount of time later… 24 hours? 48 hours?

  3. During that time window, the rest of the league would see said player(s) on the ‘designated’ list and could offer to trade players and/or $ for said player before they are ‘cut’.

  4. This both enables the cutting team to seek something in return (with a known deadline) and gives competing teams the ability to ‘pay’ for a player they otherwise would lose due to the order of the standings.

1 Like

I like the idea.

Bumping this up again as the season nears its end. I feel like an option like this could spur more involvement by teams out of contention around the trade deadline. Just want to see if I can spur some discussion.

1 Like

In my league, we tend to use the trading block for this kind of thing. Well, I guess some owners use it as a DFA announcement, and some other owners use it as a way to tease out actual trades.

But, it might be helpful to tag on an actual deadline where the player is cut if there are no bites from other teams. Kind of like the trading block, but with some teeth.

In my league, there were a few trades this year where one team sent players and received nothing back. This was part of a salary dump / opening up a roster spot for other upcoming transactions. Some other owners were miffed by that, along the lines of, “hey! I would have traded for that guy, or at the very least, I would have certainly claimed the player.” They felt cut out of a possible transaction.

This DFA idea might smooth over those kinds of things, getting it out there in the open.

2 Likes

The trade block is a useful tool, but it is still only proactive. Ottoneu does not have a reactive way for an owner to deal with a newly acquired player other than to cut an existing player.

When you bid on active auctions, you will not know if you go over the cap or your roster space until after you have acquired the player. MLB teams have the ability to designate an active player for assignment as a way to effectively remove them from the roster but still potentially trade the player away.

That’s all I am advocating for here. Basically a signal to the rest of the league that a player is going to be removed from a roster and they can chose to try and trade for said player if they do not believe they could acquire via a claim or free agent auction.

2 Likes

I like this idea. I know that it might be hard to implement and that some might think that it does not add a great deal of functionality, but I like the way it was explained as a reactive feature, instead of active.

I also like that this is a mechanism that MLB teams have to address roster situations, which fits with Ottoneu’s realistic team-management environment.

1 Like

I like this idea a lot, though I’m not sure exactly how much it adds to the experience. At least the way I think about max bids, I always have at least a player or two in mind that I will cut if I win a bid. The additive component would be that rather than just needing to cut that player, I’d be allowed a short portion of time to try to convert their value to something else. But, on the con side, I would imagine that most of these trades would be cap space since the dropping team is by definition in a roster crunch, unless they worked out a 2 for 1 deal.

At the very least, it would be a small step closer to mimicking the experience of a real life GM, which I believe is Ottoneu’s goal. Though that would obviously have to be balanced with the level-of-effort of implementation.

4 Likes

Ottoneu is generally perceived as being complicated and a big effort to play, and while I don’t necessarily agree with that perception, I think adding in things like this that add complication with only some upside over what already exists on the platform would reinforce that perception. I don’t know if this is a lot of value add on top of the trade block.

While this is generally true, Ottoneu is obviously a very streamlined experience. Adding things for the sake of realism itself is not in the scope of Ottoneu because that would make it in my mind both less fun and less accessible. For example, everyone has the same $400 budget and no one has to spend all their time engaging with their ownership group about maintaining or increasing that budget. Would be way more realistic! But obviously would also be not fun.

2 Likes