I think something has gone wrong here:
I checked, and I got Lucroy’s points added in on the standings page.
What probably happened is you went into the day at 161 games and then had two catchers play. @nivshah can confirm, but I believe in a situation like that you are able to get to 163 games at catcher. The system only checks the caps before the games that day start, not in the middle of the games.
Yeah, it is currently a soft cap. Next year it will be a hard cap. Just because the points show up on the live page do not mean the points are showing up in the standings. They are not adding up in the standings, in fact.
I’ll work today on making sure the live page doesn’t show points / stats for players who aren’t actually accruing points and stats for their teams.
That doesn’t appear to be true.
Standings after Sunday’s games: https://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/234/standings?date=2016-09-11 (I’m Imaginary Hammers, in 2nd place, with 15,892.6 points)
Monday’s Live Page: https://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/234/live?date=2016-09-12 (Remember to go to the right team, I had 99.4+9.67=109.07)
Standings after Monday’s games: https://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/234/standings (still second, now 16,001.6 points)
I entered the player-by-player points from the live page into Excel, to account for whether Lucroy’s stats were just getting left out of the subtotals, but it sure looks like all my points on the live page counted (Lucroy is up top with 6.2):
Am I missing something?
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Okay, I should have been more clear in my last post, because I’ve been over this with a number of users via email already.
The cap check currently looks like:
games played < cap limit
When the games played at a position is 162, that is not less than 162. So the next game will count, which in your case was the game on 9/12 with Jonathan Lucroy. That was your 163rd game. If that count goes up today and your standings have Lucroy’s stats in them tonight, on 9/13, then there is actually a problem.
The cap check next season will look like:
games played <= cap limit
This will create the ‘hard cap’.
OK, that makes sense. Sadly, I can’t test it, as Lucroy isn’t starting tonight, and when I tried to swap him out for Hundley, it would only let me remove Lucroy and not place anyone into that C spot. Looks like, aside from the < vs. <= issue, it’s working as intended.
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Yeah, see, I knew something was working right about game caps 
Thanks for showing your work, @byron. Hopefully it will clarify this incredibly confusing quirk for others.
So I understand the soft cap, does that mean if I have 809 games at OF and start 5 guys, I can get to 814 and have all points count to standings?
I think only the IP cap is considered “soft” but @nivshah will need to clarify this if it happens all in the same slate of games one evening.
What @henton said is not quite true, actually. It’s pretty complicated - if multiple players have the same start time, then this could happen, but most likely you won’t get much more than 1 or 2 games over the cap, if that. This is how it has been for 5 years, but I will be changing this in the offseason like I said earlier.
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I am curious to see if you can get past 810 with OF. Based on the C example it seems you should be able to.
Pardon me if the answer is above, and I’m not getting it, but what about positions in which you can only start one player? How do they get to 163?
This is going to sound ridiculous, but 162 is not less than 162. It is less than or equal to 162. For the last 5 years for some reason that I cannot speak to right know even though I wrote almost every line of code that runs the games, the game check was doing the first check (is 162 less than 162?).
Next year that will change.
So the games cap for each single-player spot in a lineup is actually 163?
No, because the check is more complicated than it needs to be. It’s hard to get into the details of it but I am going to simplify the whole thing next year.
Sorry to be a pain about this, Niv, but how would this guy whose games played chart I clipped get 163 games out of the 3B position?
I am unclear why this needs more clarification, but:
If you don’t visit certain parts of the site AND you are at 162 games, you will get a 163rd game. There are multiple checks for if you are at the game limit, and if you avoid them by happenstance then the final check has a “>” instead of a “>=”.
Next year it will be much more streamlined. I’m not going to answer any more questions about game limits, I think pretty much anything anyone needs to know is in this thread.
Thanks.
Sure. Fun Easter egg.