Why can't we bid on players within 30 days of cutting them?

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[unrelated to original question, but to do with re-auctioning so I’m posting hereI don’t know if this has ever been debated, but should an owner be banned from bidding within 30 days of cutting a player? My thinking is that if he isn’t picked up off of waivers, then the whole league agrees that that player is too expensive at X cost. Why shouldn’t the owner be allowed to re-bid (if the player seems to have undergone some sort of mechanical change, or he only got send down to the minor for two weeks and you needed space for an active player)? I can see how this rule could be violated, if re-auctioning was happening a lot, but there could be a rule that a) the owner would still have to carry the cap penalty for 30 days, b) you could allow owners only one re-auction per player (so if they cut a guy they couldn’t re-auction him for the rest of the year, and c) you could lock their bidding at 1$ below the original cut cost (so they could only bid 13$ for a 14$ cut) which would prevent them from just trying to win a bid.

This has been debated at length.

I’m opposed to changes to the 30-day rule for the following reasons:

  1. The 30 day waiting period is a nice balance between punishing teams for paying for players that end up not being useful and allowing those teams to recover. Lessening this period would lessen the penalty for teams who make bad decisions with their money. The crux of the entire game is how teams spend their money, so lessening the weight of those decisions would make Ottoneu significantly less interesting / challenging.
  2. Complicated situational rules are very unfriendly to new users.

For these reasons I think the current situation is good and has no reason to be changed.

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I don’t think the penalty for cuts should be lessened, if anything you could bump the tax penalty to 60 days, I just think you shouldn’t not be allowed to bid on a player. Almost all Ottoneu veterans re-sign and re-cut salaries, so the penalty is never that strong. And a lot of the cuts I see are just about roster crunching and less about salary cap issues (which can themselves be circumvented with loans). If a player gets sent to the minors for 2 weeks but you have too many guys on the DL (which happens a lot in the world of 10-day DLs), he might be the guy you cut and you might lose him for non-cap reasons.

From the owners I’ve seen in my league, new owners often don’t even read the rules and we have to explain them as we go.

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I think one of the penalties to cutting a player (in addition to the cap hit) is not being able to add them back for a period of time. It adds a lot of weight to the decision to cut a player or not. The fact that results in difficult roster decisions is a ‘feature’, not a ‘bug’ (if you will).

What do other people think?

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I like the rule as is. Otherwise, I’d worry that there might be ways people start add/dropping starting pitchers to get to their IP limit later in the year

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I don’t think it’s a bug, but in the majors teams can DFA a guy (off the 40-man) and then bring him back up if he starts doing well. (Just to draw a parallel, not saying ottoneu should mirror the majors exactly) As for streaming pitchers, you could add something that prevented owners from doing it all year, say after the 2nd cut you wouldn’t be able to add him back for the rest of the year (which is actually a tougher decision than cutting for 30 days and re-bidding, just to cut again, which happens fairly often). With loans and re-bidding cap penalties aren’t that difficult to deal with, so if you wanted to make the initial cut ‘difficult’, it could come with carrying the cap penalty for 30 days, regardless of if he was claimed again or not.

I agree - I like the current rule/process as is and there really should be some risk in not making the “right” evaluation (keeping, cutting, or bidding) on a player. I would be disappointed if these rules were to change.

What if another team adds the player you cut, drops that player, then the same player goes up for auction before your 30-day waiting period is over? Shouldn’t the other team adding your cut player remove the 30-day limit? I’m sure this is a unique situation. Still, if your team doesn’t have a cap penalty from that player, then I would think you would be able to start an auction or bid on them if somebody else starts the auction, even if you technically cut that player less than 30 days ago.

Team were exploiting this by trading for players with the express intention of cutting them so the original team could start an auction at half off. So, no, if you’ve cut the player within 30 days you cannot re-auction them, even if they weren’t most recently on your roster.

That makes sense. A few bad apples ruined it for the rest of us!

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A post was split to a new topic: Trading players with the express intent of cutting them