[USML Announce] Andy's Proposal

[Richard E. Robbins]

On February 5, 2004, SpringKerb at aol.com wrote:

[snip]
> Like we don't know which guys the FAAB purchases were?  I'll bet most of the 
> league could name last year's most significant FAAB players without even 
> looking.  And, since TQ Stats already maintains a running list of 
> transactions, the nformation is already there.  
> I don't see any reason why we'd need to do 
> anything to "mark" the FAAB players, given that we'll know who they are and
> can easily check if there are any questions.
> 
> Mark

You are kidding right?  We have owners that have a hard enough time complying with our current rostering and trade rules and you want to add another one that assumes that people are careful about this sort of stuff?  For that suggestion alone you should be forced to serve as league secretary for a season.

TQ Stats transactions lists last year were not always crystal clear as to the difference between someone being picked up on waiver claims as opposed to FAAB bids or being acquired in trades.  We'd need to keep a running list of these guys and Blocker would need to check it whenever a trade is made.

Can you remind me as to why this approach is better then the skinny FAAB currency proposal or the eBay bidding proposal?

By the way, the skinny FAAB currency proposal not only suffers from the floor hostile, cap friendly assymetry that I pointed out earlier, but by making it impossible to create an asterisk player through FAAB bidding it too (like the "withdrawn" proposal) could result in a situation where a productive, legit asterisk type player could be used in trades without running into the taint of being an asterisk player.  If a top flight player lands in the AL during the course of the year, and he is acquired through FAAB bidding, he should become an asterisk player.  A team building for the future shouldn't be able to acquire the player and trade him to a contender in what would otherwise be a prohibited imbalanced trade but for a structure that eliminates the possibility of a FAAB player becoming an asterisk player. 

The eBay bidding structure should make it impossible to turn a fill in kind of player into an asterisk player in order to facilitate what would otherwise be a prohibited trade.  Again, I am not concerned about collusion if we simply state that collusion is forbidden.  On the flip side, the eBay bidding proposal will create asterisk players where they should be created and limit the ability of a non-contending team to trade these players in a way that amounts to an end run around our anti-dumping rules.  The eBay proposal is also floor and cap neutral and requires no additional activity from the league secretary after the FAAB bidding on a player has been completed.