Everyone wants a competitive yet fun fantasy baseball league. You want to be able to shit-talk your buds about not keeping Josh Hamilton, or drafting Zack Greinke over David Wright four years ago in your keeper league.
Unfortunately, some people do not like losing and impliment strategies that are universally considered BITCH-MOVES. They’re not illegal in most cases, but they do go against the spirit of the game.
Your job as commisioner is to impliment rules that completely eliminate bitch-moves from your fantasy league. If its not clearly stated in the rules, it’s legal and while it may ruin the league and even a friendship or two it’s still technically legal. If there’s money on the line, these bitch-moves become more prominent.
Here’s how to eliminate the dreaded bitch-move from your fantasy baseball league.
1. Set a limit, or a price, on waiver-wire transactions.
The biggest loophole in head to head leagues is cycling, rotating, or spot-starting waiver-wire bait. An owner will spend all of his draft-picks on offense, and possibly saves and rely solely on waiver-wire pitchers to fill his stat sheet.
Considering standard fantasy baseball categories, there are enough counting stats for pitchers for cycling to work. By starting every available starter, you’ll definitely take home WINS, and STRIKEOUTS. Considering you’ve spent all of your early draft picks on offense, all you need to do on a weekly basis is take home 4 of 5 offensive categories, to win every week.
If you’ve drafted closers as well, you only need to win 3/5 offensive categories.
2. Set both Minimum and Maximum Innings Pitched Limits
A maximum innings pitched limit will act in the same manor as a waiver-wire limit. If an owner can only accumulate so many innings, rotating pitchers is eliminated.
As important is a minimum limit on Innings Pitched, in head to head leagues.
Another “strategy” is to once again concentrate solely on offense and completely eliminate starting pitchers all together.
If you start solely good closers and amazing relievers, you will win ERA, WHIP, and SAVES almost every week. You’ll undoubtedly lose Wins and Strikeouts, but when you play head to head leagues going 6-4 every week will get you into the playoffs. Once you’re in the playoffs, 6-4 will win you the championship.
I figure out IP limits as follows:
Minimum IP per Week = (# of SP * 5 IP) + (# of RP * 2 IP) + (# of P * 3 IP)
In a default league, should work out to about 20-25 IP which is a fair limit, and may be even a bit low.
Maximum IP per Season = (#SP * 180IP) + (# of RP * 70IP) + (# of P * 130IP)
You can go higher, but this is generally a good number that ends up being fair, and actually requires you to micro-manage a little bit.
3. Inform everyone of any rule changes, or category changes
The Value of certain players change quite a bit with even the slightest change in rule or category changes.
This is pretty simple, but if you go and change average to on base percentage, tell everyone. If you have six offensive categories and four pitching categories, tell everyone.
4. Think about Pitching, Pitching, and More Pitching.
Generally, the hitting categories are hard to exploit because each player starts each day, and the players on your bench have very little impact on your final point total.
Early in the season, players do not play every day and the schedule really hasn’t taken hold. There’s the possibility of streaming, but its far from a sure thing.
Pitching on the other hand is a different beast. Every player on the pitching side has the possibility of contributing — so watch out.
5. Collusion and the Trade Deadline
If you play with the same guys year in and year out, collusion can genuinely become a factor and it’s almost always impossible to prove.
Obviously, if two of the guys are always hanging out — they’re liable to talk trade more often, and eventually come to terms on a trade more often. There’s going to be some good ones, and some bad ones.
However, if every year around trade-deadline day, the same two guys are making fairly unbalanced then you should at least investigate, and i’m sure it’ll immediately be brought to your opinion by whomever has the most to lose.
I’m a fan of the Commish having complete control over trades, rather than league votes. If there’s a problem with a trade, the concerned parties should email the commish.
The Commish looks at the trade, and tries to think of every conceivable reason for making this trade. Maybe the trade is Hanley Ramirez, the top ranked player, for the fourth best pitcher.
On the surface, trading the top player in the game for the 25th player in the game screams of collusion. The commish needs to look at the stat categories and see if it makes sense for both teams. If the team trading for the 25th best player is already winning pitching by a wide margin every week — you’ve probably got yourself a case for collusion.
Otherwise, you’re going to have to talk to the other owners. Ask them if Hanley Ramirez had been floated around in trade talks at all, or if this came out of nowhere. If someone’s trading Hanley Ramirez for Josh Beckett, when they could have gotten Johan Santana — this is generally pretty sketchy.
If you can think of any reason, at all. The trade has to go through, as it’s not your team to run.
Obviously if someone presents you proof of collusion, go ahead and enforce whatever procedure you have in place. If it’s a money league, this is the part where it gets ugly.
6. One Last Thought
Set fair limits on the length a player remains on waivers. Your Waiver-Wire position should mean something, and everyone should get a chance to use it.
If a couple people only check their leagues once or twice a week, set the waiver wire time at a week. If someone not in the Yahoo or ESPN player pool comes in, sometimes the standard two day waiver-wire period isn’t long enough.
If everyone checks their team every day, two days is fine.
Hopefully this’ll eliminate most bitch-moves from your league, and keep it fun.
