Tanking

I'm sure it will be a heated topic of discussion this offseason.

You will never completely eliminate tanking. They can't even eliminate it in the actual professional sports.

It's unrealistic to expect everyone to field "an entire team". The elite competitors will always have extra players that are getting reps in real life while sitting in paid minors or on the bench or not yet given a contract. And there just aren't enough active players to go around.

But many leagues take the approach of requiring some minimum activity level per matchup. That's a fairer method than mandating which specific players a team uses (and requires a lot less oversight by league leadership). As long as teams meet their minimum activity, all is good. If they fail to meet that level, penalties are assigned. I think you would see pretty strong support here for weekly minimums somewhere in the 20-50 AB and 10-15 IP range. If you make the minimums too high you risk a team getting penalized just because it suffered some injuries or had a guy unexpectedly sent down (or on the pitching side the relievers just not getting much work that week). But even the folks doing the tanking would likely vote for some sort of reasonable minimum.

Tanking is part of sports but there is also a right way and a wrong way of doing it. Taking that away is against what happens in RL. We am not trying to stop tanking but teams should have to earn their bad record not be handed it by doing nothing. How you get to that point. Guess we will find out.

To me the issue isn't about whether you should be able to tank or not its about how you should have to tank.

Yes. And that will be a major discussion for off-season. We won't go into next year allowing what happened this year with DBacks and Phillies to happen again.

I'm largely for teams having the right to tank if they feel it is in their best interest and that they are not a contender in a given season. However, I strongly dislike teams fielding essentially empty rosters and rolling out a shitty hitter or reliever to try and lose the ratios each week.

In my opinion, there should be heavy weekly IP and AB requirements that all teams need to meet. If a team doesn't meet them in any particular week, then they forfeit one spot in the draft for the ensuing season for each week that the requirement is not met.

While I think an AB/IP requirement is necessary and can be beneficial, I do not like any ruling that requires a GM to play their best players. GMs should have the right to decide who plays and who does not play.

My personal opinion is AB/IP mins do not address the problem whatsoever. I'll live with whatever gets passed, but moderate AB/IP mins like 50 AB and 10 IP just help the teams that are going to try to lose. Stronger AB/IP mins like 100 AB and 25 IP are going to burn a lot of teams that aren't even tanking.

I was one of the 3 owners that tanked hard some weeks along with the DBacks and Rangers (who tanked late). But I didn't like doing it. I'd be thrilled if we allowed tanking to some degree but took away the reward for finishing in last place. That is the big issue that will always cause problems. In real life, you have to worry about fans and revenue plus league rules that don't allow for creativity in roster construction. In fantasy, we don't have those constraints, so we need to eliminate the rewards.

We passed an unweighted lottery for all non playoff teams in our league that didn't allow the same teams to get top 5 picks in consecutive years and didn't allow teams that made the playoffs the previous year to get top picks either.

There are other ways to take away the tanking reward as well or we can create rules that don't allow owners to bench all their star players every week instead or some other similar idea. But I think it is clear that AB/IP is definitely not the best way to tackle this.

Having said all that, I am new here and will be fine with whatever gets passed. But those are my thoughts.

PM me if you want to engage me on this stuff. I don't want to go back and forth with anyone on this thread. I've stated my opinion and have spent hundreds of hours thinking about and discussing this stuff in other places already.

Peace.

I think the words "enitre team" might be too much but playing basically no one is unacceptable or should be anyway.

Some teams won't like being told who to play. Some teams won't like mins. Some teams will think nothing is wrong with what Phillies and DBacks did. In the end there won't be anything that makes everyone happy but you have to make as many people happy as possible.

So its about getting some ideas and narrowing them down and seeing where are here at.

I like this as I did in NBA. I don’t want a ton of “you have to do x or y” or defined tanking. Then we have to look for it in detail. The key is just that you can’t bench guys and leave a spot open or with a minor leaguer unless there’s a strategic reason to do so. We need guys to put out as full a roster as they possibly can. And no empty positions unless you don’t have mlb guys eligible there.

And I don’t envision anyone policing this to the nth degree. If we happen across an example or it is reported then we would address it. Benefit of the doubt likely goes to the coach. That’s how I see it working.