The Thursday opening of the 2018 Major League Baseball season is not aligned with tradition, but is instead a by-product of additional in-season rest days negotiated by players into the current labor agreement.
Good for them, right? Well, not so fast…
For many fantasy players, it has become more than a bit of irritation. With most weekly transaction leagues on a Sunday night waiver schedule, the traditional Monday aftennoon start to the season had offered ideal timing for fantasy owners to react to the latest news. However, with 2018’s first pitches that matter on Thursday, instead, major problems followed.
MLB teams are not required to set rosters until Opening Day and in fact, were still playing spring training games multiple days after Sunday.
As a result, most all of the several dozen major league players who were clearly headed to the disabled list, whether 10-day or 60-day, had not yet received that official designation. This, in turn, created a roster crunch issue for many fantasy owners, which in some unlucky cases was severe.
How could an owner bid for the necessary free agents to fill roster holes when the players to be replaced were still officially active? Worse, other owners not in this situation could slip in and scoop up the best free agents to have emerged since draft day.
Several of my industry leagues took dramatically different approaches to this quandary.
Tout Tight
In Tout Wars, weekend email traffic confirmed there was considerable confusion among the rank and file. On one hand, it was reinforced to owners that the corresponding drops to Sunday adds did not need to be made until the roster-setting deadline – the time of the first pitch of the week. Normally, that would be on Monday, but this week, it is Thursday, not unlike the period following the All-Star Game.
Some owners had not remembered this and the league constitution contributed to the stir because it read that drops must occur “at the same time” as the corresponding additions. Usually, this gap was 17 hours at most (from midnight Sunday evening to 7 p.m. ET on Monday). However, in 2018, the time difference was more than three days – three very active days in terms of MLB roster changes.
There was additional confusion in that the FAAB system would invalidate bids unless active rosters remained legal – meaning that for every add, a player needed to be at least reserved – though no drop was yet required. In other words, the total number of reserves could temporarily exceed the limit with this not enforced until the week’s play began.
While I successfully pushed for a wording change to the Tout constitution to align the rules with the actual practice, this did not really help the league’s owners. Because MLB teams were not required to set rosters until the morning of Opening Day, most clubs did not.
As a practice, the league’s stats provider does not reflect disabled list moves until the overnight period, with the changes going into effect the next day. In other words, the MLB DL moves made Thursday morning were not reflected on the site until Friday – long after first-week rosters had to be set and made legal.
Some owners who gambled on picking up a replacement on Sunday were forced with a painful drop decision on Thursday morning.
When all is said and done, though far from ideal, in my opinion, the Tout approach was implemented consistently for all owners – which is what matters most.
LABR loose
LABR is at the other end of the spectrum. Its rules include the creation of an expected disabled list, enabling owners to replace obviously injured players whose teams had not yet put them on the real disabled list. In fact, the league leader, Steve Gardner, published and kept current his injured player list on USA TODAY’s website, making it available for other leagues to use as well.
Perhaps this more liberal implementation was partly rooted in the reality that the LABR drafts are among the earliest in the industry, often held as spring games are just beginning. As a result, there is generally a greater need to bolster rosters with replacements before Opening Day.
Personally, I took the most advantage of this of any NL LABR owner, as I had four players injured during spring training and lacked full replacement coverage from my reserves.
In my earlier example, since four of the five Tout league drafts were held on March 17, only a week had elapsed since. Therefore, there should have been less need for backfill compared to the earlier-drafting LABR leagues. But, don’t try to sell that to Jeff Samardzija owners, for example!
In my case, while I had no injuries, I did draft an unsigned free agent in Tout. However, I made sure when selecting my reserves to have a ready refill to plug in at his position. As a result, I was one of the few owners to stand pat during the initial Tout FAAB period.
When all is said and done, while creating and managing the expected disabled list required more work for those running the league, it was the fairest and best approach to take, in my opinion.
If you felt this timing rub in your league, and if MLB continues to have Thursday openings – which seems likely given each labor agreement runs for five years – you may want to consider putting such a clause in your constitution for 2019 and beyond.
Brian Walton was the 2009 National League Tout Wars champion, scoring the most points in the league’s history. He also holds the all-time NL Tout single-season records for wins and saves. His work can also be found daily at The Cardinal Nation Follow Brian on Twitter.
