FAAB, Waivers, or Both?

At one point, I had intended to write more about various rules differences in Rotisserie leagues before the season ended. Since the last two weeks of the season are slow when it comes to analysis, this is probably as good a time as any to look at a few of these issues.

The original rules for Rotisserie, as outlined by the founders in their 1984 Rotisserie League Baseball, primarily allowed players to be replaced only if they were sent to the minors or injured. Once a player returned from the minors or injury, you had to either get rid of the formerly injured player or get rid of the replacement within two transaction reporting periods. If the player you were getting rid of was on an active major league roster, he would go on waivers. Any team could claim a player on waivers, but you could only obtain one player on waivers in a given week. Waiver claims were given precedence in inverse order of the standings - last place first, first place last. Additionally, if you waived someone the previous week, you were moved to the back of the line on claims.

At some point, the Free Agent Acquisition Budget, or FAAB, was introduced. This allowed owners to replace players at-will, and eliminated the concept that you had to get rid of either the player you reserved or the player you replaced him with. Best of all, FAAB created a system that more closely mirrored real life. In too many instances, the owner who won wasn't the owner who had the best auction, but the one who was lucky enough to have an injury on the same week that Don Mattingly came up to the big leagues. FAAB isn't perfect, but it does allow every team to compete for players on equal footing, and not just because someone got hurt.

When FAAB was instituted, waiver claims continued to exist in the rules as well. I've stopped buying the Rotisserie book since John Benson bought the franchise, so I don't know how the original league handles this rule now. But I do know of several leagues that no longer use waivers and FAAB together. LABR and Tout Wars both don't use waivers.

For simplicity's sake, using FAAB only can be a lot easier for a commissioner to manage. There aren't two sets of rules for different players depending on when a player was released. You are also putting every team on an utterly even playing field when the season starts. Everyone starts with $100 FAAB (typically; some leagues use a different amount), and you have a theoretical maximum of 100 moves that you can make over the course of a season.

On the other hand, taking waivers away makes it that much harder for teams at the bottom of the standings to improve their teams for next year. True, bottom feeders will always have FAAB. But waivers does give these teams an opportunity at first crack at a player of their choosing, at least for one week.

I've always preferred the waiver/FAAB combination for this reason. Unlimited waivers would definitely be a bad rule; you don't want teams rewarded for being in last, and you especially don't want a team that gets off to a slow start in April to have the ability to pick up any available player he wants in late May just because he wasn't lucky in the first month.

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons that leagues no longer use waivers is that stat services don't manage waivers very well. Even services that allow waivers don't seem to possess the ability to block more than one waiver claim a week, which leads for headaches for a commissioner trying to back out these claims after the fact. Worse yet are the services that don't allow waivers at all; then you have to figure out some alternate means of allowing these types of moves.

I'd be curious to know if your leagues have this mechanism or not. If your league did away with it, I'd like to know why. If not, do you still enjoy waivers?