Dumping Pet Peeves

Over at Fake Teams, I found this post about dumping pet peeves (the author calls it "bailing").

I definitely have my own peeves about dump trades, but I've covered them in previous posts last year. I thought instead at look at the five that Fake Teams lists and see if I agree or disagree.

1. Teams that bail to other teams with their best players and then come and offer you their worst - but for the best bail pieces you have.

This one bothers me a little bit. But teams that pull this trick often have little left to trade and are still antsy to get into the action. I can often forgive this minor sin, since I generally assume that the owner isn't trying to hose me, but is trying to get the best players for his effort next season.

2. Even more annoying, those bailing teams act as if they aren't doing that.

Again, I'm not sure if the dumper necessarily knows that he's pulling this trick or not. My peeve rests more with the obstinate owner who keeps coming back with the same offer again and again. Once you've moved your best chips, you can still be a player in the dump market, but you're better off exploring smaller trades. An owner in my league last year moved a $12 Mark Teahen for a farm system Brandon Wood. It hasn't worked out for the Wood this year, but the idea of getting a cheap Wood for what had become a borderline player in Teahen was a creative idea, and far more inspiring than simply trying to fleece someone by offering something like Teahen for Fausto Carmona at $2.

3. Bail teams that don't know what bailing is - they make offers and counteroffers that have them winning the deal in the current season and future ones. The only thing saving bail trades from being recognized as the league-destroying force they are is the bailing teams gets future value at the expense of current.

This doesn't bother me. It only makes me sad for the owner that does it. I've also noticed that if a league survives long enough, the owners who do this tend to get weeded out over time. Even if as a Rotisserie owner you're Harry Stein and Alex Patton rolled into one, there will come a season when you eventually have to cash in your chips and play for next year. If you try to play it both ways in a serious league, you'll typically finish out of the money every year. Maybe you'll do "ok" and finish 6th or 7th one year, but the next year you'll finish 10th or 11th. The teams that truly dump wind up having some success with it and the non-dumpers eventually get flustered and quit. I've seen it happen at least three times in my league.

4. Teams that declare they are bailing and then don't do anything for a couple weeks.

This is happening in my league right now, and it's annoying at least a couple of owners. Whether you're mad about this or not, though, depends on where you're at in the standings and how strong your future chips are. I'm currently in 2nd place in my money league and my dump chips are admittedly not as strong as some of the first division squads behind me in the standings have. For these teams that are 20-30 points out of first, I can see why they're frustrated. They need to make deals soon or they're not going to win. In fact, for a couple of teams, their window has just about closed.

For me, though, the trading inertia is most likely going to be good news. Some of those middle-of-the-pack teams are going to simply give up or only make dump trades that are extremely favorable to them. That will leave me with a less competitive landscape to navigate and I anticipate being able to make a more favorable dump trade with the non-contenders as a result.

In a dump league, you obviously want to own chips you can trade in these this-year-for-next-year-deals, but you should also buy the best team possible at your auction. Saying "I lost because Teams A, B, and C didn't dump soon enough" isn't an excuse for losing. Winning is about generating maximum opportunities throughout the year, not assuming the dump trades are going to happen on your terms.

5. Being the recipient of a bail deal and finishing behind the team that bailed.

This has almost never happened in my league. When it does happen, the team that went for it and finishes behind a dumping team either had a lot of injuries or probably shouldn't have been playing for this year in the first place. You can't do anything about injuries, but you should be annoyed about the injuries and not the fact that you went for it.

If you did go for it and you didn't have significant injuries or bad luck, then you probably shouldn't have gone for it. We've all seen teams do this before. Typically, they are either teams who got off to an artificially bad start and tried to capitalize on this or - worse - middle of the pack teams that decided to go for it even though they didn't have a real shot.

Most of these peeves, while annoying, aren't things that you should get too wrapped up in if your run for first place doesn't work out. Even in a dump league, dump trades are but one way to position your team to compete. The only peeve I have isn't even listed here, which is when one team hurriedly dumps its players to another team without even bothering to announce its intentions to the league. In every other case, I have to recognize that I might not be able to make the dump trades I want to make to help my team win, and will have to adjust on the fly to position my team to win in another way.

In non-carryover leagues, the same things can happen. You can make fair, sensible offers all season long only to see an owner trade A-Rod for Jose Contreras because Contreras is off to a nice start. You can grumble about that trade all year long, or you can adjust to the new reality. Whether you're in a dump league or not, I recommend adjusting. More than anything else, this is the key to winning any kind of Rotisserie League.