Solving The Dumping Dilemma

When I wrote about FAAB and potential keepers, Anonymous weighed in with a fairly radical alternative.

We've gone a step beyond, apparently motivated by serious paranoid anti-dumping, we can't freeze FAAB acquisitions nor may we trade them. Apparently solves the dreaded dumping, but sure seems to kill any serious in-season trading unless you have asterisk players to burn and still compete.

As my regular readers know, I tend to avoid comment on specific rules and league formats. What works for your league works for your league, and if it keeps all 12-13 owners happy - or at least not at each other's throats - then who am I to say you're doing it wrong?

But I do wonder about the potential impact of these types of acquisitions in a potential dump deal.

Let's go back and look at the list of players from that linked article above who were kept this year:

National League (19)
$8 Josh Johnson
$7 Jason Motte
$6 Travis Ishikawa, Hong-Chih Kuo, John Lannan, Nyjer Morgan, Daniel Murphy
$5 John Baker, Clint Barmes, Emmanuel Burriss, David Bush, Matt Lindstrom, Ryan Madson, Paul Maholm, Ricky Nolasco, Pablo Sandoval, Skip Schumaker, Ian Snell, Todd Wellemeyer.

American League (13)
$15 Armando Galarraga
$11 Juan Rivera
$10 Mike Aviles, Grant Balfour, Shin-Soo Choo, Joey Devine, Gavin Floyd, Frank Francisco, Matt Joyce, Kendry Morales, Brandon Morrow, Denard Span, Brad Ziegler.

Once again, the $5/$10 salary difference makes all the difference. Morales was the only player in this American League who was included in a dump deal. Based on performance, contenders could have made an argument for Rivera, Choo, Span and maybe Floyd. The list expands in the N.L.; a number of these players would have made enticing dump chips, with Josh Johnson, Lannan, and Sandoval jumping out as the most obvious candidates.

I've examined this phenomenon before, but most of the dump chips we see are freezes from a prior season, not freebie FAAB players. There are a number of reasons why this may be so, but I suspect that the biggest reason is that we don't trust that these FAAB acquisitions are real until we've seen them perform for weeks if not months.

One year later, it is a little more likely that you'll see a FAAB player become a dump chip. However, the odds are still poor. I don't like the idea of limiting trades, but I suspect that the rule Anonymous mentions is curtailing trading without necessarily curtailing dumping.