Yesterday I talked about a clear and obvious sign that your Rotisserie league might have an ownership problem. But besides inactivity, what other possible warning signs are there that might make you wonder if you should start lining up a replacement for next year as soon as possible?
Can't Get the Transaction Rules Right: He doesn't understand how the league's position eligibility works. Players are listed to pick up, but without a FAAB bid. If your league uses waivers, players on waivers have a bid on them or players who aren't on waivers get claimed. If there is a salary cap, bids are placed without regard to how much cap space is left. Tries to reserve players who are active. Tries to activate players who are still on the DL or in the minors. All of the above issues aren't isolated errors but errors that occur repeatedly and almost every week.
Doesn't Understand Fair Trades: He has Jacoby Ellsbury, Ichiro Suzuki and Coco Crisp but doesn't understand why your offer of Mark Teixeira for Coco Crisp is logical. You try explaining it but he thinks that this deal will hurt his team. You pound your head against a wall.
Doesn't Understand Dump Trades: He's out of the money, but doesn't know why he would want to add a $6 Ben Zobrist to his team for a CC Sabathia in the last year of his contract. He tells you that he likes Sabathia and that he's going to shoot up from 10th to 6th any day now since CC will surely offset Kyle Davies and Francisco Liriano's combined badness.
Makes Selective Trades: Never returns your e-mails on trade offers. You send him 20 e-mails but don't hear anything. Then he makes a clearly inferior dump deal with another owner. This happens to be the owner that brought him into the league/saved his life when they were in the NYPD together/ was the mohel at his son's bris. Sometimes there is a magical e-mail account or telephone number that one or two owners have that the rest of the league doesn't have. Sometimes the players the owner gets in the dump deal are flipped again in lesser deals or just thrown back into the pool at the freeze deadline.
Doesn't Understand Deadlines: Tries to put moves in after the free agent deadline. Tries to make trades after the trade deadline. Loses players on his reserve list to waivers and gets mad about this. Misses the freeze deadline. Goes to Europe or South America before the freeze date and doesn't freeze his team. Doesn't seem to understand why not submitting a freeze list six days before Auction Day is a big deal.
Makes Plenty of Mistakes at the Auction: Starts calling out names of players in the minors two-thirds of the way through the auction. Starts calling out players from the "other" league. Starts calling out players on other people's rosters. Usually these players are obvious freezes. Doesn't bring a list of minor leaguers for the farm draft. Forgets about the farm draft entirely. Tries to steal your Baseball America. Takes 20 minutes to pick a minor leaguer.
Blames Everyone Else But Himself for Any or All of The Above: Thinks the rules are unfair. Thinks that other owners are getting preferential treatment "just because they know the rules." Yells at the Commissioner. Yells at other owners. Like many geniuses unrecognized in their time, thinks that if only people understood his sensitive nature that these transgressions wouldn't be viewed as mistakes but as examples of this owner's forward thinking vision.
I don't think I've ever seen an owner do all of these things, but this is a pretty accurate composite of all of the things I have seen go wrong. The biggest challenge with any and all of these actions is that while they're certainly disruptive and possibly detrimental to a league, you can't really kick an owner out of the league for missing the FAAB deadline.
There are ways to deal with these types of owners, though...and I'll run through some of these methods this weekend.
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