Okay, first off, it’s not what you think. This entry is all about a screw up I made, which I am comparing to the infamous Merkle’s Boner. If you’re not familiar with Merkle’s Boner, well, I just linked to it so read up! You won’t be disappointed. [Jay’s Note: Can confirm, it is SFW, though does qualify for risky click of the day!] The major difference here is, you know, this isn’t real baseball. It’s fantasy. To me though, it was still a huge pain in the ass, and I am interested in getting other’s takes on what the outcome should have been. This happened a couple months ago by now, and we’ll get to the resolution and hindsight at the end.
I am the commissioner of the prestigious Die Nasty Dynasty Baseball League, which is entering (I believe) it’s sixth year. The league had always been hosted on CBS, but when I took a job writing for Fantrax it became obvious for many reasons that we needed to move the league there. So we did. The downside there is that I was tasked with the importing of rosters. It’s a 15 team league with 50-man rosters, so with full rosters to move as well as some extra guys that ended the season on someone’s DL, I wound up placing over 750 players. You can see how there would be some room for error, so I told every owner to check over their lineups once I was done to make sure that I didn’t goof…
Well, I goofed. You might call it a boner – Dokken’s Boner. To set this up just a bit, each team keeps 20 of their 30 MLB players and all 20 of their Minor Leaguers. The 10 players not kept per team go into the free agent bucket and we hold a 10-round MLB draft each year in the interest of helping give the bad teams a chance to climb back into contention. This will come into play shortly.
Do you remember a scant few sentences ago when I asked each owner to go over their rosters to make sure everyone was there? Surprise! Not everybody did that. As it turned out, I neglected to add JT Realmuto to one of the rosters. As a 15-team, two-catcher league, one would think the owner would notice the absence of one of the best dynasty league catchers in existence. However, this particular team is stacked at catcher and most certainly did not notice Realmuto missing. Several weeks passed without any mention of Realmuto in the free agent pool. The keeper deadline approached. It was a week before the draft. Owners tempestuously awaited who would become available to them. They also began to eye the free agent pool to see who would they may target. The owner with the 1.1 pick posted that the pick is available in trade. This is when the boner really started to, uh, bone.
Mere hours before the keeper deadline passed, releasing 10 unkept players per team, a trade was agreed upon…
Team A sent Jeurys Familia, Brandon Finnegan, and the 1.1 pick
Team B sent Alex Verdugo, Alec Hansen, and pick 6.12
Team B had seen JT Realmuto in the free agent pool and was thrilled to be able to take him at 1.1. Realmuto was easily the highest ranked player in the pool, but to give you a sense of what else was available, there were the likes of Eddie Rosario, Odubel Herrera, Cole Hamels, and a bunch of closers. Team A is rebuilding and apparently didn’t value the likes of Realmuto or those other guys, instead opting to grab those tasty prospects. Team B soon texted me to express his unadulterated joy over the acquisition of Realmuto. I couldn’t believe he was unowned, so I double checked the old CBS site and did a player search for Realmuto. It said he was a free agent. Game on.
Shortly thereafter, another owner texted me to tell me Realmuto was most definitely owned last year and should not be available to draft, also reminding me he was on Team S. After looking at the CBS site again and pulling up the Team S roster, it became clear why he was listed as a free agent – every player had been dropped from the CBS rosters! I hadn’t paid attention to that league for months since the switch to Fantrax, and apparently the keeper deadline had come and gone with nobody selecting their keepers. Welcome to Boner City, USA. Population: me.
This all stems from my failure to add Realmuto properly, and I boned myself by now having to deal with this mess. So who else gets boned? Is it Team S who didn’t go over his roster properly? Should he be forced to carry on without Realmuto? Is it Team A? Should the trade be reversed since Realmuto shouldn’t be in the FA pool? Is it Team B? He could get stuck paying for a player he didn’t trade for at 1.1 if the trade stands. Should Realmuto be left in the FA pool or returned to Team S?!?! Is your head spinning? Because mine certainly was at this moment. What do I do?
Let’s begin the resolution and wrastle this boner to the ground. I decided that Team S shouldn’t be punished for what was (mostly) my mistake. Even though he didn’t comb over his roster like he was directly instructed, I couldn’t live with him losing Realmuto because I failed to add him. So, out of the warm waters of the player pool and on to Team S went JT Realmuto. However, now Team B is pissed because he just traded for a much lesser player (at least in his eyes) and would have never pulled the trigger on the trade without the 1.1 being Realmuto.
Ever the moderator, I decided to CC both owners in an email to catch them up on all that happened and urge them both to find a happy medium to resolve this. Perhaps they could re-work the trade so everyone is happy. Well, that did not happen. Team A didn’t see the big deal and refused to have the trade reversed or to re-work the deal. Team B also refused to re-work the deal and wanted nothing less than a complete reversal. No one is happy. So, I come up with my own way to potentially step in and help. I tell Team A that if the trade is reversed, I’ll take the 1.1 pick in a trade, and he can take some of my prospects instead. We had discussed this actual trade a week prior, but couldn’t come to an agreement. I told him then that I was unwilling to deal Taylor Trammell. Nothing had changed in that regard, but he confirmed he wouldn’t do a trade for the 1.1 pick without Trammell. So not only did that get nowhere, he then told me I was “out of line” by trying to use this as a solution. So much for trying to step in and help. At that point I’d had enough and told both stubborn owners I was going to put it to a league vote whether the trade should stand the next day. Owner A soon relented and agreed to let the trade stand, also letting me know that he was going to “reevaluate his future in the league”.
However, Owner A quickly followed up with a compromised trade for Team B, which warmed my heart. It was a fair compromise, which was all I was looking for from these guys the whole time. Did Team B agree to the deal? No, of course not! Instead he now weirdly insisted the trade simply stand. And stand it did.
Personally I was completely surprised when Team A didn’t agree to reverse the trade immediately, given the extreme circumstances. In the end, however, Team A offered the best compromise in my eyes. What would you have done as commish? Did this situation come to the proper conclusion? Was it wrong to take Realmuto from the player pool? Should I have reversed the trade immediately after that?! Should I be enshrined as the worst commissioner of all time?!?! If so, I should at least get an ugly trophy. For what it’s worth, the 1.1 pick wound up being Brad Hand, and it’s only appropriate to finish off Dokken’s Boner with a little Hand.
Are you a commish? Have any issues, rule questions, or need a lesson on ethics? Dokken is here for you! Ask away in the comment section…
