Musings and Digressions: When Good Intentions Go bad
A deep dive into 'waiver-gate'
I’m sharing this cautionary tale to illustrate the special sort of madness underpinning my commissioner-ing1. Of course, most of this is a result of me being well meaning; I try to put together the best experience as I can for everyone by going the extra mile beyond a ‘standard’ fantasy sports experience where I can. But doing so means I tend to try too much and take on a lot more responsibility than might be considered reasonable, and it sometimes creates points of failure that lead to situations like Wednesday. In other words, this sort of stuff is almost always my fault, but it comes from a place of caring rather than malice or indifference. Today I’m going to outline the situation I will simply refer to as ‘waiver-gate’.
SOWING THE SEEDS
This season I wanted to do something a bit different and use ‘traditional’ waivers. The problem—as the three people that read my emails or footnotes in my rules document already know—is that this isn’t an option at ESPN. You can either have waivers when players are dropped and everyone else is a free agent OR you could use Free Agent Acquisition Bidding (FAAB) where waivers run on set days and managers can bid on players. You can’t have anything in between. Or, at least, more well-adjusted commissioners can’t. This is me we’re talking about, King of the Workaround.
This is where I began to sow the seeds of my own demise. I realized that there was in fact a way for me to get what I was looking for. I could turn on the FAAB settings and simply take away everyone’s money! The solution was elegant in its own insane sort of way, but it would work. I tested it out2 and confirmed that the ‘tie breaker’ settings for FAAB would work EXACTLY like the waivers I was looking for and went about implementing it. It was a perfect plan, until I went and idiotically forgot to readjust the waiver dates.
SHIT HAPPENS
This year’s draft came together a bit later than hoped. Part of that’s the lockout shortening everyone’s window for baseball this year, and some of it is the fact we are 20+ grown-ups with a lot going on in our lives. (Fred, even had a kid that appeared on Master Chef Jr. which is absolutely cool as hell.)
It seemed appropriate with the short window between draft night and the start of the season to do my best to help give everyone the best shot possible in week 1 by allowing waivers to run before setting lineups. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Now here is a ‘fun’ fact: ESPN is weird with how it handles rosters in weekly leagues (something that is definitely going to come into play later). From past experience, I’ve found it best not to run waivers mid-period if I can’t help it, and for this reason my plan was for waivers again the last Sunday of the scoring period. But there were two problems that prevented me from immediately changing settings once the season started:
If I set the waivers on their normal Sunday/Monday routine then they’d run the first Sunday of the scoring period.
If I turned off waivers then nobody would be able to place claims until I turned them back on.
Me, ever the fool, decided ‘oh, I’ll just turn them on Tuesday’. Well, we know how that turned out. Monday and Tuesday were particularly busy days for me at work and fantasy baseball configurations were the furthest thing from my mind. On Wednesday afternoon at 11:05am I had a realization: ‘Wait, aren’t the waivers still set to run on Wednesday?’ I logged in at 11:06am to see that I’m five minutes late; waivers have run and things are officially a mess.
MY DESCENT INTO MADNESS
Here I am, waivers have run inappropriately, and it’s time to make things right. I immediately email the league to let you all know what’s going on3 and I head to my League Manager tools. So far, so good. I go to reset the waiver order but there’s one teeny, tiny, miniscule problem…there IS NO way to reset the waiver order for FAAB.
It is now clear to me that it is impossible to set things back to how they were pre waiver-gate. But this wasn’t my first rodeo. Along with a storied 15-year career of commissioner cock-ups4 , for those of you that didn’t know, I’ve been a high school teacher and occasional software trainer over that same period. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s how to roll with the punches. So the fairest corrective action—really the ONLY one—would be to put something in place that took order and rankings out of the equation and, thankfully, that already existed; Heck, it was technically what we were already using as far as ESPN was concerned. Goodbye ‘traditional’ waivers and welcome back Free Agent Acquisition Budgeting (FAAB).
With the structure for future waivers decided I turned my attention to actually setting rosters right. ‘This should be easy’, me, an idiot, thought.
A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
I went to Old Man Pap’s drop page, went to drop Santiago Espinal5 but there WAS no Santiago Espinal to drop. ESPN was only showing me players currently on the ESPN roster. WTF. To this point things had sucked, but they were solvable. With potential for more headaches on the horizon, panic was officially beginning to set in. So I did the one thing I thought I had left available to me and I reached out to ESPN support.
Now I’ll say this for ESPN Fantasy Baseball Fan Support, they’ve always been very nice to deal with, quick to respond, and generally fantastic. In this case, though, it turned out they were completely useless. After several minutes of looking into it further I was told I was out of luck. I would not be able to make any roster adjustments until Monday. The worst case scenario was starting to come true: I was going to have to send out new emails saying ‘sorry but claims and waivers are going to have to wait and be squeezed into a small window on Monday because I was a dumbass’. If you didn’t want to quit already, I wouldn’t have blamed you at that point if you had. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned working in the government it’s ‘trust but verify’. I wasn’t about to give up quite yet.
TAKING MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS
Time for a different tack; I’d start instead by adding dropped players, and here I (finally) met with a bit of good fortune. While players were not appearing on the ‘drop’ page they WERE appearing as drop-able, for some godforsaken reason, after I would ‘add’ a player. I was beginning to right the ship. But (to continue what seems to be this graf’s nautical theme) there was now an iceberg looming. How the heck do I get the players off rosters that were added to fill empty spots of players moved to the IL? I can’t drop them on the ‘drop’ page and there’s no players to add and drop that way. Time for some more creative thinking.
I decided to stick with what was working. To ‘drop’ an erroneously added player back onto waivers I would just ‘add’ a random schlub no one would miss from the player pool, and I could put this entire nightmare behind me. Ah, if only it were that simple. It turned out that doing this led to an error to ‘drop a player’. I WAS dropping a player! That was the entire freakin’ point! Yelling at my browser wasn’t going to work and trying to reach out to all the impacted managers and asking them pretty please, could you please help me cover my ass wasn’t a very efficient option either. The specter of the ‘uh, we’re going to have to do this all on Monday morning’ armageddon loomed. I wasn’t going to go down without a fight, though. One more tool in the LM toolbox remained available and it was worth a try. I opened up the ‘make trade’ option.
THE ‘TRADE & DUMP’ METHOD
Managers usually wouldn’t think to try this because, at best, they’d catch shit for it and, at worst, they’d burn a bridge with a potential trade partner, but most fantasy sites will let you offer trades where you get a player and in return you trade…nobody. But it’s my job6 to know incredibly useless things about how fantasy websites work and figured it was worth trying to do just this to put these players on my roster and then drop them myself. And a funny thing happened, it (sort of) worked7! We were finally this close to getting all the players back into the available player pool as intended. You can already tell where this is going though, there was a problem.
As it turned out that I could make the trade, I could accept the trade, but, for some reason, ESPN was forcing me to drop players even though I had an empty roster spot. <SIGH>. So I dropped my players onto waivers along with all the other players that should be there. I now had one final challenge: getting my players back.
MR. MONEYBAGS
If you walk away from this story learning only one thing (well, outside of my willingness to completely commit thousands of words and hours of my time to share inane tales like this one with you) let it be this: as the King of the Workaround I will not be denied.
You could probably already tell, but simply re-adding my players using my commissioner powers was not possible8 , so I had to find a way re-add these players to prevent someone from accidentally (or, knowing Carlin, on purpose) adding these players during waivers and kicking off another commissioner crisis. Again, I got creative. I couldn’t add the players now but what if I could guarantee I could add them during waivers? Enter the ‘Mr. Moneybags’ solution.
For some reason, of all the nonsense that I’ve had to do up to this point to try and make things right, this one is my favorite ‘fix’9. How do you make sure no one can outbid you on a player? Give yourself so much money that only you can bid and win those players, that’s how. In addition to the $100 FAAB being used to select normal free agents I gave myself an additional $303 dollars; $101 per bid for each of the players that I had to drop to implement the self-dealing trade and dump solution I concocted.
I know you’re waiting for a ‘but’, but…there finally was no ‘but’. Waiver-gate was mercifully over.
What’s the lesson? Your commissioner is a fuck-up. But he’s a committed fuck-up.. Fantasy is a silly hobby but for reasons that I’ll never be able to fully articulate, it’s one I love with a sort of devotion that is borderline unhealthy. I make mistakes, but they’re usually made as a result of that passion. I appreciate those of you that have already reached out to me to share your support and I am forever appreciative of you. This tends to be a thankless job and I’ve dealt with my fair share of bad actors over the years, but you all are easily the best bunch I’ve ever managed with and I can’t thank you enough.
Again, I did mess up here and I do deserve to eat shit, but I am grateful that you’ve all shown grace in cutting me some slack in this instance. And to all of you who have made it this far: What’s wrong with you? I just spent 2,000+ words on this insanity! LOL.
I’ve got to find a better (actual) verb for this.
Yes, I created test leagues SPECIFICALLY to make sure the crazy ideas I have work.
Some may find it annoying, but I’ve learned it’s better to err on the side of OVER communicating.
‘Cock-up’ is the fun sort of word that I feel vindicates all the hours I’ve spent reading British authors.
Side note: Who?
Clearly not my actual job.
You probably already know that, though, because of all the weird trade emails you would have gotten.
When I would try I would receive an error saying that I had to drop -4 (yes, negative) players. Oooookay.
Perhaps it’s the irony of messing with FAAB leading me into this mess and now, finally, being the last step in solving it.