I just did the first mid-month reallocation of 2015! Even before we have any results up, A Commissioner’s job is never done.
Since I did the reallocation wrong on my first attempt, then went and found the Reallocation Primer I published last year and used it to correct the error, I thought I’d share the primer with everyone. I’ve made one edit (marked in blue) to clarify that it applies pitchers who switch from RP to SP or vice-versa. This primer was never adopted officially as a league rule, but it functions as a sort of hadith — a commentary useful for guidance that seems to have been accepted as accurate.
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Replacements for Disabled or Demoted Players: If during the month an EFL player is cut or sent to the minors by his MLB team, or goes on the disabled list, the EFL owner may, effective immediately,
a) Call up one player from his minor league team, and
b) Increase other players’ playing time at the position(s) covered by the disabled or demoted player.
The EFL team may not make any other adjustments, such as decreasing the percentage of playing time of any player at any defensive position. The playing time added to any position (including Other Hitter or a pitching role) must be between 1% and 3% per day remaining in the calendar month counting the day the owner announces the change(s) to the league. (The normal requirement that players be activated for a minimum of 33% of their actual PA or IP for the entire month is waived for changes announced under this rule.)
Here are some assumptions behind the rule:
1. We don’t want to be a daily management league, where owners have to think about how to maintain their team every day to stay competitive. A manager who pays attention to his team in spurts of once a month should be able to compete. So we don’t want unlimited roster moves.
2. On the other hand, an injury (and to lesser extent, usually, a demotion) can be devastating to a team. If the team has extra resources, it would be nice to be able to put some of them to use in an emergency.
3. While injury/demotion replacements do give owners a little manuevering room if they’re clever, they should not be opportunities for wholesale changes. It’s fine to cushion teams from bad luck. But the rest of the league deserves a cushion against a team having extraordinary GOOD luck because of an injury.
HITTERS:
The rule is easy to explain for hitters. Consider the available positions as falling into three broad categories:
The Bench is a place of total MLB inactivity. The benched player is essentially in the minors.
Other Hitter is for playing time not involving defense. An Other Hitter is only DHing or PHing. He maybe didn’t even bring his glove into the dugout.
The 8 defensive positions are fully active.
So here’s the spectrum:
Bench — OH — Defensive Position
Mid-month replacements can only move rightward on this spectrum. Notice the rule says you can’t ever decrease a player’s playing time at any defensive position. That’s the key that keeps this act of mercy from turning into an opportunity for wholesale mid-month restructuring of the roster.
PITCHERS:
The rule is not as clear about pitchers. I think I have been reading the rule for years thinking there was a bit of a spectrum of activation for pitchers, like this:
Relief Pitcher — Starting Pitcher
So you could move a relief pitcher into a starting role, but not the other way around.
Also things are complicated because you can’t allocate a pitcher into both roles. This was a spreadsheet issue — I couldn’t figure out how to design it for that. But it was also a doctrinal issue: pitchers can’t just switch back and forth willy nilly.
But we have had, for the first time I can remember, a couple of requests this year to reallocate a starting pitcher as a reliever. Since we can’t share allocations between SP and RP, this has the effect of charging an innings penalty for the shift — a 100% starter (or reliever), switched on the first day of the month, would only be a 93% reliever (or starter) (in May, or a 90% in June, since the limit is 3% per day left in the month). The average switch in the middle of the month would turn a 100% starter into a 45% reliever.
And since that seems about right, and since the rule doesn’t describe a pitchers‘ activation spectrum like it does for hitters, I have approved the mid-month starter-to-reliever requests. But it isn’t as conceptually tidy as the hitter side is, and I am open to ideas for cleaning this up. Dave said he could redesign the database so we could have a bench, and a split allocation between starting and relieving, but I think we’d also have a rule penalizing the pitcher‘s innings for either planning a split role or creating one mid-month.