Vintage Baseball Guild

Rule 20: Explanation & Interpretation

We recognize that in any given season, some owners will attempt to compete for that season’s championship and others will attempt to lay the groundwork for contending at a future time. For those owners who make the rational decision that they are unlikely to reach the playoffs in the current season, there are several legitimate tactics that are commonly used as part of a “rebuilding” strategy, including:

Trying to trade away players who are valuable in the current season but not as valuable in the future, in exchange for draft picks or players who will be valuable in future seasons,
Putting a higher priority on drafting players based on their future or long-run impact rather than their immediate impact on a team’s success,
Trading away draft picks from the current season in exchange for draft picks in future years,
Putting a higher priority on retaining carryover players who do not “pay off” for 1 or more seasons, and a lower priority on retaining carryover players who “pay off” in the short run but not the long run.

Each of these tactics involve a logical trade-off in which an owner is willing to accept a less successful team at one point in history in order to build a team that will be more successful at some other time. Such moves are reasonable and legitimate tactics, partly because they mirror the type of actions that a real major league baseball team would take when faced with the need to rebuild its talent base.

However, there is a distinction between accepting a losing record as the byproduct of building for the future, vs. deliberately attempting to lose games. Within the limits of reasonable rebuilding strategy, owners are expected to do their best to use the players on their roster to win as many games as they can. Owners are prohibited from intentionally “throwing” games for any reason, including attempting to get a better draft position or affecting the outcome of a race between two other teams. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Batting a team’s weakest hitters in the top of the batting order and the strongest hitters at the bottom of the order,
Playing players out of position when better options exist that provide at least equivalent offense,
Benching stronger players and replacing them with others that are unambiguously weaker,
Releasing unexpired players to the free agent pool for no plausible reason other than to weaken a team’s lineup,
Weakening a roster by trading away players for little in return, simply to remove them from the team so that weaker players can play instead,
Deliberately retaining weaker players on a carryover list and cutting players who are unambiguously stronger, when there is no plausible explanation other than to weaken the roster,
Intentionally arranging a pitching chart so as to force pitchers to pitch with excessive fatigue when there is no other plausible reason for doing so.

However, any of the above moves ARE allowable when usage, injury, or fatigue issues are involved. For example, an owner might decide to temporarily bench a stronger player with limited playing time or a “prone” rating in order to save him for later games to avoid running out of players at a position. Or, an owner might decide to save a player for a more crucial series against a specific team to increase his chance of making the playoffs. Sometimes it makes sense to accept a weaker lineup at a particular point in the season in order to increase the team’s chances of winning more games over the rest of the season. And, it is reasonable for teams that have already clinched playoff spots to rest or protect key players near the end of the season to make sure they are available in the postseason.

Because reasonable people can disagree about player evaluation, lineups, and roster moves, the commisioner will not take action unless, in his judgement, the most plausible explanation for an owner’s personnel move or strategy decision is to deliberately increase the team’s total losses or to collude with another team. If the situation is ambiguous, or if the owner has a reasonable explanation for his or her actions, the action will be allowed even if others disagree with the wisdom of the actions.