How the Reds expose a flaw

I can't imagine the frustration: you invest time, resources and even a little bit of sentimentality into your best player. He's in the middle of a monster season, and then one morning you wake up and see a team has dropped a bid on his head worth more than your entire franchise.

I can't imagine it because (thankfully) it hasn't happened to me. But it has happened to plenty of other active teams, and it's always from the same club: the Reds of Cincinnati.

There is indeed a pay-for-play system (nothing wrong with Josh monetizing his efforts), but Reds' investment in this game is staggering. Literally thousands of real-world dollars, sometimes more than a hundred at a time dropped on a single player. And he's quite honest about his intentions. There are players he wants, and he has the right and capacity to invest in making sure he gets them. For that reason, he's been dubbed the Evil Empire of the FB universe.

But he's also been quite honest about why he does it. A little thing called the 10-minute rule. The premise is simple, after the bidding deadline ends, the team in control of a given player has 10 minutes to respond to any bid on his head and exceed that offer. If he does, he retains his player.

Simple? Extremely so. But equally flawed. A team needn't negotiate, signal their intentions for a player (which other teams will note I always try to do in the interest of sportsmanship) or take any action during the bidding period. All he has to do is wait until bidding is closed and snap him back up. There's really only one solution for a team determined to land a player: make a bid so staggeringly high no team can match it. That's precisely what Reds have done. On a traditional alignment chart, Reds are Lawful Neutral. There's nothing subversive to his actions: he's following all the rules and investing as is his right. He is playing the game the way it has been designed to be played.

And THAT, perhaps, is where the rub lies. Are Reds an evil empire? Or are their entirely legal actions merely exposing the inherent flaws in a game designed by one person with the best of intentions? No code, no system, no game is perfect, and Josh works tirelessly to improve this game, and deserves our continued support and thanks. But is it time for us to talk about player contracts, how they function in the game, and how to make the player marketplace a fair transaction for all, where no one is forced to take the extreme measures Reds have taken in order to land a competitive team, or put at a disadvantage by seeing their players headhunted by unmatchable bids.

Ideas (just a few among what are surely many) that might be worth discussing:

- A max bid for a player based on his fair trade value
- Modifying bidding so the money from a bid goes to the team who loses him, thus distributing bidding money to the teams who lose their player assets.
- Elminating the bidding period and moving ALL players not under long-term contracts into a world-wide Free Agent Pool, thus requiring teams to issue contracts to players rather than have them come up for bid every year.
- Or some combination of these and other ideas which could be put forth.

The intention of this article is to make sure that as a community, we don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The Reds' "evil empire" isn't the problem. Rather, it's a symptom of a larger flaw which we can call work together to solve. And I hope we do solve it, to make the game even more fun, fair and friendly to all.