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I had taken the time to look at the players before posting.
While both Boggs and Mattingly could play at the major league level, they are still very young. If the definition of tanking is a failure to put your best players on the field for each game in order to secure the highest draft pick possible (according to Crackerjack) then it doesn't appear here that the standard was met. There are still two very good reasons not to put Boggs and Mattingly on the Major League roster.
First, they are 20 and 19 respectively. There are a lot of owners who feel that OOTP unfairly penalizes young players who are promoted too soon. If you force teams to bring up players whenever they are better than their teammates at their position, you put not just the Reds in a situation, but open a Pandora's Box of other situations where someone can force a team to promote a youngster when it wouldn't be in the franchise's best interest by making a post like this on the message board.
Second, it isn't economically adventageous for the Reds to promote Mattingly and Boggs. If the Reds don't believe that they are a legitimate contender for the NL Central this season, the best thing for the team would be to not promote their top two prospects. They lose a cheap year of their careers early to get to .450 and lose the chance to win a few years from now because they had to spend money on Mattingly and Boggs or lose them to free agency sooner.
Anti-tanking rules only really work in the case where the players are established regulars and they are sent to AAA in favor of a clearly worse player late in the year. Other situations present reasons to keep a good player off the roster because the team may not get the most benefit from the career of the player. And in a good league, you need to develop a strategy to maximize the amount of talent you have. And keeping a young, but talented and potentially ready player in the minor leagues for one more year of seasoning and contract avoidance should be a valid strategy in any league using financials.
Regardless, I feel bad for Crackerjack. He has to make the toughest decision of all for a commissioner. One where he knows that no answer will make anyone happy.
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