What happened?!? Computer waives half the league...

[ConStar]

So I load the game tonight, and the AI has released almost half the rosters from the teams I do not control. And these aren't borderline players -- several 21-year-old, 5-star studs in the mix, the star player from my team that I just traded away for prospects, guys leading the league in RBIs, etc. It's ridiculous! Nothing like this would ever happen in real life.

My most recent backup is 3 days ago, but before I wipe out 3 days of games, can someone tell me HOW this happened, and more importantly, how I can prevent it without having to turn transactions off league-wide?

For instance, Washington just flat-out DFA'ed Steven Strasburg. I'm looking at 180 DFAs here and can't figure out for the life of me what I did wrong.

EDIT: Boston cuts Xander Bogearts and Jackie Bradley Jr., the latter hitting .310 as the team's starting CF. This makes no sense...

SECOND EDIT: I just scrolled through all teams...all DFA'ed 12 players. Every team has DFA'ed at least 2 of its top young players who are making $490k with 5-star potential, along with a handful of productive veterans. Virtually all of them were having strong seasons.

[ConStar]

Some more investigation into this...

* The top prospect from each team, provided that prospect had a ML contract, was waived.

* One team waived a 5-star, 23-year-old shortstop to pick up a 29-year-old journeyman infielder my AAA team had released the day before. Both had minimum-salary contracts.

* Two teams waived players they had signed to 4-year contracts as free agents over the offseason, each in the total dollar range of $60 million.

* Two teams waived enough players so as to drop below 20 total players on the ML roster. One of those two teams waived both catchers and all but two outfielders.

It took me about 1.5-2.0 hours to fix all of this. I gave up trying to redo all the transactions and just concentrated on the major ones. Names waived included Jackie Brantley Jr., Xander Bogearts, Yasiel Puig, Travis D'Arnaud, Nick Franklin, Andrew Cashner and Mason Williams.

[hefalumps]

Can't offer much insight but I'm curious to find out what happened.

What time of year is it? You said they were having strong seasons so I'm assuming you're mid-season - but what month and day out of curiosity?

And did anything unusual happen a day or two before this mass DFAing? A trade or a release?

[TGH-Adfabre]

Has the roster size for your 40 or 25 man rosters changed?
Have the roster sizes for your minors changed?
Was this right after the draft?
What are your minor league roster sizes?

[bwburke94]

This kind of thing has been reported before. So it's possible that what you say is true, despite today's date.

[ConStar]

Originally Posted by hefalumps

Can't offer much insight but I'm curious to find out what happened.

What time of year is it? You said they were having strong seasons so I'm assuming you're mid-season - but what month and day out of curiosity?

And did anything unusual happen a day or two before this mass DFAing? A trade or a release?

Game date is April 17, 2014. Most teams have played 10 games.

Nothing unusual happened the day before, that I can tell.

[ConStar]

Originally Posted by TGH-Adfabre

Has the roster size for your 40 or 25 man rosters changed?
Have the roster sizes for your minors changed?
Was this right after the draft?
What are your minor league roster sizes?

Roster sizes had not changed, no. The draft is still a couple of months away at least.

This league runs a 50-man roster instead of a 40-man roster, and each team has 30 active rather than 25. Each division has one extra team over what the MLB has (in other words, the AL West has Texas, Oakland, Anaheim, Seattle and Houston, plus a team in San Antonio). So there are 36 teams in the league.

Nothing was changed in regards to minor league setup, either. I just loaded the game and bam, there it was. I just happened to get a storyline-style email telling me that the Marlins had waived this guy and he was upset about it, so I pull up the transaction log and it was so big that it had to open in an external browser. There I was greeted by 432 waiver wire designations in addition to the usual transaction list.

I'm trying to recall whether this same thing happened last year, and I believe I remember it happening then, too, just on a much smaller scale (i.e., about 4 waivers per team, but no top-line prospects).

[ConStar]

Originally Posted by bwburke94

This kind of thing has been reported before. So it's possible that what you say is true, despite today's date.

It took me a second to figure out what you meant (April 1), lol.

I *WISH* it was an April Fool's Day joke. Then I could get those two hours back I spent cleaning up the computer's mess.

[ConStar]

lol, this is going even further down the rabbit hole...

So anyway, I finally hit the checkmark button to go to the next day, after spending a couple of hours reassigning all the big names to their rosters.

The following is what I got about 300+ examples of:

"BOSTON RED SOX: CF Jackie Bradley, Jr. was removed from the 40-man roster."
BOSTON RED SOX: Optioned CF Jackie Bradley, Jr. to Triple A Pawtucket."

In other words, the computer placed Bradley on waivers sometime in the middle of the April 17 playing day (that's the day I became aware of all the roster moves for all 36 teams). Then, I went back in and manually placed Bradley back on the Red Sox's 40-man roster and active roster. Overnight, the computer somehow removed him completely from the 40-man (I didn't know you could do that in one day's time, since the player was on the waiver wire) and demoted him to Triple A, despite the fact that he's hitting .390/.405/.683 at the moment.

The transactions log for the entire league for April 17-18 is now over 800 entries long.

Just to go back and give you the example of what was said the day before, here's the first entry for Bradley:

"BOSTON RED SOX: CF Jackie Bradley, Jr. was designated for assignment, placed on waivers and taken off the 40-man roster."

I feel like the AFLAC duck in the Yogi Berra/barbershop commercial. If you're hurt, and miss work, it doesn't hurt, to miss work.

EDIT: I should mention, at least, that none of the computer teams are claiming each other's players (yet).

[Carlton]

This HAS to be a financial settings issue

Can you give us your league wide Financial base, and then look at each individual team and see their budget?

I recently had to UP teams budget in my 1995 Dynasty "Strike Three" (obvious plug) after I saw teams giving up in the last 3 rounds of the draft, because they couldn't afford any more draftee signings.

[bwburke94]

This is beyond Borkholder levels. The entire league is getting Borkholdered.

[RchW]

Is league evolution on?

[Charlie Hough]

Are the roster limits for your lowest levels of minors set as unlimited?

[ConStar]

Is league evolution on?

League evolution is not on.

Are the roster limits for your lowest levels of minors set as unlimited?

Yes, they are unlimited. Cincinnati, for instance, has 110 players today on its rookie league team roster.

Can you give us your league wide Financial base, and then look at each individual team and see their budget?

I'm not certain exactly which numbers you want me to report, so I have a selection below. Note that I did not change anything from the defaults when I started this league:

* Average team revenue: $146,400,000
* Average team expenses (excluding players): $29,900,000
* Average player payroll: $101,500,000
* Average profit: $15,000,000

Also, I just checked Boston, since it was one of the teams making the worst moves, and got this at the end: Budget, $174M; Payroll, $141M, Money for extensions, $68M; P&L, $48.5M; Current balance, $40M; Proj. final balance, $16.7M. Remember here that Bradley and Bogaerts were both making league minimum ($490k), so it wasn't like cutting them was going to free up payroll.

The worst one yet was Washington cut a fictional player named Albert Ortiz, who won the AL MVP award last year, was making only $800k this year, and was leading the team in all major offensive categories at the moment.

[ConStar]

Well, gentlemen, we've come full circle:

"BOSTON RED SOX: Purchased the contract of CF Jackie Bradley, Jr. from AAA Pawtucket."

Virtually all of the players that were DFA'ed by the computer are back with their original teams, and no one claimed anyone else's players on waivers.

[Carlton]

This IS a Kerfuffle

I am stumped