My vote

I don't support a bid. Why? Disclosing my interest, I would like to have this player on my team and the possibility of acquiring him influences my strategy, especially since I did draft many pitchers. So an auction is not particularly fun or a lark from my standpoint. If we want to have fun, then slap an auction/bid process on a player who won't have much of an impact. Otherwise, change the draft to an auction system. To me, the random appearance of impact players is fun enough. It's the good randomness to offset the bad randomness of injuries. We played a season, some finished high, others finished low. Now we prepare to tweak our teams for another run, courtesy of free agents and rookies, and the teams that are fortunate enough to get a higher draft slot or suck so bad they don't have any keepers ought to have first crack at the impact players. I don't understand why we want to change that and give every team an equal shot at landing an impact rookie. He's going to go high, and he should go high. Bench, you're always pointing out the self-interest of MCard's proposals and I humbly suggest that Andy might have more of an interest in this auction than mere fun. Whatever. I vote no. Either have an auction system for everyone, or none at all.

On another note, while I enjoyed MCart's well-argued market model (and suspect this is why we are now drawing hits in China) I would not assert that there is no incentive for parity. I prefer leagues with heated competition; leagues that enslave managers to their computers, tweaking lineups and scouring the free agent pool. They are much more fun than leagues in which 3 or 4 managers are out of the running by June and essentially give up. But maybe I'm just a communist.

Also, if Carter can't come, should we take this show on the road and go to Philadelphia?

Were there more votes?

Snot Boogie has now accrued $350, if my caclulations are correct. Wait, how much money did we get from the 2-man team, Pete? I suspect the other teams will eventually give up.