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As we enter the 27th season with the game of Fantasy Baseball (aka Rotisserie Baseball), you would think with all the technology innovations out there, the topic of Free Agent Acquisition Budget (FAAB) would be an easy thing to accomplish. In most leagues, each team owner is given a budget typically of a 100 dollars of salary which they can use over the course of the season on free agents. The only catch is that each of the owners in the league compete with each other for free agents and the team owner with the highest bid is awarded the player. The ability to sign new free agents takes place periodically over the course of the season. In typical formats, bids are placed once a week using a sealed bidding process and its either a manual or an automated process to interogate all the bids submitted and determine which team has placed the highest bid for a player. The team owner that is awarded the free agent player must make a corresponding cut from his roster to make room for the new free agent. The player the team owner selects to cut is included in the team owners free agent bid.

One provider of fantasy baseball hosted web application’s is CBS Sportsline. This is a system that supports the FAAB process within their application. On their web site it says:

you can choose from Waiver process, FAAB (Auction Process), Commissioner approval, or by allowing all owners to make add/drops on their own.

From this fantasy baseball forum, I found this further exaplanation of CBS’s FAAB process:

FAAB stands for Free Agent Acquisition Budget. Every add/drop is granted via a blind bidding system that is processed automatically. Each time an owner has an add/drop processed they will be place at the bottom of the FAAB order. If there is a tie for a player, the FAAB order is used; the owner that is higher in the list will receive the player and be moved to the bottom.

You can also select the Commish FAAB approval process. Free agents are still picked up via a blind bidding system, but it is processed by the commissioner not automatically. The Commissioner will go to the Transactions Request page to process the winning bids.

If you select to use either of the FAAB options each owner will go to the Transactions add-drop page and select the players to be added and dropped then a bid is entered. The team with the highest bid for that player will be awarded the player and the bid value subtracted from their budget.

However, their seems to be some concern if the sealed bids are really sealed with the manual way of processing the free agent bids.

Now that I think about it I seem to remeber going to the ADD/DROP box . Select a player to be claimed off waivers and in the comments box we write in Waiver claim. The commissioner will see it but we do lots more faabs than waiver claims so I really don’t care about that part. As long as he doesn’t see the bids