I have updated the money balances to reflect this year's fines. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.
I was generally lenient on the fines this year for two reasons: (1) I truly, deeply hate this part of the job; (2) the fine schedule was buried on like page 115 of the message board and it would frankly be unfair to penalize teams drastically for something that is, in fairness, impossible to find.
Most teams had no issues. I am incredibly personally grateful for the majority of owners who never have any overusage in any season.
Having said all of this, going forward I am going to implement a new fine rule - that any team having more than $400k in fines in a season will be eligible to play as the home team in any playoff games (unless playing a playoff series against another such team).
I am firmly convinced that this should not be an issue. Owners such as Eric and Kevin are almost always in the playoffs and I do not believe that either has ever had a single $1 in fines ever. With our rules on unlimited players this should be easy enoughg to do.
I am also going to crack down on exceptions going forward - in the absence of clear and obvious problems of the sort of "Player X had 2 IP left, he was in the minors in the CM I sent, and the away team still played him for 6 IP" I am not going to entertain "my road instructions weren't followed in series 3" type excuses. To be frank, it takes too much mental energy on my part to try to go through everything. If a team has like 3 PA of overusage total I am highly likely to ignore it, but 6 guys with 5 IP over is not going to be ignored.
Apologies for sounding like more of a hardass than usual, I just really dislike this subject. If anyone feels like this is too strict or has concerns, let me know.
Here is the fine schedule that was previously inadvertantly hidden. I am going to put this at the end of the Official Rules so that it will be accessable.
The Rules provide that any changes to the fine schedule are to be posted before the start of the season. While, thankfully, overusage of players and lateness in reporting series results have not been a significant problem for ARBA of late, it is my belief that the current fine system needs some refurbishing. Thus, here is the fine schedule for the 2004 season (bearing in mind that, per the Rules, "in cases of gross overusage, the Commissioner may impose greater penalties above and beyond the fine schedule" and "[f]ines may be waived by the Commissioner in his discretion for good cause.")
For PA and IP usage in Excess of Total Allowed:
$2K per PA $5K per IP PLUS, an additional penalty applicable only to PA/IP overusage: For PA/IP fines totaling less than $49K: +$50K For PA/IP fines totaling between $50K and $99K: +$100K For PA/IP fines totalling $100K or greater: +$250K
For example, if Player X has 3 IP over the allowable limit, but the team owning Player X has no other overusage, that team will be fined $65K (3*5K + 50K).
As another example, if players on team Y aggregate to 21 IP over their allowable limits, team Y will be fined $355K (21*5K + 250K).
