Here is a link to this week’s roundtable, hosted by Newsday’s Adam Ronis (yes it is his third mention here in the last two days). This week we addressed:

The question is: What is the best way to handle trades? Should all trades be approved? A league vote? If you’re running a league, what’s the ideal way to approve trades without too much controversy?

Andrew Cleary tackled this topic for us, but I wanted to toss in my $0.02. Perhaps the absolute worst development in fantasy baseball over the last few years is the idea of owner’s voting on other’s trades. Perhaps it can work with a supermajority of owner’s voting for trades, but even there it is not nearly the best solution.  If you want to have this run like a real government and have the votes subject to the veto of the commissioner then even that is far better than a flat vote.

When it comes to government, I subscribe to the Platonic model of having government run by a philosopher king. This is the way I think fantasy baseball trades should be handled and leagues run.

I actually like Brett Greenfield’s solution; let all trades go through but kick out any owners that violate the league balance. This was a “Tee-Off” of mine on the Roundtable Show a few weeks ago. I said that owners should be kicked out if they do not care about the league’s integrity since if they don’t care about the league then why should the league care about them?

One item that was touched upon by Mike Muschiano from The Poughkeepsie Journal was the idea of forcing managers to state the reasons for voting one way or the other. The only way this system should work is with the Fantasy Philosopher King, otherwise known as the commissioner, taking all of the opinions into account before issuing a ruling. This is how republican (small “r” on purpose) is supposed to work and it isn’t a bad idea for trades either. Even if they state the reasons someone has to judge whether those reasons are valid.