One of the common issues that keeper leagues have to deal with is how to address dump trades. Last year the RotoWire Staff League had a couple of such trades that had much of the league up-in-arms, enough to the point to have me solicit reader feedback on potential solutions.

I'm personally a free market guy and wasn't as bothered by the trades, but I felt the pulse of the league and thought that change was needed. We recently voted on five proposals, ultimately accepting two of them, but rejecting the other three.

We turned down a requirement for an open market on Big Ticket players, cutting down the number of major league keepers, and cutting down the number of minor league keepers. Frankly, I think it's hard to ratchet that number down after you already have a mature league - given how some teams are constructed to have better keeper rosters than others, it's easier to see the resistance to change there. The downside to a high number of keepers is to create high inflation in the auction, and it also perpetuates the order of teams in the league.

We did accept two changes - one was a minor procedural issue, dealing with how a trade for a given week must be consummated before the free agent deadline, requiring a team to be able to start a legal lineup after the trade. The other is far bigger, and one that I never previously thought that I'd propose: an in-season salary cap. Our league has a standard $260 auction budget, plus a $100 FAAB budget throughout the season. Here's what the new rule requires:

- At no point during the season may a team have a total salary (including reserved players) exceeding $360 (i.e., the sum of its Draft Day budget and allotted FAAB dollars).
- The total salary will be determined at the moment the trade is consummated. It |STAR|cannot|STAR| be contingent upon a drop in subsequent in FAAB bidding. It has to fit before the FAAB process for a given week.

So essentially, if a team is going to go for it, they're going to have to be cognizant of their total cap number and be creative to make things fit.

We'll try this on for size for a year, and report on how well it works and how well it's received.