I suggested Foster Owners in e-mails to Mike and other owners a while ago. My proposal was along this line:

Let the Foster Owner be GM only. No playing of games - this way its not a "free" team but simply a system to rebuild a team and distribute talent. The mandate would be to make the team attractive to a new owner by filling in gaps, balance out age and talent, and position the team for next season. Not to win immediately, but to make sure some team capable of only 50 wins doesn't have two 40 year old closers, or drafts a third RF behind Sosa and Ramirez while having no 2B ready to play.

Foster Owners would get a team that is unowned from the time the draft order is set to the trade deadline, at a maximum. Obviously a real owner could take over the team at any time. By having an owner for the drafts, Mike wouldn't have to set a standard draft list, and the latent drafted should match holes. I thinks its possible an owner might become attached to the team and end up picking it up full time themselves.

Mike says its not possible given the code. To me there are only two ways this could be an issue - one is for billing purposes, the other for the list of unowned teams.

For billing purposes, this is simple - a Foster Owner gets a seperate account for his/her Foster teams, and logs in under a different username and password than for their owned teams. This Foster Owner account (FO account) has no billing data assigned to it, so the owner isn't billed for the Foster team, and their billed account doesn't show the team. So for me, I'd have my Fred Cline account with my teams, and my FO Fred Cline account with temp teams.

For the unowned team list, this is just a matter of instead of that list being generated automatically, it would have to be updated by hand. Since teams have to be assigned and owners removed by hand anyway, this seems like a simple step.

Fred Cline