Sounds reasonable.

The rules are different in pre-season.   It's 5 days.   Not sure where I read this but I did.

Contacted "support" yesterday (before the season start) and they will not substitute short of 14 days.  Apparently they do not kick in the Auto Control in the preseason as between the preseason and regular season the team is now more than a week of games without direction and no auto control.   May be a glitch in their system but if it is a glitch that needs correcting.

Check the updates.   I KNOW I read it somewhere.  They said, because so much needs to be done during the pre-season, that the commish could replace owners who are AWOL for 5 days in the pre-season.   It's not surprising that low level support won't replace anyone before 14 days but they're just reading a manual.  I think it's oursourced.

Of course, as I'm reading your post again, it appears that he was around for much of the pre-season so it looks like much of his missed time is ST games.  That may not apply.

9/4 PM2	Arbitration Hearings, End / Rehire Coaches, End	n/a
10	9/5 AM	Sign Free-Agents, Start	n/a
11	9/5 PM	Sign Coaches, Start	n/a
12	9/5 PM2	Offseason	n/a
13	9/6 AM	Offseason	n/a
14	9/6 PM	Offseason

above is the league schedule - last sign was 9/5 pm2

Yeah, you should have started banging on them on 9/9.   Once ST starts, it doesn't matter very much.   He's already missed everything. 

9/9 PM2	Rule 5 Draft / Hall of Fame Nominations End / Hall of Fame Voting Begins	n/a
25	9/10 AM	@Salt Lake City Slingers (fs)	8-6	W
26	9/10 PM	Rochester Screaming Eagles (fs)	5-4	L
27	9/10 PM2	New Britain Brontoraptors (fs)	1-5	W
28	9/11 AM	Cincinnati Chili Coney (fs)

by 9/10PM2 (day 5) already into ST games - now the only issue is protecting the existing players and WIS makes it impossible to do that

I took over this team in the last cycle of 19/19. By the time I got there, the pitcher had started every game since the beginning of ST & went to 0% fatigue during the 3rd game. By the time I got the ball out of his hand he had started 7 (but only lost 4) reg. season games, that's 25 in a row& 22 @ 0 fatigue level. After a couple of exchanges with "support' asking for assistance and being told if I didn't like it to tell the commish to find another owner, I was told today there is nothing "they" can do and the guy would return to 100% in 43 HBD days. So he sits in R on my bench, not even on the DL so I could replace him and I guess it's either demote a decent 26 y.o. pitcher or play with 24 guys for 1/3 of the season. I'm not whining but seems to me I'm handicapped enough without playing "short handed" and no one even in the box. 
I think the best fix is to give the commish limited access to all apparently abandoned teams. If "they" don't want to do that, then at least set the line up at every level to the "recs" when the BL club goes on auto.

One other thing, this can't be a problem that has surfaced just recently. Has it not been addressed because no one has pointed it out before?