I agree with the waiver wire "conservatives." Common sense dictates that it almost never makes sense to reduce your cap size relative to other teams with two exceptions, one already mentioned above --

Dumping your scrubs at the start of the season and using the extra $1.4-$1.6 million in cap room to pick up another reliever or upgrade a position player. That's a no-brainer. Though you pay a 10% tax on the $1.4-$1.6 million, it's still found money.

Realizing you have a better-than-expected AAA player and using him to replace the position player you drafted. That's a little trickier because you need to have TWO better-than-expected AAA's, since one won't have enough PA's, or you have to pick up a low PA player from the WW to pair with your AAA player to stay above the minimum PA requirement. Sometimes that works and sometimes it blows up in your face.

When owners go to the waiver wire in other scenarios and miraculously "reinvigorate" their teams, it usually means that their team is benefiting from a statistical change in fortunes that would have happened anyway and they got lucky and weren't penalized for reducing their payroll.

But the bottom line is that going to the waiver wire on a regular basis is a recipe for disaster unless you're in a high cap theme league that allows you to pick your own WAA AAA's. My 0.02...

Most any time, for PA or garbage IP. It might cost you some fee, but in the end you'll still get bang for your buck.

I'm not sure if I want to dump my bench guys. I choose those just as carefully as I do my starters. The Michael Young and David Bell scrub seasons are very good at what they do. Kerins and a few others are very good bargains that are cheap that can give you quality at bats.

In the $90M WISC league I had a '52 Elmer Valo who was supposed to be one of the two guys who batted ahead of my albatross hitter and set him up to succeed. Through 170 ABs (45 games) he was hitting .148/.249/.166 and had scored only 24 runs. The rest of the season he played in 83 more games, hit .296, and scored 82 runs.

I agree with the majority. Unless there's a very good reason to do so, don't use the waiver wire. Bad performance is not a reason to go to the WW unless you can explain why the player is performing below your initial expectations. It's usually just bad luck. According to the old Fangraphs post on statistical stabilization, which to the best of my knowledge is still considered to be reasonably accurate, it takes something like 450 plate appearances for SLG to stabilize and 900 for AVG. The standard variance of sequences of events with only 2 outcomes is sufficiently high that weird things happen over 170 ABs all the time.