Archive for Trade Possibilities

The phrase “Buying Low” gets thrown around in the baseball community. I’m not sure if owners can actually buy low on many of these frustrating but talented players. Owners need to be willing to sell. I going to try to redefine the concept of buying low concentrating on drop rates and go over a few potential targets.

When I hear or read about buying low on a player, the touts are focusing on buying a good player during a cold streak. Paul Goldschmidt fits this label with his .208/.324/.380 slash line. Owners paid first round prices for replacement level production. But are Goldschmidt’s owners selling low? Probably not.

Going over some recent trades at the Yahoo trade tracker, Goldschmidt is being traded straight up for players such as Clayton Kershaw, Joey Votto, Patrick Corbin, and Shohei Ohtani.

His value is down some (and should be with the K% spike) but not horribly. He’s still owned in 99%+ of leagues at ESPN, Yahoo, Fantrax, and CBS. Even the most frustrated owners in shallow leagues aren’t moving on. So why should owners focus their time and energy on players who even the most frustrated owners aren’t moving on with?

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One of the great things about Ottoneu is the high level of engagement by the growing community of owners.  Few topics get the masses talking more than crowd-sourcing feedback on recent league trades, so today I want to highlight a few of the more interesting trades I’ve seen recently to get a pulse on how some player values are already shifting early this season.

As a quick reminder, Ottoneu is a keeper system by design that shifts the balance just short of traditional dynasty leagues, and offers a variety of scoring systems (including H2H this year).

Few players have seen their value shift as wildly as Shohei Ohtani over the past few weeks.  What he’s managed to do to start the season with both the bat (1.286 OPS) and off the mound (97.8 mph fastball) has at least verified that he’s as talented as the world thought he was, but the fact that he now looks less raw than he did just a few weeks ago in spring training tells you everything you need to know about the upward trajectory of his value in fantasy baseball leagues.  If you don’t happen to own Ohtani already, he’s going to be one of the hardest players in the game to acquire over the next 30 days.  He’s young, exciting, and just for the cool factor of clicking between batting and pitching stats on his FanGraphs page makes him the hottest commodity in the game right now, especially if you have the flexibility of slotting him into your daily lineup or your rotation like Ottoneu provides.

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Jason mentioned this idea on Sunday’s pod so I went ahead and put it together. It’s a list of all the players on 40-man rosters who are out of options and thus could have the inside track on roster spots if they’re directly competing with someone who does have an option left. He mentioned that he uses this info to identify some options for AL/NL Only leagues where playing time is king. Hat tip to Justin for the title of this piece!

I didn’t pick and choose who to mention so you’ll see some guys who are obviously not in grave danger of even being sent down at any point. Instead, I’m just listing all the 40-man players with a “0” in the options column on Roster Resource. These guys could be dealt to or picked up by teams where their playing time gets a boost.

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I once took an excellent training course on effective communication.  At the beginning of the course, our teacher started with a game:

In my hand is an envelop with a $10 bill inside.  I want one of you in this room to take the deal I’m offering you.  I’m going to ask you a simple trivia question and, if you get it right, you get the ten dollars.  But if you get it wrong, you owe me two dollars.  However, if you don’t know the answer, you can ask one person in the room for help.  Who wants to volunteer?

After a few moments of people looking at each other wondering what the catch might be, I volunteered.  “How many states make up the United States?”, he asked.

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I’m going to start by picking on Jon today. In a recent article on Deep League Stolen Base Options, he wrote the following in the comments:

Nice thoughts, but are any of these guys actually available in any “normal” (e.g. AL or NL-only) deep leagues? I don’t think there’s any useful way to use ESPN ownership rate as a proxy for deep league availability. I’m sure there are many players with a sub-1% ownership rate that are taken in nearly every “only” league.

I get his point that in 12-team ‘Only Leagues, there are no players on the waiver wire at 1% ownership, yet alone 5%. In Jon’s case, his best option to get steals is probably from making trades. There is a transition depending on league size where team rebalancing transitions from waiver wire pickups to trades.

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In last night’s chat, Paul Swydan and I got a ton of questions on Mike Trout’s trade value because of his recent injury. It’s a simple yet loaded question with so many different league types and possible roster construction rules. I will discuss some basic starting valuations for Trout which owners can use.

When looking at possible trade options, I like to start with Yahoo!’s Trade Market page. It lists the most recent trades involving any player. It just lists the last 25 trades so the page can be refreshed with updated information. Here are some post-injury one-for-one trades from the page:

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Earlier this week, I recommended Zack Godley in all leagues. A little while later, I got the following tweet

@jeffwzimmerman @rotographs Great Godley piece Jeff. I’m torn. Do i drop Shoemaker Berrios or my 3rd RP Betances to grab him in 14 team weekly points lg? 5 keepers.

— Marcus Aurelius (@WilcoWacko) May 17, 2017

It’s a tough call and one I face in my own home league where everyone is not 100% invested in their team. Just because a player should be owned, he may not be a fit on a team. Here’s how owners should operate when the situation arises.

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Having last week identified some hitters who seem to us to have been lucky or unlucky so far this season, and then suggested what their trade value might be if their luck evens out, we now work the same magic with starting pitchers. These guys’ granular stats, we posit, indicate that they’ve pitched significantly better or worse than their Fantasy-relevant numbers suggest that they have.

We propose that they’ve been unfortunate, and that their fortunes will change. So we ask ourselves (1) who are these guys? (2) what will their stats look like over the rest of the season if their luck balances out and their full-season numbers are about what they were projected to be? and (3) what other pitcher’s expected performance will our guy’s rest-of-season stats resemble?

Our methodology is simple. We first tried it last year, with some success, and then in the preseason, where it would have pointed you towards Dallas Keuchel and away from Julio Teheran. So it shows promise. To find guys who’ve been lucky, we look for starting pitchers who are the top third of their cohort in Batting Average on Balls in Play and in Flyball/Home Run percentage, but the bottom third in Hard-Hit Percentage.

We figure that a guy who’s not getting hit hard but giving up a disproportionate number of hits and home runs is a good candidate to turn his season around. And we turn the method on its head to identify the lucky guys who do get hit hard but—because they’re giving up fewer home runs and hits than they should be—don’t yet have the scars to show for it. We think those guys are headed for a fall. Read the rest of this entry »

In the run-up to the season, our sense of adventure shone brighter than our always-flickering common sense, and so here we are playing in not just one but several leagues that permit trading. When you trade, to state the obvious, you’re betting that the package of stats you’re giving up is less valuable to you than the package you’re getting. Sometimes, this is just a question of trading stats you don’t need for stats that you do. If you’ve got four closers but your hitters have no speed, you’re going to trade some saves for some stolen bases. And sometimes, of course, just like teams in Reality Baseball, you’re trading this year for next year.

But—as we used to say in Academe when we didn’t want to do any more work on a project—keepers are Beyond the Scope of this Article. The thing you’re most often trying to do when you contemplate trades is divine who on your team has produced stats that flatter his actual performance, and who on the other guy’s team has better things in store. And to assist ourselves, and now you, with this project, we’ve tried to identify hitters who, through the first one-fifth of the season, have been lucky or unlucky, and who figure (we hope) to produce numbers more typical of their projected performance. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, I wrote about a trade offer a buddy of mine received in a dynasty league. He was offered Nolan Arenado and Dallas Keuchel for Andrew Benintendi, Miguel Sano, Rafael Devers, Josh Bell, and a 2018 draft pick. The comments devolved into a discussion of trade negotiation etiquette. Gross, right?

To be clear, I’m a believer in the old adage “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” At least as it applies to getting what you want from other people. If you ever happen to have a fly infestation in your house or apartment, I highly recommend putting a funnel over a cup of vinegar. You will catch ALL of the flies. You could smear a thick layer of honey over an entire counter and not catch one fly. Whoever made up that saying didn’t know anything about flies.

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