Archive for Trades

Bill Buckner and Steve Bartman know better than most that baseball is a haunted sport. Downright spooky even. Curses range from the Bambino to the Billy Goat to Seattle-area Etsy witches, baseball fans subscribe to and are victims of decades long vexing hexes.

And by baseball standards, the Home Run Derby Curse is akin to the curse of being on the cover of MLB the Show. FanGraphs writers have taken hacks at diminishing this curse over the years, but the popular consciousness still loves to tout it. Their theory is fairly straight forward, relying on the idea that derby participants change their swing to try and win the derby, and can’t find their game swing again in the second half, leading to a slump.

In this article, I’ll seek to answer two questions:

In recent years, has there been a fall off between halves for derby participants?

And is there a way to try and predict who will fall off to help us humble fantasy managers sell high?

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Pulling off trades in our fantasy baseball leagues can be difficult. We usually know our league-mates well, and they often know our true tendencies and intentions, but that shouldn’t stop us from engaging. We should be active with trade conversations to improve our rosters in our quest for league titles. This weekly column will recommend hitters and pitchers to try selling high or buying low on, and I’ll try to present realistic opportunities. Below are two players to target in trades and two to consider dealing.

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Back on April 14, I introduced my process of researching upcoming matchups and schedule outliers in three- to four-week windows to help identify waiver-wire and trade targets. The basic premise of this theory is that rest-of-season (ROS) analysis has high margins of error and that it is better to compartmentalize fantasy decision-making into short-term timeframes. We do not know who will get hurt and whether a specific team would be a good or bad matchup for a hitter or pitcher two months from now. We know that the New York Mets have been great to stream pitchers against, as have the Houston Astros for hitters. If Francisco Lindor, Luis Robert Jr., Jorge Polanco, Hunter Brown, Tatsuya Imai, and Josh Hader are all healthy and playing well in mid-July, the Mets offense and the Astros pitching would be better.

My long-time fantasy baseball modus ponens has been this:

1. If baseball were predetermined or highly predictable, we could rely on rest-of-season analysis for fantasy baseball decisions.
2. Baseball is not predetermined or highly predictable. Every hitter and pitcher will either have multiple prolonged slumps, get injured and go on the IL, play hurt without the public’s knowledge, or be demoted.
3. Therefore, we should not heavily rely on rest-of-season analysis for fantasy baseball decisions.

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The Trading episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Jason Collette

Strategy Section

• Trading
  • Why have there been fewer trades made in the past few years in fantasy baseball leagues?
  • When is it too late to make a meaningful trade?
  • How do you know when you should make a trade vs. picking up players off of the waiver wire?
  • What is the best way to approach other leagues managers to make a trade?

Buy/Sell/Hold/Drop

• Hot Players
  • Jake McCarthy
  • Curtis Mead
  • Spencer Steer
  • Ben Brown
  • Luis Severino
  • Gregory Soto
• Cold Players
  • Mauricio Dubón
  • Brenton Doyle
  • Kyle Manzardo
  • Luis Castillo
  • David Peterson
  • Brandon Sproat

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

Injury Update

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Pulling off trades in our fantasy baseball leagues can be difficult. We usually know our league-mates well, and they often know our true tendencies and intentions, but that shouldn’t stop us from engaging. We should be active with trade conversations to improve our rosters in our quest for league titles. This weekly column will recommend hitters and pitchers to try selling high or buying low, and I’ll try to present realistic opportunities.

This week, let’s dig into a specific underperformer and assess what they types of deals we can make.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trades are the lifeblood of fantasy baseball home leagues. The conversations around them help keep us connected and engaged, and make our league more fun.

Striking deals isn’t always easy. There are often hurt feelings around lopsided proposals, league-mates who value players differently, and that one guy who wants to veto everything. We can improve our fantasy squads with the waiver wire, but our collective hit rates are low. Quite often, those pickups backfire — a hitter’s cold streak or a pitcher’s blowup, which inevitably leads to dropping the player. The one facet we have control of in home leagues is trading.

Managers are often emotionally tied to certain players – specifically, missed draft targets or players from their favorite baseball team. Also, we’re not all great at zooming out to a long-term view and getting stuck in the moment. Good analysis can be washed away by recency bias and small sample sizes. No one can force us to make a deal, so it’s the one element of the game we have some control over and can use proper value assessment and negotiation techniques to our advantage.

This column will recommend hitters and pitchers to try selling high or buying low, and touch on trade strategies. No two leagues or two managers are the same. You know your league-mates best: what kind of deal they’ll scoff at, which player type they’re willing to deal for or acquire, and how good their player and market-valuation skills are. I’ll dig deep and present realistic opportunities.

SIERA and K-BB% to Spot Under- and Over-Performing SPs

ERA indicators or ERA estimators or peripherals — these are interchangeable terms for a set of Sabermetric statistics that fantasy baseball managers use to help predict future performance of pitchers. These ERA indicators (xERA, FIP, xFIP, SIERA) are not interchangeable since they include different inputs and have varying purposes. FIP excludes balls hit into play. xFIP utilizes the league average HR/FB%. SIERA incorporates a pitcher’s underlying skill level into the equation and adjusts for the type of balls in play. The SI stands for “Skills Interactive”, and you can learn more about SIERA in the original article here. SIERA is far from perfect, but many studies over the last 15 years have proven it to have a slightly higher correlation to ERA than the other indicators.

Over the years, I have utilized a simple formula (ERA minus SIERA) to identify pitchers who could be deemed “lucky”, with negative regression on the horizon, and vice versa — “unlucky” with a higher likelihood of positive regression. To further qualify the luck or lack thereof, I review BABIP and LOB% (left-on-base rate, or strand rate). In the context of fantasy baseball FAAB/waiver pickups or trades, I dig into pitchers’ year-to-date starts and look at their projected upcoming starts – both from a perspective of ballpark/environment and strength of opponent. Moreover, and most importantly, I am reviewing the most important metric of all, which is K-BB% (the difference between their strikeout rate and walk rate). Proficient at punching batters out, able to locate pitches and not walk a lot of guys? You’re probably going to have above-average results.

Before our sage readers bring out their pitchforks, note that I recognize there is a lot of nuance here and not everything can be overly simplified. Of course, a high or low BABIP is impacted by team defense, or if a pitcher generates weak or hard contact. Nevertheless, I assume a pitcher with four seasons of around a league-average BABIP (.290) who has a .365 BABIP through five starts is going to regress towards his career mean. The same for a pitcher with a 100% LOB% through five starts, regressing towards the league average of 70-75%.

The perfect example for this point in the season is the pitcher who has been the very best in baseball, Los Angeles Angels righty, José Soriano.

Through five starts, Soriano has a 0.28 ERA, 3.04 SIERA, 2.82 xFIP, 21.7 K-BB%, .149 BABIP, and a 100% LOB.

In his first two full seasons as a starter (2024-2025), those rates were: 3.93 ERA, 3.97 SIERA, 3.65 xFIP, 10.6 K-BB%, .291 BABIP, and a 69% LOB.

It wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume that Soriano will regress from a 0.28 ERA. In fact, it’s common sense. His BABIP and LOB will regress towards his league-average marks from 2024-2025, but likely both will still be well above league-average. We see that his 2024-2025 ERA, SIERA, and xFIP were similar (in the 3.65-4.00 range) and that his current indicators are closer to 3.00. If Soriano ends up with a 3.50 ERA this season, that means there’s some ERA damage to come (to be expected), but he will still end up being a massive provider of fantasy profit at his 250+ ADP. The question to ask ourselves in trade leagues: can we net a top-10 starting pitcher for Soriano in a “sell-high” scenario from a league-mate who only peruses box scores, doesn’t dive into advanced metrics or consider indicators?

Let’s take a look at the qualified starting pitchers with the highest (unluckiest) and lowest (luckiest) differentials between their ERA and SIERA. I use “unlucky” and “lucky” in quotations for these sorted leaderboards to simply denote these differentials noting that luck isn’t a metric.

Unluckiest Starting Pitchers To Date

We knew the Jesús Luzardo Experience would be the ultimate roller coaster going into the season. Luzardo is a top-10 skills arm with extreme highs and lows. This is the guy who served up 20 earned runs in back-to-back starts in the week of the 2025 Memorial Day holiday, but allowed two runs or fewer in 50% (16/32) of his starts last season. Luzardo punched out seven or more batters in 18 of those 32 starts. So far in 2026, Luzardo has an exceptional 30:5 K:BB in 22 innings, an extremely high BABIP of .417 (career: .307), a super low LOB of 41.7% (career: 70%) and a massive difference between his ERA (7.94) and SIERA/xFIP (2.45/1.93). He is the ultimate “buy-low” target, though whether we strike a deal or not is based on mindset of the league-mate who currently rosters him. Are they metrics-saavy and have good fantasy common sense? If so, you probably won’t get a surefire advantage on a deal. Would I trade Soriano for Luzardo? It’s 10x more equitable than it was on March 15, but yes, yes I would, and I’d obnoxiously ask for a throw-in player “to make the deal fair.” (winky emoji)

There is no doubting the high level of concern someone who drafted Garrett Crochet in the first or second round of their draft might have. His implosion in Minnesota (10 ER in 1.2 IP) came out of the blue. Last Sunday, he cruised through four innings against the Tigers before getting torched for four runs on two singles and two homers, in the fifth. Crochet’s BABIP is high (.368) and LOB is low (55.6%), though not at extreme Luzardo levels. His fastball velocity is slightly down from last season (0.5 mph), as is his strikeout rate (-5.4%) and his swinging-strike rate (-3%). It doesn’t look awful under the hood, but because Crochet was drafted as a top-3 pitcher and these blowups are uncharacteristic of him, the trepidation in dealing for him is high.

Digging into FanGraphs player profiles on the rest of these players elicit a common theme in addition to the large ERA-SIERA differentials: above-average BABIPs, below-average LOBs, and, for the most part, a slight velocity decrease. In the case of Mike Burrows, his SwStr% is up from last season (12% to 12.7%) and his barrel rate is greatly reduced (10.8% to 5.7%). Burrows’ next three projected starts are against the Yankees (home), Red Sox (away), and Dodgers (home), so perhaps we weather the storm and pluck him off waivers in a few weeks when his schedule improves.

Yusei Kikuchi’s four-seam fastball velocity is slightly up from last season (94.8 mph to 95.4), but it’s an offering he continues to decrease because it typically gets crushed. He’s an example of a pitcher I typically avoid drafting and want nothing to do with. Streaming Jake Irvin (career 4.99 ERA) is always a case of playing with fire. He’s another pitcher I never want anything to do with.

David Peterson and Aaron Nola are on the downswings of their careers, but both have a high chance of improving their ERAs. Everything under the hood appears similar to last season. Logan Webb, Nathan Eovaldi, and Logan Gilbert are three arms I’d explore deals on.

Luckiest Starting Pitchers To Date

Other than Soriano, the standout “lucky” pitcher worth shopping is Justin Wrobleski. The sample size is smaller than most on the list (24 IP: three starts, one 4-IP piggyback), but we can still confidently yell “negative regression” so long as our league-mates don’t hear it. Wrobleski has a 9.8% strikeout rate (9 Ks), a .205 BABIP and has yet to allow a home run. Wrobleski earns confidence points as a member of the Dodgers rotation, but will rarely earn two starts in a week because of they run a six-man, and he’s no lock to remain in it for the long-run with Blake Snell and River Ryan eventually joining it.

Seth Lugo has been masterful through five starts, but he’s the same guy he’s always been — 91-92 mph FB velo, 8-9% BB, sub-10% SwStr. The big difference this season is he has yet to allow a home run. Edward Cabrera hasn’t allowed a home run either, but there is little else in his profile to elicit confidence. Cabrera’s .286 BABIP is close to his career mark and to league-average, his strikeout rate is way down (25.8% to 18.7%), his 12.1% walk rate is closer to his career mark (11.7%) which may portend last season’s 8.3% as an outlier, and his Stuff+ ratings are down across the board. Cabrera’s next start is against the Phillies at home, this Thursday. I would not be looking to trade for E-Cab, though I would explore dealing him for a more durable pitcher with a higher health grade around his preseason ADP, like MacKenzie Gore or Robbie Ray.

Many others on this list aren’t particularly enticing from a name-brand, reputation or fantasy value perspective — Michael Wacha, Clay Holmes, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Bryce Elder fall under this category. Seeing Jack Flaherty’s 3.7 K-BB% induces agita, especially when noting the decline from 2024 (24%) and 2025 (18.9%). We can’t technically call it a decline yet since it’s only been five starts, but he’s another roller coaster guy who is tough to ride with. Last season, he served up at least four earned runs in 26% of his starts failed to reach the fifth inning in 28%. He somehow managed an 8-15 record on a playoff team that finished 12 games above .500.

There will always be outliers, but the holes poked into this process would be tiny pinholes. This process have assisted in my fantasy baseball endeavors for many years and I always strive to improve it and learn from experience and those around me. Reviewing ERA and SIERA differentials, BABIP and LOB rates relative to average, recent and future matchups, and of course strikeout-to-walk ratios are good first steps in assessing over/underperforming pitchers and their rest-of-season fantasy value.

Trades are the lifeblood of fantasy baseball home leagues. The conversations around them help keep us connected and engaged, and make our league more fun.

Striking deals isn’t always easy. There are often hurt feelings around lopsided proposals, league-mates who value players differently, and that one guy who wants to veto everything. We can improve our fantasy squads with the waiver wire, but our collective hit rates are low. Quite often, those pickups backfire in the form of a hitter’s cold streak or a pitcher’s blowup, which inevitably leads to dropping the player. The one facet we have control of in home leagues is trading.

Managers are often emotionally tied to certain players – specifically, missed draft targets or players from their favorite baseball team. Also, we’re not all great at zooming out for a long-term view and not being stuck in the moment. Good analysis can be washed away by recency bias and small sample sizes. No one can force us to make a deal, so it’s the one element of the game we have some control over and can use proper value assessment and negotiation techniques to our advantage.

This column will recommend hitters and pitchers to attempt to sell-high or buy-low, and touch on trade strategies. No two leagues or two managers are the same. You know your league-mates best: what kind of deal they’ll scoff at, which player type they’re willing to deal or acquire, and how good their player and market valuation skills are. I’ll do my best to dig deep and present realistic opportunities.

Trading for Short Term Gains

Streaming hitters and pitchers based on an upcoming week’s set of matchups is a strategy that winning managers have utilized for decades — a two-start pitcher with increased velocity and strong recent outings, or a hot hitter moving up in his team’s batting order with Coors Field and Great American Ball Park on tap. Most fantasy baseball managers are aware that these types of players are ideal free agent or waiver pickups, especially if we have an easy drop. This is easier to execute in shallower (10- and 12-team leagues) because the likelihood of these targets being available is higher due to the larger free agent pool. It’s wise to plan ahead for the upcoming week, perhaps even for the week after that, if feasible.

What if I told you that you can optimize your roster for a longer-term outlook based on the next 3-4 weeks of the schedule? The following strategy can work via waivers/FAAB or trading, but it requires astute analysis and some extra digging. For this week, let’s frame it from the perspective of targeting hitters to buy low on. We can do this in the following manner:

1. Research each MLB team’s year-to-date pitching stats. I do this via FanGraphs’ TEAM stats.
2. Identify the outliers — the best and worst pitching rotations and bullpens
3. Review each MLB team’s set of matchups for the next 3-4 weeks
4. Match the outliers (5-6 best, 5-6 worst team pitching staffs) to the next 3-4 weeks of the schedule
5. If a team’s offense is scheduled to face several “bad” pitching staffs, hitters from those offenses are buy or add candidates, and vice versa

The May 2025 Chicago Cubs 

In early May last season, I ran through this process and identified that the Chicago Cubs had an extraordinarily advantageous set of matchups in the second half of the month. We had a small, yet reasonable sample size (first six weeks of the season) and their schedule really stood out like a sore thumb from May 16, 2025 – June 5, 2025: 3 vs. White Sox, 3 at Marlins, 3 at Reds, 3 vs. Rockies, 3 vs. Reds, 3 at Nationals.

Pitchers get better and worse, get promoted and demoted, and they get hurt. Things change, so this isn’t an exact science, but my assessment of a short-term matchup advantage for the hitters proved true. Over that three-week span, the Cubs went 14-4 and led the Majors with 112 runs scored (6.22 runs per game). The next closest were the Dodgers (102 runs) and the median for runs scored over that span was in the mid-70s. Core Cubs hitters were mostly rostered in all formats, but some were available in shallow-league waivers and there were certainly buying opportunities via trade. Five of their hitters batted .325 or higher over those three weeks (Suzuki .343, Tucker .339, Hoerner .338, Busch .333, Shaw .327) and Pete Crow-Armstrong went ham altogether (.293-17-5-23-8 in 80 PA). We may not be able to predict the future accurately, but with a basic understanding of the ‘buy-low/sell-high’ philosophy, perhaps we may have come to the conclusion that Crow-Armstrong could draw a huge (top-25 overall hitter) return in a 1-for-1 trade. Sure, PCA continued to produce at a high level for another month before his post-ASB crash-and-burn (.216-6 HR-8 SB after .265-25-27), but the idea of selling a hot, young player at his likely apex should have at least crossed our minds.

Every single hitter goes through waves and troughs throughout the season. In most cases, we ride these waves (leave them in the lineup), but sometimes we paddle through and sit it out (bench them). Once in a while, we have to trade in our reliable longboard for a newer, sleeker version that makes the ride smoother.

Upcoming Hitter Matchup Outliers

How can we confidently trust a three-week sample of pitching data to determine which team’s pitching will be good or bad over the next 3-4 weeks? A starter or reliever can have a bad outing at any time, and a team’s staff can over or underperform for a stretch, but certain things we can accept as true. Such as, the Mariners, Yankees, Rangers, Phillies, Dodgers and Braves have good pitching and are generally tough matchups in a series. Or that the Nationals, Angels, Rockies and Cardinals are among the league’s worst and are generally plus matchups for opposing hitters in a series. Then there are slight adjustments we can make based on ballpark: Coors Field (Rockies) or Sutter Health Park (Athletics) are good for hitters; T-Mobile Park (Mariners) and Oracle Park (Giants) are not.

We can then go to the FanGraphs team pitching stats, sort through and do some digging. Do the Mariners still look like an elite staff and bullpen? Fourth-best WAR, best ERA, top-five xFIP, lowest walk rate: check. Do Nationals pitchers still appear to be a strong group to target hitters against? See for yourself:

Feel free to sort this table by different categories, click on various Stat Presets (Advanced, Batted Ball, Statcast) to review other metrics, split between starters and relievers (under Positional Split), or review 2025’s data.

Are the Astros (6.50 ERA, 6.0 BB/9) going to have the worst staff and be a target to stream hitters against in the short term? Probably. They’re down Hunter Brown, Tatsuya Imai, Cristian Javier (which isn’t saying much) and Josh Hader. Mike Burrows and Bryan Abreu have been horrendous, and they’ve recently added Cody Bolton, Colton Gordon and J.P. France into the mix. It might be a prettier picture in August, but for the next 3-4 weeks, it’s fair to consider them a “bad” staff. If Garrett Crochet isn’t hurt and bounces back, as most of us expect, we likely won’t see Red Sox pitchers among the bottom-five in two months from now.

Most of the pitching staffs closer to average are a “push” — they don’t move the needle to help identify outlier-good or outlier-bad matchups. We’re looking for a string of extremes. Here are a couple:

Great Matchups, next 3.5 weeks (Friday, April, 17 – Sunday, May 10)

Chicago White Sox

• 3 at Athletics
• 3 at Diamondbacks, 3 vs. Nationals
• 3 vs. Angels, 3 at Padres
• 3 at Angels, 3 vs. Mariners

Except for the Padres and Mariners, facing ATH, ARZ, WSN, LAA (x2) is as good as it gets. Perhaps slow-starter Miguel Vargas (1 HR, 180 BA, .222 BABIP, 14.5% BB) is a worthwhile trade target who can be acquired for a cheap return. Or perhaps we’re on the precipice of another Munetaka Murakami power heater. Chase Meidroth and Edgar Quero are getting dropped in many deeper formats.

New York Mets

• 3 at Cubs
• 3 vs Twins, 3 vs. Rockies
• 3 vs. Nationals, 3 at Angels
• 3 at Rockies, 3 at Diamondbacks

If this six-series stretch after this weekend’s Cubs series doesn’t fix the Mets’ offense, probably nothing will (or at least until Juan Soto returns). As of today, every hitter except for Luis Robert Jr. and Francisco Alvarez is a potential buy-low candidate. You don’t have to be in the room to know your league-mate who drafted Francisco Lindor and Bo Bichette is panicking.

Not-Great Matchups, next 3.5 weeks

St. Louis Cardinals

• 3 at Astros
• 3 at Marlins, 3 vs. Mariners
• 4 at Pirates, 3 vs. Dodgers
• 3 vs. Brewers, 4 at Padres

In exactly three weeks, there will be oodles of “I told you Jordan Walker stinks” tweets. The reality is that Walker is not as good as he’s been these first three weeks and isn’t as bad as he might be the next three weeks. Walker and his teammates will be facing some of the toughest rotations and bullpens in baseball — if he somehow doesn’t cool off, it would be a surprise. We’re not selling high on Walker just because of the next three weeks of matchups, but we should absolutely test the trade waters to see what we can get in return because this is the ideal window. Two weeks ago or two weeks from now, a Walker-for-Lindor offer would be scoffed at. Right now, the other manager might take it.

So, that’s a snapshot of one of the strategies I’ve used over the years for trades and free agent acquisitions. We often assess too much in terms of rest-of-season or the upcoming week. Going the extra mile to review metrics and preview schedules for extreme matchup outliers in a 3-4 week window can prove fruitful and provides small victories that can help add up into a fantasy league title come October.

Trades are the lifeblood of fantasy baseball home leagues. The conversations around them help keep us connected and engaged, and make our league more fun. Striking deals isn’t always easy. There are often hurt feelings around lopsided proposals, league-mates who value players differently, and that one guy who wants to veto everything. We can improve our fantasy squads with the waiver wire, but our collective hit rates are low. Quite often, those pickups backfire in the form of a hitter’s cold streak or a pitcher’s blowup, which inevitably leads to dropping the player. The one facet we have control of in home leagues is trading.

Managers are often emotionally tied to certain players – specifically, missed draft targets or players from their favorite baseball team. Also, we’re not all great at zooming out for a long-term view and not being stuck in the moment. Good analysis can be washed away by recency bias and small sample sizes. No one can force us to make a deal, so it’s the one element of the game we have some control over and can use proper value assessment and negotiation techniques to our advantage.

This column will recommend hitters and pitchers to attempt to sell-high or buy-low, and touch on trade strategies. No two leagues or two managers are the same. You know your league-mates best: what kind of deal they’ll scoff at, which player type they’re willing to deal or acquire, and how good their player and market valuation skills are. I’ll do my best to dig deep and present realistic opportunities.

April is a good time to capitalize on the overreaction and panic of our league-mates.

Here is a trade scenario to consider that could perhaps spawn ideas about similar players:

Offer: Matthew Liberatore (SP, STL), Eduardo Rodriguez (SP, ARZ)

Target: Nathan Eovaldi (SP, TEX), Max Meyer (SP, MIA)

Now is a good time to explore offers for Liberatore and E-Rod. Both are lefties on below-average teams. Both are off to good starts. It is unlikely that either will have a higher market value this season than they do now.

Liberatore is a fine pitcher. He’s a former first-round draft pick of the Rays (2018) who spent time as both a reliever and starter until the Cardinals stretched him out last spring so that he could be part of their rotation. Liberatore had an excellent stretch over the first two months of the season. In his first 11 starts, Liberatore produced a 3.08 ERA, a 1.06 WHIP, and an impressive 3.5% walk rate, and his strikeout rate hovered at 21.4%. His walk rate normalized closer to league average (8%) over the final four months, but Liberatore had several blow-up starts and those last 18 starts didn’t go as well — a 5.05 ERA, 1.49 WHIP, as well as a K-rate dip to 17%.

Through his first two games this season, the ace of the Cards rotation has allowed two runs (both solo homers), with three walks and four punchouts in 11 innings. We shouldn’t fall victim to small sampleitis, but it’s worth noting that the damage could have been worse in those starts when we consider his strand rate (100%), BABIP (.216), and differential in ERA (1.64) and xFIP (5.28). The big question: does someone in our league like him and consider him “safe”? The one way to find out is by trade-fishing.

Eduardo Rodriguez has had two noteworthy seasons — with the Red Sox in 2019 (203.1 IP, 25% K, 3.81 ERA) and in 2023 with the Tigers (152.2 IP, 23% K, 3.30 ERA). The rest of his career has been mostly unremarkable and his WHIP (career 1.33) is usually detrimental to fantasy teams. In deeper leagues (15-teamers and above), where starting pitching options are thin, E-Rod might have slight appeal to someone in your league (perhaps a Red Sox fan) on name recognition alone. He looked great in his season debut where he threw five scoreless innings with five punchouts and two walks against a stacked Dodgers offense. Five days later, he followed up with seven strong innings with no runs allowed against the Braves. Most notable in those first two starts was his pitch mix. Typically a 44-47% four-seam guy, Rodriguez threw his fastball just 28% of the time in those first two starts, while significantly increasing his changeup usage (from 21% since 2024 to 35% in 2026). Rodriguez’s changeup was an effective pitch in his two best seasons, but it’s been an inconsistent offering of his over the course of his career. His sinkers and cutters pop from time to time, but overall, E-Rod’s pitch mix and effectiveness has been all over the map — simply too much tinkering.

Your league-mates are probably too smart to buy high on an inconsistent pitcher on a bad team just because he has a 0.00 ERA through two starts, but it sure is worth exploring. His next four starts are against the Mets (road), Orioles (home), White Sox (home), Brewers (road). Since the Diamondbacks play six, five and six games the next three weeks, there are no two-start weeks on the horizon for him unless there’s a rotation shift or some rainouts.

The biggest reasons to shop Liberatore and Rodriguez is because their ratios are currently far below where they’ll end up at and because we want as few of the below-average swing-and-miss arms on our roster as possible. Liberatore’s career swinging-strike rate is 9.2% (8.9% last season) and Rodriguez’s is 10.4% (under nine percent since 2024).

It’s unlikely that another manager will give up Nathan Eovaldi or Max Meyer in a 1-for-1 deal for Liberatore or Rodriguez, but it’s not a far-fetched starting point. Most of our friends can read through attempts of fantasy baseball trade subterfuge. We’re not going to start the conversation with “let me take Eovaldi off your hands and I’ll give you E-Rod, who hasn’t given up a run all season.” But we should take any opportunity to subtly point things out that accentuate the player you’re offering or criticizes the player you’re targeting. In fact, it doesn’t hurt do the opposite, perhaps with a little bit of BYAF (But You Are Free), a persuasion technique that reinforces a person’s autonomy:

“Eovaldi never plays a full season and is getting old, but I’m willing to take on the risk. It’s up to you, of course.”

It’s undoubtedly been a rough start for Eovaldi. In his first outing, he gave up a two-run shot to Kyle Schwarber in the first inning and a three-run bomb to Alec Bohm in the fifth before getting pulled with two outs in the fifth. He struck out seven and didn’t walk a batter. His second start, against the Orioles, went poorly — 4 IP – 8 H – 6 ER – 3 BB – 5 K. There are no issues with his velocity — he’s still hitting 94-95 mph with his four-seamer. In fact, he threw it less than 14% of the time while raising his split-finger usage from 31% to 37%. His four-seamer is the pitch most of the damage has come on, and it’s likely he will continue relying primarily on his split-finger, curveball and cutter. He has a .481 BABIP and 54.1% strand rate in those two starts — definitely a touch unlucky.

Let’s not forget that the man maintained a 1.73 ERA (3.02 SIERA) and 0.85 WHIP over 22 starts last season. He hasn’t exactly been the bastion of health, but Ol’ Nate has averaged nearly 27 starts over his last five seasons. Moreover, he is typically an elite control guy, boasting a 6.5% career walk rate (since 2011!) and sported a 4.2% mark last season. A low-walk veteran with a 11+ ERA and 2+ WHIP is the exact type of pitcher we target in trades now.

The person with Max Meyer might currently be experiencing a case of “man, I fell for the hype; this guy stinks.” Meyer has allowed five runs and has walked five batters through his first two starts. On the flip side, he has 11 strikeouts (9.2 innings) with a 14.1% SwStr, his velocity is intact, and he continues to throw his patented slider at an average of one out of every three pitches. He calls a pitchers’ park home and is talented enough to beat out his ratio projections, which peg him in the 4.20-4.40 (ERA) and 1.30-1.35 (WHIP) range. Could you pull off Meyer for Liberatore or Rodriguez straight up? Probably not, but we don’t get what we want in life without asking.

The managers who win pitcher trades are the ones digging in the trenches. The ones who do a deep dive into peripherals, underlying metrics, velocity changes, pitch mix adjustments and play logs of past outings. Remember that a 1-for-1 offer out of the blue will usually give away your intent, so try to hide your true goal in a smaller, multi-player deal. It’s easier to trade with friends or league-mates you already have baseball or trade conversations with, and you can play a bit of the long-game by planting seeds in conversations that could help you get the deal you’d like to get done.

Trades are the lifeblood of fantasy baseball home leagues. The conversations around them help keep us connected, engaged, and make our league more fun. Striking deals isn’t always easy. There are often hurt feelings around lopsided proposals, league-mates who value players differently, and that one guy who wants to veto everything. We can improve our fantasy squads with the waiver wire, but our collective hit rates are low. Quite often, those pickups backfire in the form of a hitter’s cold streak or a pitcher’s blowup, which inevitably leads to dropping the player. The one facet we have control of in home leagues is trading.

Managers are often emotionally tied to certain players – specifically, ones they’ve drafted or ones they targeted in drafts and missed. Also, we’re not all great at zooming out for a long-term view and not being stuck in the moment. Good analysis can be washed away by recency bias and small sample sizes. No one can force us to make a deal, so it’s the one element of the game we have some control over and can use proper value assessment and negotiation techniques to our advantage.

This column will recommend hitters and pitchers to attempt to sell-high or buy-low, and touch on trade strategies. No two leagues or two managers are the same. You know your league-mates best: what kind of deal they’ll scoff at, which player type they’re willing to deal or acquire, and how good their player and market valuation skills are. I’ll do my best to dig deep and present realistic opportunities. If there’s someone in your league who will swap their Josh Naylor (0-19 through five games) for a red-hot Joey Wiemer, it’s probably time to find a new manager for their spot, or a more competitive league. Early in the season is usually a great time to take advantage of a good deal, as we can potentially lean into targeting players who are off to slow starts. We can also use fandom to our advantage, specifically when we know a league-mate is a diehard fan of a specific Major League team and may be blinded by subjectivity.

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A couple of weeks ago, the Pirates acquired second baseman Brandon Lowe from the Rays as part of a three-team trade. The 31-year-old had spent his entire career in Tampa Bay, so it’ll take some getting used to seeing him don a new uniform and in a new league. He’s coming off the second best fantasy season of his career. Let’s dive into the park factors to determine how the park switch might impact his results.

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