Hey! Shop Your Trades: Part 2
Yesterday’s post about shopping trades yielded some interesting comments for what I thought was a slam dunk topic. It’s my own fault that certain aspects of the example I used were distracting from the central premise. Write better dummy.
Let’s start by restating things. More than two owners (one of which is the seller) in a 12 team league should know that Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Kris Bryant are available to be acquired in the same trade. Agree? Disagree? Poll!
Poll prompt:
More than two owners (one of which is the seller) in a 12 team league should know that Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Kris Bryant are available to be acquired in the same trade.
— Brad Johnson (@BaseballATeam) March 6, 2019
I’m going to proceed with the rest of this post as if we’re now all on the same page to this point. This poll will later reveal the accuracy of this assumption. Let’s dive into the subtext of yesterday’s comments.
We All Play For Different Reasons
Everybody has their own unique way of playing fantasy baseball. Options range from small single-season leagues to behemoth dynasty scenarios. Not only are the formats bountiful, the actual motivations for playing can vary wildly too.
Here on RotoGraphs, I make a couple basic assumptions about the readership. I expect that you care, like really care, about what happens in your leagues. You want to win. You want to play in leagues that are active. You want to associate only with rivals who care just as much as you. Most of us play fantasy baseball to partially simulate the act of running a real baseball franchise. Many of us fancy ourselves to be Jerry Dipoto.
I realize not everybody fits neatly into this bucket of caring fantasy players. However, the Venn diagram of people who read about fantasy baseball on FanGraphs and people who want a truly immersive fantasy experience must look something like a blurry circle. Right? Feel free to enlighten me to the contrary.
And sure, we all have some opponents who simply aren’t like us. This even happens in industry leagues. We have to make allowances. Approach them in a different way. You have a standard way of talking trade, playing the waiver wire, etc. You can adjust for non-standard opponents. If you want to.
For me, this happens post-production. I’m not writing about or for the low effort folk. I expect most of you are high effort players. I expect you mostly associate with high effort rivals. I write for that audience. It’s up to you to adjust to other styles of play on your own. I’m always happy to elaborate in the comments.
So yes, do your best to recognize how your opponents take the most enjoyment from fantasy baseball. If you’re into it, try to tailor your talks with them to match the way they play. If you’re not into it, accept that you’ll miss some opportunities to work with those owners.
Subtlety Exists
It’s a thing on the internet – and life in general – that when a course of action is proscribed, naysayers will ride to the fore with the most ludicrous scenario as a reason why nothing will ever work. Don’t you dare try something new!
Yesterday, I concluded with a suggestion for participants in a mega-trade. If you find yourself about to trade Trout and more, notify the league. I used a terse example because we were already 1,000 words into a post* and it felt excessive to spend another 500 on how to develop a trade negotiation. That’s it’s own separate topic.
*Research says y’all have a roughly 400 word attention span. On a good day. I usually try to keep things in the 500 to 800 word range.
A massive blockbuster is rarely born fully formed. It’s the work of days and weeks and sometimes months of negotiating, setting boundaries, breaking down those boundaries, and slowly building a framework. Complicated trades require complicated negotiations.
There is a certain momentum to them. One day you have a message in your inbox. It’s a not-laughable offer for your Mookie Betts. It’s an easy pass, but a quick conversation reveals that there is wiggle room to add more. Some names are exchanged. Wants, maybes, can’t possiblies.
During this process, you begin to come to terms with possibly trading Betts. This is the most appropriate time to involve everybody else in the league. You’ve yet to come within sight of the finish line with the owner who made the offer. All you know is that yesterday you were dead set on having Betts on your roster. Today, you’re open to a post-Betts lifestyle.
Reach out to the league through the message board, trade block, Discord, or whatever you use as a place to congregate. “Hey there, I’m considering a not-terrible offer for Mookie Betts. Now is the time to participate.” Then reach out to individual owners who can field sufficiently strong offers.
Once you’ve established early in the process that certain very general aspects of the negotiations will be public, nobody is going to walk away in a huff. No bridges are burned. Everybody understands that it’s on them to field the best offer.
Initial Discussions Matter… To Some People
I’ll admit, I struggle with this because it’s an alien concept to me. Trades usually fall into one of two buckets.
- I need something
- I want to arbitrage
I rarely need things. When I do, I can be pretty arrogant about my ability to find it without anybody’s help. It’s something I’ve identified to work on this season. I can think of only two trades I executed based on need. They both appeared on my three worst trades list (the two larger deals). Needful trades are dangerous trades.
Nearly every deal I make is an attempt to create value, i.e. arbitrage. This is most easily accomplished when two owners have divergent opinions. For example, I think highly of Tyler White. You think highly of Merrill Kelly. We swap. One, both, or neither of us winds up correct. Rinse and repeat over N iterations.
I usually approach these deals from a perspective of affordability. I want your good player. You want my good player. But if I can’t afford to trade that player without creating needs, then I’ll try to figure out an alternative path forward. Admittedly, these often start as lowball offers. You never know when somebody will attach value to a guy you dislike. Usually, these talks bust. Sometimes they don’t. Or they lay the groundwork for a future trade.
That can be off-putting to certain opponents. From my own perspective, I’ll snark the hell out of you if you send me a contemptible offer, but I don’t take any actual offense. We can continue to talk as long as we start moving in the right direction. Or you might just be barking up the wrong tree.
For me, the number one reason I play fantasy is to negotiate. So this aspect of the game is my favorite part. Some of your rivals don’t want to spend more than a few minutes negotiating. A few of them actively hate negotiating.
I know better than to approach Eno Sarris with anything less than a fully developed offer. He doesn’t want to talk about it unless we start a hands-length from the finish line. For Eno, I think it’s simply a matter of time-management. He has a lot on his plate, much of it not couched in the realm of fantasy.
Even though Eno and I have very different approaches to trading, we still execute a trade or three every year across our two shared leagues. As I mentioned in the first section, if you want to adjust your approach to better suit your opponent, there’s nothing stopping you.
You can follow me on twitter @BaseballATeam
If I’m going to take time to engage with someone in trade talks, I want to know that they’re serious about making a deal, and not just trying to rip me off. If the initial offer is something that I don’t even have to consider for a minute before declining, it makes me think they’re not actually that serious. Make an offer that is very close to what you’re actually willing to do, and if it’s close to something I would do, I’ll engage with you. If it’s not, I’ll just assume we’re just far apart on our evaluations, and I won’t want to spend a lot of time on a fruitless effort.
I guess this is my way of saying #teameno, and the other style of trade negotiating is very annoying to me.
Same here. I play fantasy to have fun, and getting terrible trade offers is just annoying. If somebody wants a premium player from me and offers garbage, I don’t even consider engaging further. A message asking if I’d even consider moving the premium player is a much better way to start.
Completely agree. #TeamEno.
When I was in high school, and online fantasy baseball was in its early stages, I would try to rip off my fellow owners in public leagues. That was fun, then. But at this stage, I’d prefer to approach owners with the same respect with which I want them to approach me.
Also, I think that if you burn a fellow owner, they will hesitate to trade with you again. It better be worth it! At least one guy in my league, I don’t even engage with. He is always looking to rip me people off. I find it patronizing and boring. Another guy, well, he destroyed me in a trade last year. Good for him. I don’t fault him for it at all, but it turned out in his favour. Even though I went into the trade eyes wide open and know that his huge victory was part due to luck, I still can’t help but be wary of dealing with him again, because it still stings. So, every trade you outright win comes with a little bit of a cost.
TradeDeadline, your last comment is just silly and short-sighted. Just because you didn’t come out on the winning side is no reason to not negotiate with them in the future. For all you know, the next trade could break your way and you’ve evened out the tally.
I think what the user describes is a real effect. I find myself having a harder time finding trade partners because I have won so many notable trades. You might not like the comment any more than I do, but people do think like that. It is not a silly comment, just irrational which the user acknowledges.
As long as the trade made sense at the time, I’m not going to be upset with an owner because their side worked out better. I’m more likely to trade with them again simply because we worked out a deal we both liked. In one win-now move in 2015, I traded away Mookie Betts to get Jose Bautista. I still regret that one. In 2016, as my entire batting lineup appeared to be injured simultaneously, I was a seller, and traded away Danny Salazar & Sonny Gray to get very cheap to keep Benintendi, Margot & Glasnow. He still regrets that one, and I flipped Margot & Glasnow for more profit the following year. We still trade with each other, because we know we can work with the other owner. There are a couple of other owners like that in the league, and a couple it’s simply not worth negotiating with. Some trades are win-win (Votto for McCutchen filled holes on both teams), some trades turn out to be totally pointless (Brian Roberts for Nate McLouth in the 2009-10 offseason), some I win hugely (Miggy + stuff for Grady Sizemore + stuff), some I lose hugely (Travis Hafner + stuff for Carlos Lee + stuff went through seemingly the day before Hafner’s numbers dived off a cliff)
Well it depends. A terrible trade offer with a dialog from there is very different from just a terrible trade offer. I play in a league with a friend who loves to send me nonsense trades. I have no idea if he thinks they are funny or if he is hoping to rip me off but I imagine the comments got off track yesterday because I think everyone has experienced playing with someone like this.
But when someone offers me a couple okay players for one of my best ones along with a comment like “I am interested in player A, what do you think of players X, Y, and Z?” then I understand that they are beginning a negotiation rather than offering me a terrible deal
Before reading Brad’s last couple articles I didn’t think there was any other method. Why would I send or want to receive a trade that’s an automatic rejection? It’s a waste of time.
You either a) message me and say hey I want XX and I am ok moving XX to do it, b) say youre interested in XX and ask me to look at your team to see what I’d want, or c) send me a legitimate offer that’s Eno-level complete.
You’re costing yourself opportunities to generate value, though. As Brad said, you never know when someone values something you hate.
I am on the same page with you 95% of the time, especially with owners who constantly send one-sided offers. But occasionally I will get an offer from an owner I consider to be pretty reasonable that seems really one-sided, and I will respond with a counter-offer that is equally overweighted to my side. This does sometimes lead to a good trade within 2 or 3 iterations. I guess to Brad’s point, it depends on the owner you’re dealing with.
I make very clear in all my leagues that I believe in win-win deals. And I make a lot of them, probably 100 trades a year between my various leagues. A while back I started sending a standard reply to terrible offers: “Can you give me some insight as to why you feel this deal would help my team?”
I’ve actually received responses that basically said, “Oh, I hadn’t really thought about the deal from your side.” Well, at least they are honest. But if they have a rationale that I just don’t happen to agree with, sometimes that rationale becomes groundwork for a different deal. In most cases it just weeds them out as future trading partners because it’s clear they don’t understand how to make win-win trades.
Man, I’m stealing that response to nonsensical trades. That’s great.
I have a suspicion that more seasoned owners probably pay more attention to the initial offer/talks as they recognize garbage when they see it.
I appreciate the effort to clear up yesterday’s mishap — which I agree could have largely been avoiding by writing more in the abstract and leaving out some of the specifics — but you’re still being condescending (is this just the “brand”?) in a space that I thought was for thoughtful fantasy advice.
By your own admission in the league in question: “I’m in 17 leagues. I cannot and will not check trade blocks.” I think it’s disingenuous to talk about how you write for dedicated, “high effort” fantasy players who care about their league(s) when you, yourself, can’t be bothered to check trade blocks — a suggestion you list above as adequate, by the way — because you’ve bit off more than you can chew. Also, it’s possible to care about a league and still not have time to waste. Spending time and wasting time are two different things. Some of the behavior you explained yesterday — and have explained in the past — falls more on the wasting side of the spectrum, in my opinion (the whole “spam no” strategy, etc).
You’ve made quite a few generalizations and assumptions about your audience in this post, in your responses to yesterday’s post, and also mentioned that you’re “not writing about or for the low effort folk.” At the risk of coming across condescending myself, maybe consider a bit of a different starting point. Come from a place that doesn’t assume your reader doesn’t care about their league, perhaps. Almost every article written on FanGraphs is targeting a niche market of the baseball fan demographic. Almost 1,000 words were published yesterday about Adam Warren. Yet the overwhelming majority of articles here are able to approach and explain their topics without the underlying tone that the author has figured it out and the reader is dumb for thinking any differently.
I don’t think it’s condescending, just direct. I know 1 or 2 guys in my regular leagues that play exactly like this and I have no problem dealing with them. I just immediately tell them if we’re way off base or where we are close.
I think not enough attention is given to how to approach a type of player that will say one thing (not putting all these guys together) and then a few weeks later trade all three guys without pinging the rest of the league. It’s probably someone who misunderstood your desires if you were interested and that is just as much your fault (Brad in this situation) as theirs because Brad made some assumptions that turned out to be wrong.
Generally if I am trading with someone I don’t have a regular recurring conversation/trade agreements with, I always frame my deal with commentary that starts here is why I think this deal makes sense for you, but PLEASE correct me if I am wrong because you may be trying to do something different. I find it’s usually a way to get the ball rolling and gets much better responsiveness. Additionally, I find it often opens the gates to understand why that player values certain guys differently than me that I hadn’t even considered…which just opens up more avenues for potential trade fits and attempts of arbitrage.
So what I am trying to say is that Brad is direct, not condescending, but in doing so MAY be limiting his opportunities to do the one thing he plays fantasy for — arbitrage.
I’m specifically referencing the ottoneu trade block feature which is clunky, slow to use, and doesn’t deliver useful information – such as what actually changed on the trade block. If you send me a message, I’ll engage with you for hours.
The problem is that you assume that normal fantasy baseball players, i.e., not industry league guys, are like you, not like Eno Sarris. Alas, most of us have jobs and family, and most of our time does not involve fantasy baseball, even the most dedicated and passionate fantasy baseball managers. We just don’t have time for the hours and hours of negotiations required when offers start with garbage purposefully. Why not just say you are interested in a player instead of making a crap offer? If the crap offer is accepted, you lose, too—it means your league is crappy or can only be won by screwing over a rube in trades. Those are not good leagues.
That’s what I usually do, send an empty trade offer saying I like X, Y, and Z, do you see a fit. Some owners play nicely and say I like A, B, and C. Others will cryptically say send an offer with no further feedback. It’s this latter type of owner who most often gets lowballed.
That’s a lot different than what you stated in your posts, and makes a big difference.
I don’t know what’s worse, me asking about Wander Javier on every post or this dude trying to justify Soroka for Trout.
You’re not a bot??
my god I actually laughed at this. and your wander javier comments annoy the hell out of me.
This….this…made me laugh. Didn’t know you had this in you and if these kinds of remarks are where this whole schtick is headed I think I’m actually kinda in for it.
I agree, he’s upped his game from the “Wander Javier is stronger than his doubt” bit.
So Soroka for Trout isn’t more popular today than it was yesterday?
I guess there’s always tomorrow.
I just imagine the author of the Soraka for Trout offer adding one dollar to the trade every day until the end of the season.
I agree with most of this. I think the most important aspect of beginning a trade negotiation is to understand the other teams needs. It’s not about offering top value right off the bat, but offering relevant value.
If a manager offers me a fringe 3B and I’m already stacked at 3B, I’m likely not to follow through because they haven’t made even the slightest effort to consider what would be valuable to me. Same goes if I’m actively rebuilding and you offer some aged veteran on the downslope of their career.
Those managers are only thinking of their own gains and I know from experience, it will be fruitless to follow through. We’ll go through tireless back and forth where we never get to a point that my team stands to benefit.
So start out low/small if you want, just make some minimal effort to see if it fits the other teams’ roster build or their state of competition.
I like this idea of relevant value. That’s exactly how I usually approach a starting point – with something that is (to me) less valuable than the piece I want, but might be so useful to my rival that they’re tempted.
I might steal that phrase. And I won’t remember where I got it so call me out if you want credit.
Winning is first, but trading is second. I love trading 🙂
Even if I get a garbage offer I’ll respond. Sure, it may become clear right away that the other owner is not serious about making a trade, rather he’s fishing for suckers. But so what? It takes me 30 seconds to find out, and if he really wants to trade then we’ve begun the negotiation.
All y’all who ignore garbage offers out of hand are missing opportunities. Or playing in public leagues peopled by trolls, which is …. blech. Don’t do that .
>>All y’all who ignore garbage offers out of hand are missing opportunities.
So what? If you’re still getting results (read: wins/finishing in the money), who cares? If I win my points league by 150 instead of 100 at the end of the season, am I a bad person? Do I deserve to have a condescending article published about behavior like mine? Should some respected writer in the fantasy community spend DAYS trying to tell me I’m playing a game wrong?
Most people here seem to be fine with most of the idea of the article (If you work hard on understanding the market value in your league for your teams assets, you will get the most out of those assets when you decide to move them) but hate the tone of the author (You’re playing the game wrong, and your hurting the game, and you’re bad for the league you’re playing in).
Doubling down on “No wait, you’re not listening to me!” from yesterday’s comments is an…interesting choice
I’m of two minds about the poll, mostly because of the word “should.” On the one hand, shopping your trades is smart and you should do it. On the other hand, everybody’s coming into this hobby at a different level of engagement and comfort, and some owners are just happier letting others propose the deals, so you probably shouldn’t care how other owners make trades.
There have certainly been trades in my leagues where I would have offered more if I knew somebody was available. But I hadn’t asked, so it’s probably fair that the guy who did ask has an advantage. I don’t see failure to shop a trade as a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Unless your concern is just having such a competitive league that failing to get the best offer for Mike Trout is grounds for removing an owner.
Usually I love Brad’s articles and find them insightful, but this really comes off as sour grapes over some big contributors going to a competitor. There’s a really good article to be written about how to shop your trades to maximize return, but I think this misses the mark because the useful fantasy advice is too tied up with grumbling about a specific trade.
The poll at the beginning of this post is a little bit biased.. You said he posted the players on the block, and you neglected to check it. It wasn’t a secret, you just didn’t look. And now it seems like you’re throwing a fit because you didn’t get what you wanted. I was always taught that if you want something, go and get it. Don’t sit there and wait for it to come to you.
There was a general outcry in our league – of which I was probably the most moderate voice – specifically because nobody was aware that this framework was on the table.
But the owner’s justification that you posted yesterday made it sound like he had a bunch of crap offers. He wouldn’t complain about all the other offers that didn’t measure up if there was only that one other owner who knew enough to put an offer on the table. It seemed more like communication breakdown than anything. He said he wanted a haul for trout et al, and a couple of weeks later he traded them away for the best haul he was offered. So without being privy to exactly what was said, it seems like maybe he took your exchange to mean he wanted to trade them away but needed a much better return than you first offered, and you took it as he’s not currently interested in trading, check back in a month or two.
Blindsides happen a lot in fantasy baseball. Dozens of times I see a trade completed and think, I would have paid 50% more to get the better player. And once I responded to message board complaint about a then Mike Stanton slow start … 3-4 weeks into the regular season … from a fellow known to have a Joe West trigger in cutting players he just drafted. The message asked for a bag of batting practice balls or somebody, anybody for Stanton. I would have waited for him to cut Stanton, but my waiver position was lousy, so I offered Duda, off to a blazing start, and the trade was accepted within minutes. It took a couple of days but the league vetoed it. Pist me off so much when I figured out who the final two votes to veto came from, I insisted that one of them take over as league commissioner. One was the guy who accepted the trade.
And Brad, I shall try to take your advice next time I have to trade serious talent to fill a need. Bidding wars are cool when you’re selling a house; why not in baseball?
While I pretty much completely disagree with Brad on this, I think everyone needs to stop focusing on the Soroka part of it. The initial post specifically says “Mike Soroka and additional unnamed assets “. It wasn’t just Soroka. Presumably Brad didn’t want to list the other players he offered for competitive reasons.
As to the rest of it – if you read the text under Dipoto’s side of the deal in the screen grab, he makes it clear that he did in fact “shop” the deal around to multiple teams and got a series of crap offers. He posted it to the trade block. Sorry Brad that everyone doesn’t drive around to the homes of every person in the whole league to shop the deal in person before they pull the trigger. Oh, and I agree with the posters saying if you had come to a deal with them and then went out publicly shopping the deal to try to squeeze a bit more out of it, well, that’s a dick move to be honest.
The “shopped” offers turned out to be comparable asks for Trout alone.
Ummm, the post itself says he shopped them in pairs and separately. Dude, it’s not like he didn’t try and just clicked “Accept” to the 1st offer he got.
Brad edited the initial post to add the words “and additional unnamed assets” well after it published. That specificity wasn’t there originally. It was, to be fair, addressed somewhere in the comments section.
Ah, did not realize that about the editing.
“Most of us play fantasy baseball to partially simulate the act of running a real baseball franchise. Many of us fancy ourselves to be Jerry Dipoto.”
It never once occurred to me to pretend to be a GM of a baseball team. I’m just betting on players, as a fan, that I have collected in an effort to prove I’m better than you at knowing who is good at near-future baseball. I care a ton about baseball, I care a good bit about fantasy baseball, and I want to win at FB very, very badly (the money is only part of it). If I’m in your league, odds are I will be outworking you from April to September or trying my hardest to do so. I’m knowledgeable and I fit most of the description above. But make no mistake: I’m a fan of players, not executives. Bill James had it exactly backwards.
As to the trade stuff, I agree with the chorus. If you send me a lowball offer, you’re basically calling me an idiot and wasting my time, so I will ignore you (at best). Bad initial offers shut down dialogue rather than creating it. (This is even a bigger deal in non-pro leagues where it’s already hard to pull off trades. Want to trade? Offer value off the bat.)
P.S. Please mentally add a “False” vote above, since I am not able (or interested) to use the Twit-ernet.
P.P.S. Brad — Despite the quibbles, I still really enjoy your POV and appreciate the insights, even though we’re not always on the same page with the details.
Not always being on the same page is a feature, not a bug. I have no interest in echoing you.
why is this getting downvotes? who wants an echo chamber?
Welcome to Salt Mountain.
Dude, its an all out salt storm! Your articles aren’t geared towards the “don’t have time to play fantasy baseball” owners, and that offends them. Which it shouldn’t since you have gone to great lengths to explain the target audience, and your intended target audience deserves and appreciates (and understands) the content you create.
Don’t worry, your articles are attracting attention because they are provocative. During future fantasy play, the “anti-negotiation” crew (from this thread at least…) should have at least some inkling that offers they receive aren’t necessarily lowballs…
Bitch baby throwing a hissy fit for 2 days is going over well. SHOCKING!
Dude just cannot get out of his own fucking way right now. Sometimes just shutting up and walking away is the right choice, but Brad keeps jumping in front of comments like this to say things that, within the context of the meta-debate, sound defensive and condescending.
Your upset that the author of an article is engaging in the debate created by the article?
I’m with Brad on this one. Trades (at least the arbitrage kind) aren’t about “ripping people off”, rather, they are about finding pareto optimal allocations, which can’t be done without exchanging information on preference sets. Refusal of owners to participate in informational exchange is way more frustrating that someone asking me if I want to do something that I am unlikely to want to do. It is easy to say “no”, it is not easy to read minds.
the last sentence of your post is so unbelievably true.
I’d rather hear your crazy offers and say “no” than have to try and divine which players of mine you prefer.
+100
First off, my god man let this go.
Second: “Let’s start by restating things. More than two owners (one of which is the seller) in a 12 team league should know that Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Kris Bryant are available to be acquired in the same trade. Agree? Disagree? Poll!”
Should? Leaving aside that the other manager did let everyone know by putting them on the trade block, a manager should kick the tires if they want to try and improve on an offer, but are under no obligation to do so. If I receive what I consider to be a great offer I’m taking it before the other guy changes his mind.
Third, “*Research says y’all have a roughly 400 word attention span. On a good day. I usually try to keep things in the 500 to 800 word range.”
Jesus dude, don’t go into an article in which you’re trying to change minds by insulting your audience. If you’re being interesting (for good or bad reasons), people will happily read what you write all day. If you’re not, they won’t.
I laughed at the word range as well. A few years back I was working with a restaurant brand that wanted their own blog for recipes and SEO value, and I personally set up a pretty complex tagging system to see where the “sweet spot” was for article length. Based on bounce rates, scroll depth, heat maps, scroll timing, etc. we eventually landed on 300-350 words.
That’s for a restaurant blog. This is a baseball statistics site that most of us needlessly pay for out of respect for its content. Write a damn book if it gets your point across. I’d bet 750-1000 words would be a better metric for “attention span” on these articles, and even that doesn’t take into account how interesting the subject matter is. With that in mind, I probably would only be willing to read 400-ish words of Brad complaining about how he didn’t get Trout and Bryant in a trade, so he may actually have a point.
tbf, I quoted a generalized statistic then immediately sais I intentionally write more than that. I didn’t think I needed to explicitly state it was because the audience is better than the average internet site. The implication seemed enough to me.
For what it’s worth, I’d say I agree with 50% of the opinion-based fantasy stuff you write. I still read every word though, and actually prefer a long drawn out borderline-self-indulgent post over a 400 word summary any day. I know a lot of us are piling on, but I hope it’s being taken as “wow, people really hated this take” and not “people really don’t think I know what I’m talking about”.
Don’t worry. I’ve never been one to care what other people think. Hard to get upset about this one when the main complaints (besides those addressed in this follow up post) are straw men.
So many words have been written on this trade, and not just here. I debated commenting on the original post, but I thought maybe there would be a second one due to the response. So, I waited for what I hoped would be something a tad more apologetic. Looks like I was wrong, something I happen to be willing to admit. With that said, let’s begin.
• ‘Hey, can you maybe shop offers around before you trade 3 top 25 assets in one deal?’, ‘Pretty annoyed. Not voting to veto or anything – the trade might even work out favorably – but this was bush league.’, ‘Shop your friggin’ trade offers.’, ‘you should probably tell your leaguemates it’s happening.’, ‘If you find yourself about to trade Trout and more, notify the league.’, ‘Then reach out to individual owners who can field sufficiently strong offers.’, ‘The owner claims he used the trade block to inform us. I don’t get those emails.’
These are some of the words that Brad has written to date (some are from the team, which is co-owned).
• ‘I’m a huge fan of the return just very disappointed in the other offers I received.’, ‘I shopped for three weeks and unfortunately the offers were very bad.’, ‘I’ve also updated my block constantly saying I’m getting more aggressive in talks with these guys.’
These are some of the words written by the owner selling Trout, Harper, and Bryant.
• ‘So this wasn’t a bad trade in and of itself.’ -Brad
• Approved: 5 Vetoed: 1 Abstained: 6 -League vote on the trade in question
Some more words. Time for my opinion on the matter.
This was a fair trade between two teams, in Ottoneu, nothing underhanded took place. The league was fully aware that the owner was prepared to move. Quite frankly, the only thing ‘bush league’ about this trade has been your response, Brad. In no way, shape or form is any league-mate of yours obligated to seek out your approval, or bring you a completed offer to beat, after another team has done all the legwork. Especially in a charity league in which you are a co-owner, which only means that not only did you fail to keep abreast of the assets about to be moved via the league trade block, but your partner failed that as well.
Just because you did not get to be a part of this particular block-buster of a trade, you have decided to use a space that your readers come to for advice and instead thrown a hissy fit. In doing so, you have most likely destroyed the goodwill to trade with either party, missing the opportunity to go after the very same Trout, now owned by the Grays, by addressing the depth lost that was required to acquire all three.
It is beyond time to look into that proverbial mirror, man up, and move on.
I wish I could upvote this more than once. I generally enjoy Brad’s posts but yesterdays was poor/sour grapes. Today’s is attempting to justify a poor position.
Also congrats on the trade Jay, it’s a ballsy move and I hope it works out for you.
A couple of positives here for Mr. Johnson, in the snark that he likes:
1. It’s not an inability to write well or convey a message properly. This post, trying to explain the previous one, says more or less the same thing. It was not the writing in the first post; it was the message.
2. It was only long after the original Star Trek had finished its run, when the actors started writing books about, that William Shatner found out that the rest of the cast could not stand him. He was so self-absorbed that he had just assumed that everyone else liked him because he certainly liked himself. Awareness early is a good thing.
As for the negative:
After reading these two posts, Mr. Johnson reminds me of a guy with whom I used to be in a league. I imagine that he reminds a lot of people of “that guy” in their leagues. The guy who makes a bunch of low ball offers. The guy who insists on “winning” every trade and cannot understand that there can be mutually beneficial trades. The guy who annoys the crap out of everyone in the league and causes controversy by making trades test the line where trades should be vetoed because someone finally accepted one of those offers. I recall engaging in an overly long trade negotiation with my league’s version of Mr. Johnson once, and we ended up with something that was pretty much a fair trade. He then rejected it, explaining that it was fair, and he had no reason to make a trade if he did not win the trade. (It was an offseason thing, so it wasn’t like there were significant positional or other in-season needs involved.)
The tells in this post that explain the type of player Mr. Johnson is are as follows:
1. Acknowledging that he is arrogant about being able to fill needs without anyone’s help. For starters, announcing your arrogance is an easy tell that someone is arrogant. Second, for an experienced fantasy player like Mr. Johnson, this statement implies that he has never or rarely has injury issues at a position/category (i.e., whether it is a shortstop hole or his main speed guy went down) where he does not have depth (and no team can have depth everywhere) in a deep enough league where there just is not waiver wire help. There is also the secondary concern with the statement about filling needs “without anybody’s help” which implies that making a trade to fill a need requires the “help” of another team rather than making a fair trade in which he gives up a fair trade asset himself.
2. One of the main points of the post is that he likes to trade and that his trades are “arbitrage” trades. While he cites to an innocuous example about teams valuing different players differently, those trades are rare—teams usually value their own player more than other teams do—this is why they bid more for that player at auction or drafted them before the other teams did. Yes, in keeper leagues and later in the season (after a team could sour on their own players) it can happen, but it does happen that often. Certainly not so often that an owner can be an active trader, make mostly “arbitrage” trades, and mostly do this type of trade. Thus, what is really being said when an owner likes to make “arbitrage” trades and likes to actively trade is that he likes to screw other owners in trades. The low ball offers make perfect sense given this. Why Mr. Johnson thinks most active fantasy owners are like this or like the owners like this is beyond me. Maybe it is the Shatner thing.
This explanatory posts strike me as Mr. Johnson trying a bit too hard. Sometimes you just have to take the loss and move on. Perhaps it would be best to follow the advice of an earlier post I read on FanGraphs and not be a “tryhard.”
I don’t think Brad is a guy who makes low ball offers hoping they get accepted. I would describe those offers more as ‘probing offers.’ Probing and low balling differ to me in terms of level of communication. Low ball offers are send and forgets, guys who don’t negotiate. They just see who they can rip off. Probing offers generally start low but are either the result of, or with the intention of starting, a dialogue.
With that said, in Brad’s position I would have been annoyed as well. If you’re making a blockbuster like the trade described, you bet I’m going back to all the owners who were interested in my guys and sending them an offer that I feel would bring back better value before I hit accept on the trade. Of course when I’m negotiating I make sure to let owners know they aren’t the only one I’m talking to in these situations and you can call it bad faith negotiations if you want, but for players like Trout, Harper, Bryant, you’re doing a disservice by not trying to maximize value from those guys. I still want these deals to be win-wins, but it’s all relative. A win-win deal can be better or worse just based on your personal player preferences.
Extracting value matters more to me for top talent, less so for others trades. I generally make enough smaller moves where I am more comfortable accepting deals that fall on the lower end of my ‘acceptable’ spectrum to build rapport, it’s just classic negotiation tactics.
I do think some of the criticism for Brad is valid regarding his projection of his own world view. He definitely has strategies that work for him and seems set in those ways and hey it sounds like it works for him most of the time. But generally I think the amateur psychoanalysis of Brad Johnson has been more than unwarranted on a site dedicated to baseball. People are straying so far from the core issues of the article in their responses that all of a sudden having a viewpoint (whether right or wrong) becomes a deep personality flaw based on 800 written words.
I get the annoyance, but the guy did post on the board of the league, it isn’t an industry league, he publicly called the guy out in a very public way, and it followed shortly after questionably calling out Ring. Maybe he is the guy he appears to me, maybe he is not. But he isn’t exactly helping his case. Maybe he is young. I recall a Rotographs guy calling Sporer a mentor recently (maybe it was him), and I still think of Sporer as a teenager on RJ back in the day because I am old. Maybe it is the new way. Hell, I have not ever visited FG on a cellphone or anything other than a desktop, so maybe the world has passed me by. At least Colon is still theoretically a major leaguer and he both older and fatter than I am (barely in both cases, lol).
I do agree that his reactions are drawing warranted criticism. Almost as if he genuinely can’t see how someone would hold a differing opinion. While some are calling this arrogance, I do think it may just be a communication style issue.
I run into this issue quite a bit myself since I tend to be direct in stating an opinion. This can come across as arrogant or dismissive to others, but the thing is I like debate and a causal back and forth of sharing informed opinions. However, the directness is often misinterpreted as aggression. We naturally take queues from others in debate so the other person may respond aggressively or defensively and that sets the tone for any further conversation. I often then try and reset the conversation, but at that point the damage is done and it’s usually better to drop it (which is likely where Brad went wrong here).
This is what can make sharing opinions publicly so difficult. Certain personalities and communicators are simply better at understanding the intentions of others. It’s a lesson that it’s often counter productive to try and ‘explain your way out’ since there is already an identified communication gap that has drawn emotion into the conversation.
So maybe Brad is ‘that guy’ or maybe he’s just direct and a little set in his ways. But given his position as a RotoGraphs writer and relationships with others in the industry I really doubt it.
This is pretty spot on. I get there being different opinions, and I thought (and still think) I did enough to say “hey, I’m focusing on this but there are other ways to approach it.”
This second post accomplished what I wanted of it.
As much as I love Eno Sarris, I’m not a #TeamEno guy on this one purely because I do love trade discussions. I am, however, turned off by lowball offers and generally don’t even bother countering unless they come back with something realistic down the road.
I’m also not willing to trade with people who use our negotiations as leverage – I understand this is a strategy for professional sports franchises, but this is a hobby for me; don’t waste my time. If someone followed Brad’s sage advice of shopping the trade publicly when we’re pretty deep into the trade red zone, I’d take the deal off the table.
Maybe the two articles weren’t well received in a popular way, but you have sparked a lot of discussion. I think it is hard to write an informative article when your personal team was involved. It would have been great to get the other guys thoughts on top of his comment in the accepted trade to see what he was thinking.
The beauty of Fantasy baseball is there are all types of negotiators who have different styles. Maybe these two articles lead to a more positively received article about the different trade styles of owners and how to handle them. I know I have come across different ones from the Eno style to the your a new owner and everyone wants to fleece you with bad offers for the first few months.
Brad, great stuff, you didn’t need a part 2 because I was on the same page since part 1!
I have ranted about it many times in my leagues when owners don’t respond at all to trade offers. Sometime they just sit there. No idea if they have seen them or not. And then when they do reject the trade, no explanation of why. Was it not a good enough offer? Are they just not interested in the players involved? Not interested in trading at all? So many reasons to reject a trade, but if you don’t say the reason for it, how does the other owner know how to proceed with future offers. Researching players to figure out who to trade and who to trade for and then making those trades happen is my favorite part of fantasy baseball. Other owners who wont discuss the trades, make it very difficult. Significantly limits the potential trade partners in a league. Especially in 10 team leagues.
I hate it when someone pushes something I don’t need all the time on me, and or push guys I dropped off to waivers for my star guys.