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.

1. I need something
2. 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.