Hey! Shop Your Trades
Over the weekend, we had a real doozy of a trade in the ottoneu Screw Cancer league. This is not an industry league so I’d like to start by apologizing to the teams involved in the trade. I’d usually avoid calling y’all out in an article, but this is too perfect an example.
To thoroughly bury the lede, let’s quickly talk about today’s lesson before jumping into unpacking this example. It’s one I’ve espoused before on this and half a dozen other sites. Shop your friggin’ trade offers. Especially when you’re trying to sell major assets.
We’re not talking about the time you were offered Brian Anderson for Trevor Cahill and accepted without a second thought because you had nine starting pitchers. Penny pinching with role players probably isn’t a worthwhile use of your time. If you receive an offer you like for an unimportant piece, you don’t need to ask your league’s permission before proceeding.
However, if you’re about to trade Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Kris Bryant to one team, you should probably tell your leaguemates it’s happening. They… might want to take steps to stop you. Steps that can work in your favor.
Let’s cut to the tape screenshot. To embiggen, right-click the image and select ‘open in new tab.’
If you don’t want to do the clicking thing which will also reveal some interesting justifications, here is the deal.
Jerry Dipoto trades: $83 Mike Trout, $62 Bryce Harper, $54 Kris Bryant, $3 Lance McCullers, and $100
Saratoga Grays trades: $9 Robbie Ray, $6 Zack Wheeler, $30 Anthony Rendon, $4 Brandon Nimmo, $33 Corey Seager, $9 Jesse Winker, $8 Fernando Tatis Jr.
That’s… a lot to unpack. In many ways, it’s funny that I wrote about these large trades just last Friday. Once you take the time to digest the deal, it doesn’t even look that ridiculous. Let’s try to break it into chunks.
The $100 is a LOT of loan. Most ottoneu owners misunderstand how the economy operates and so do not properly price their loan money. It’s just something they throw in to facilitate a trade. It’s a complicated part of the equation. It’s tempting to say Dipoto should be paid for the players AND the money.
Truthfully, unless they’re priced well under cost, the players lose nearly all of their value without the loan. Offseason trading reveals this. What would you offer for an $82 Trout in early January? Let’s assume you have the budget to keep him. The $4 Nimmo and $6 Wheeler? What about Harper? The $33 Seager maybe? Perhaps $54 Bryant and $3 McCullers for $30 Rendon?
That leaves $9 Winker, $8 Tatis, and $9 Ray as surplus. That’s roughly what Team Dipoto’s $100 has bought. I might trade $100 for Winker, Tatis, and Ray at good prices.
So this wasn’t a bad trade in and of itself. A rebuilding owner purchased a bunch of rebuild-ish pieces. He used a trio of expensive players he acquired over the offseason explicitly for this purpose. We all knew he intended to do this eventually. What we didn’t know was that he was ready to move right now.
I have built a contender in this league, and I loaded up on pieces to send to rebuilding owners for reinforcements. Real tasty-looking $1 prospects. I also have some major building blocks on affordable contracts – $35 Francisco Lindor, $19 Ronald Acuna, and $15 Vladimir Guerrero are among the most notable. I don’t have any plans to trade those players, but there are certain scenarios under which they could become available.
When this owner acquired Trout earlier in the winter, I began laying some groundwork. I congratulated him for choosing a strategy of rostering expensive players for a post-draft sale. It’s the best way to rebuild in ottoneu. I informed him I would field the top offer for Trout at the appropriate time.
The draft came and went. On February 21, my co-owner and I sent an inquiry involving a $6 Mike Soroka and additional unnamed assets for Trout and a loan. Gotta start somewhere. We were told by the owner that he thought he resuscitated the roster enough to compete. He needed a haul. Talks fizzled from there as he never defined what “haul” meant. I mentally categorized it as “follow up in June.”
UPDATE: I think this anecdote about discussing Soroka is distracting a lot of readers. The point was that we were having a general chat about some players and the other owner said he wasn’t especially interested in trading Trout. I indicated I would attempt to field the top offer at the appropriate time. Soroka, it turns out, wouldn’t have been included due to his re-injury.
Two weeks later, the mega-trade appeared in my inbox as completed. I was excluded from the talks entirely. Nobody likes to be excluded. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. The owner claims he used the trade block to inform us. I don’t get those emails. Hardly anybody ever checks them. Honestly, what percentage of ottoneu trade block update emails do you check?
Quick #ottoneu question:
You know all those "trade block updated" emails and messages. How often do you actually check the update?
— Brad Johnson (@BaseballATeam) March 4, 2019
Honestly, I can’t say for sure if I would have put any of my three best players into an offer – even for all three of Trout, Harper, and Bryant. I tend to get overly cocky about my great-not-amazeballs rosters. Hubris is a bitch sometimes. It cost me a four-peat in FanGraphs Staff Two last year because I wouldn’t trade Juan Soto.
I do know I could and would have paid more for Trout alone than the implied valuation in this deal. The prevailing sentiment is that Mr. Dipoto could have done better by disaggregating the swap. It’s likely but not definitely a correct sentiment. My opinion is that simply involving me in the negotiation would have improved his overall return by at least 10 percent. Again, that’s likely but not definitely a correct opinion.
One thing is certain. The trade brought forth the wrath of a thousand suns on our message boards. The V-word was dropped on multiple occasions before cooler heads prevailed. The furor could have been averted by simply keeping us all in the loop. Imagine, the following posted on the message board:
“I have received an acceptable offer for Trout, Harper, and Bryant. You have X hours to change my mind.”
Then, follow up individually with owners who inquired earlier in the offseason. As a homework assignment, read this Matt Gelb post on the Athletic about the Phillies’ courtship of Bryce Harper. Pay especial attention to how Scott Boras handled the negotiations.
You can follow me on twitter @BaseballATeam
Have you considered that this particular owner didn’t bother circling back to you with Trout *plus* Bryant and Harper because, for Trout alone, you offered a $6 Mike Soroka? Even as a “gotta start somewhere,” this is an awful offer; the kind of awful offer that might make another owner not even want to waste his time.
February 21 was a day before Soroka was hurt again, but even a healthy $6 Soroka is still a $6 pitching prospect. Offering him for Trout is bad. It’s not even in a ballpark that it warrants a counter, really, much less that the owner might fire back with a counter that included Trout plus two other expensive studs.
I don’t disagree with you that owners should do their due diligence before trading big time assets. But this particular breakdown reads like sour grapes from an owner that low-balled and is now upset.
I think you misinterpreted my offer. He identified Soroka as a guy he liked. I said we could START a package with Soroka. The conversation never continued.
It’s the sort of first offer that says you aren’t serious about the trade. Regardless of your intentions with a lot of people you need to put more on the table right away.
I disagree. I agreed to Soroka and said he could identify other pieces to include with him. That’s a strong starting offer.
Of course that’s your opinion. I’m telling you that people, including myself, don’t look at it that way. If start with a medium value pitcher and you don’t put Vlad Jr. on the table I’m talking to the guy who put Tatis there. Especially if you’re playing in a non-industry league people don’t always have time to kick it around with several times.
This guy isn’t like you though. I do adjust for owners who want one best offer. For example, Eno is notorious for rarely engaging in a negotiation unless the initial offer is 95% there. We make a couple trades every year. This particular owner has been talking up how much he likes back and forth for months. I expected an opportunity to explore offers based on his comments. We left our talks at “Trout isn’t going to be traded until after the start of the season.”
We never got anywhere near the point of seriously discussing a framework.
Well it’s certainly possible that this owner is giving the impression of being different than he is.
But why do you think he ignored your offer? Can you offer a more compelling explanation than mine?
I know exactly what happened, and it had nothing to do with offering Soroka. When we talked, he was leaning away from trading Trout et al. That changed, and he assumed I would reach out if interested. The problem is he only posted about it in the Trade Block which I’ve disabled since it’s a poorly supported feature.
So it’s the system and not the fact that you started with mike “might not pitch this season because of his wonky shoulder” Soroka? got it.
It’s maybe the crappiest starting point for trout I’ve seen all offseason and again yohblade the classic mistake of assuming he wanted to engage on a non serious request. YOU needed to engage with names from your team not the other way around.
Nah, I’m in the league too. I made better offers than Soroka and was told those 3 wouldn’t be traded as a group. I had the same impression as brad, that this was non-urgent and I’d check back soon. Then I see all 3 traded as a group one morning…
That’s reasonable enough, though I would certainly agree with the poster below that starting an offer with Soroka alone is not particularly enticing, even if the other owner expressed interest in him.
One thing I find happens a lot is that expressed interest in a particular player gets easily overblown. I tell you I like Soroka, you hear “I must have Soroka at all costs.”
In this case, Soroka’s a throw in to a Trout deal, not the first piece on the table, interest expressed or not. I realize it’s subjective, but of the package that got accepted, I think you could argue Soroka would’ve been the least valuable piece of all (I’ve got $9 Robbie Ray as the least valuable piece, but at least with him you’re spending $3 extra to get some track record and additional MLB data).
Because you lowballed him and didn’t ever add other players and put it on him to do all the work. Can you blame him?
Was this in general or in response to you asking him who he woul d want for trout?
You’re a moron
I have to agree here. Plus, I’m not familiar with the league but Harper in non OBP leagues is kind of overrated and Bryant is coming off a season where he was hurt. The owner got two top 50 assets back that are also pretty young and cheaper in Seager and Rendon, picked up some undervalued pitching in $9 Ray and $6 Wheeler which is way better than $6 Soroka and got Tatis, Winker and Nimmo. I think he did quite well, but I guess he could have emailed all interested parties and said ‘beat this’ but that’s rarely done for some reason.
Shopping the trade runs the risk of a better offer coming forth for the person you want to trade with. It also gives that person time to get cold feet, especially if they get negative feedback from the other owners. If you’re happy with a trade you should seize the opportunity even if there is an off-chance of squeezing out an extra 10%.
I also think side one has the ability to outscore the trout side and complements his team well.
Had this happen frequently in a league I played in. About half of the owners knew each other personally, the other half were scattered around the country. The “friendly” half of the league basically excluded the rest of us from any of their trade discussions. Several awful deals went down that would have easily been bested by other teams in the league who never got a chance.
Needless to say I’m not playing in that league any longer.
Trades like this are why trading cap space is destructive to leagues. You can basically hand someone a championship for little return. It encourages sockpuppets too.
Sockpuppets? I have never heard of this term but I like it. How do you mean?
One person running two teams, usually shuffling present value to one and future value to the other. We ran into this with one league I was in and it totally destroyed the league. So I’m kind of hypervigilant about it haha.
WOW. That’s nuts. Thanks for the definition and I’ll keep an eye out for it as well.
Back in “A Standard Framework for Trade Negotiations,” you wrote:
“Let’s say I gave you a list that includes Jose Ramirez. You countered with a list that happened to include Brad Keller, Colin McHugh, and Diego Castillo. I might say to myself “let’s see how much they like Keller, McHugh, and Castillo!” So I offer the trio for Ramirez. And you say no.
See how easy that was? I made a terrible offer, and you said no.
At the core of the deal, I’m still trying to buy Ramirez for as little as possible. You either spam no until I reach an acceptable offer or you can proactively counter my offers. Either way, it’s better for us to start with knowing who we each like before engaging in this stage.”
This result is what you get from habitually low-balling people.
Yeah, I feel like article’s alternative title could be ‘hey, make your first offer vaguely realistic! (if you want to be included in further negotiations).’ I certainly can’t be bothered to spam no until we reach something acceptable. If someone sends a terrible offer that tells me their valuations are drastically different to mine, or they’re ideally looking to rip me off, that tells me it’s not worth the effort to negotiate.
I have a reputation for long-winded negotiations, but that’s at least partly because I’m looking at their roster, too, trying to see how it’d help them and selling them on it. Ideally they’re slightly overrating the players they’re getting, and slightly underrating the players they’re giving.
A serious offer of those 3 for Ramirez would tell me good-faith negotiations are very unlikely. An offer of Soroka as part of a package isn’t so terrible, unless it comes across as Soroka being close and asking what additions get you over the line.
“I have received an acceptable offer for Trout, Harper, and Bryant. You have X hours to change my mind.” – I would never post something like this. If I negotiate an acceptable trade with someone, and they then want to wring a tiny bit more out of someone else and end up leaving me hanging, that again tells me they’re a poor trade partner. The slight extra profit I might get isn’t worth the damage to my reputation from reneging on an acceptable deal. “I want to trade Trout, Harper & Bryant, and plan to get it finalized by 1st week of March” is the sort of thing I’d post.
I agree with your last point to an extent, but I still ALWAYS shop any sort of blockbuster in this way. I can’t think of a time when I’ve renegotiated but:
1. It’s a common courtesy to your leaguemates to let them know a gamechanging trade is happening.
2. It’s a useful sanity check in case somebody DOES come riding in with a much better offer. Usually the original offer is acceptable because that team was the best fit to make a trade. But I always carefully shop my trades so there’s bias in my experiences.
To clarify, the point isn’t to squeeze a couple extra pennies out of a deal, it’s the make sure you’re not leaving an entire major asset on the table.
Brad, I can tell you that if I got down this far of a road with you on a deal, and you shopped it publicly and pulled out for another deal I would never initiate a trade negotiation with you again. I hate that. And so do 95% of all offers. If you’re gonna shop someone you do it at the onset of initial negotiations and make sure your trade partner knows you’re doing it.
This is exactly what I was thinking while reading this! I’m in a 16 team league where a LOT of trading is done. I don’t have a problem with people asking for a second opinion (and I absolutely do this myself with big trades), but if I were on the cusp of making a major trade and the other guy accepted another offer at the last minute I’d absolutely avoid him in trade discussions moving forward.
It’s a bit of a strange objection people are raising. Obviously nobody thinks you should spend a week negotiating with one owner, reach a deal, and only then throw it out to the league. Publicly shop early in the process, and then by the time a deal is ready, you can privately tell the other suitors exactly what it will take to top what you have on the table.
The problem with this is you end up with everyone being more savvy and nobody actually making an offer. You end up with protracted discussions and then both sides insist that the other make an offer. If your trade partner insists that you make an offer, you can shop anything to anyone because then they accept and it is over.
yes – the private shopping is key. I always privately shop with people i’ve been talking with.
putting it out there publicly is stupid, though.
“To clarify, the point isn’t to squeeze a couple extra pennies out of a deal, it’s the make sure you’re not leaving an entire major asset on the table.”
I trust my own knowledge enough to not worry about this. My starting point is that other owners are at least competent. If I’ve negotiated a fair deal with someone, then I think the only way I could leave an entire major asset on the table is if someone is irrationally in love with a player I’m selling. It happens, and I do love it when I realise I have a player someone else absolutely must have and I’m going to sell at a big profit (last year’s preseason it was Dominic Leone), but it’s rare enough that I’m not going to hit pause on an accepted & acceptable to me trade in order to run that sanity check.
As for the article itself, and your comments on a lesson for you, I think you said it yourself in the article, that “Once you take the time to digest the deal, it doesn’t even look that ridiculous.” So the issue isn’t that this guy sold unacceptably low on guys he acquired for the sole purpose of selling, the issue is that you didn’t get to make a better bid. So the question is why were you excluded, what led the guy to believe you weren’t worth seeking an offer from? And I think exploring that would be an interesting piece, btw.
As others have said, I play fantasy baseball for fun, it’s not my job. I only have so much time available to do fantasy baseball stuff. I’m not going to go out of my way to keep people in the loop of my thought process. A protracted negotiation can be fun, if it starts from us both being in the same ballpark, especially with a good deal at the end. But spamming no to lowball offers until the offer comes up enough isn’t something I see as negotiating, nor as fun. If I have someone pegged as a regular lowballer (whether that’s accurate or not) then I’m not going to make the effort to reach out to them in search of an offer, I’m going to leave it to them to send me something sensible. The guy’s justification in the pic you posted also hints at that, that he’s frustrated with other owners lowballing him, that the offer he got was by far the best, and so he’s taking it.
It’s frustrating to see an asset sold to a competitor for less than you’d have paid, for sure. But I think the best way to avoid that happening is for other owners to know you’re the type of person they can efficiently & fairly negotiate with, that you’re worth reaching out to to see what you’ll give them, that they’re not going to be wasting their limited time.
Hard to see how this warranted a full post.
The key lesson – shop your trades – takes up *maybe* 5% of the wordcount, and isn’t explored in any depth. The rest is complaining in great detail about owner-and-league-specific valuations and negotiations.
Wowza, this is not the kind of trade I was expecting to see lol.
I clicked because I was offered Justin Turner for Marcell Ozuna straight up and thought “hmm, I wonder if I should shop that, and if I can get some tips” and saw this monstrosity lol. Fun stuff.
That’s exactly the kind of trade you SHOULD shop. “Hey gang, getting a couple hits on Osuna. Let me know if you’re interested.
I can’t believe the crux of the comments discussion is about making a good first trade offer and not the owner who rushed to trade three of the best assets in FGpts on March 4th with a colossal loan.
I’m honestly trying to figure this out. I’ve clearly poorly communicated the point of the post. There’s a learning experience as writer in here somewhere for me to unpack.
Full disclosure: I know the Jerry Dipoto owner personally and he’s been giving me the red ass in two other leagues for many years now.
Aside from that, I *despise* the (let’s be honest, bad faith) pearl clutching fantasy owners like to perform over horrible trade offers. It’s so easy to just say “we’re far off” and move on. No one’s insulting your mother or declaring fatwah by offering a replacement SP for Mike Trout or whatever. To act like bad trade offers hurt leagues nearly as much as an earth-shattering deal like this one is absurd.
I think it’s the value prop difference. Seems like different people derive different types of fun from different types of league interactions.
You want a healthy league, with active and engaged managers who understand the game and play smart. That’s what you find fun. You want high value trades that might take weeks to work out.
Joe-random-commentor likes to be in an exciting league with big swingy events, and finds winning to be the most fun. He wants instant gratification from his trades, and he loathes bad offers.
Seems entirely possible that people can play the “same” game but be playing it for entirely different reasons. Despise it all you want, that doesn’t make it illegitimate. Someone ruining your fantasy baseball fun is pretty low stakes compared to finding out you have cancer, but at the end of the day someone fucking up my whole league because they did a stupid trade isn’t earth-shattering either.
TL;dr- none of this matters, and the points are all made up.
People like the players on their team. When you offer dogshit for the players they like, it feels like you are insulting their players. This makes people mad.
I really enjoy talking trade when it’s clear one party isn’t trying to rip the other off. However, I’ve had someone try and convince me last season that I should trade Altuve for a replacement level OF, and I just said “no” and never tried trading with him again. This is in play for ALL negotiations, not just fantasy baseball trades – offer something obscenely low or request something unrealistically high and whoever you’re working with is liable to stop taking you seriously.
But isn’t that the point? The other guy did say “We’re far off” and moved on. Then Brad missed an email shopping the guys. Then the owner made an (apparently) acceptable swap in terms of value with someone else. So what’s the problem?
I agree, but on the flip side, there are managers who consistently make pathetic offers and never negotiate up to something worth executing. At some point, I just stop even reading their emails.
I imagine that’s where some of the outrage comes from. It’s not the end of the world to get a bad offer, but there’s a ‘boy who cried wolf’ element where those bad offers end with the offender missing out on a future opportunity.
$.02
Brad I think your writing is great. You’re premise and trade style leaves something to be desired here on the delivery. Mainly because you misguidedly assume that the owner YOU reached out to for Trout owed you a counter or a chance to beat something when you never engaged with a better offer than Soroka. It’s YOUR turn to up the anty there.
In real life negotiations. If someone offered me the equivalent cost of Soroka for a piece of TROUT sized land and said come back with a counter, I would move on right there. He’s done. He’s not serious. He hasn’t put the time into the valuation and he’s trying to lowball me so I know they even when he gets to the end he’s going to be lower than the other bidders and there are only so many hours in the day.
Bad trades occur all the time, and this particular trade doesn’t even seem *so* egregious that it would warrant the /rant post that it received (which is how it comes off).
Making a decent first trade offer is actually a relevant topic to write about for fantasy content, and it’s barely touched upon in the piece itself. To top it off, the author is insistent in the piece and in follow-up comments that he “knows exactly what happened,” when it seems a more fitting takeaway should be “how can I improve my trade negotiation tactics?”
When you mentioned the term ‘V-word’ that immediately brought to mind that people were cursing at each other. I thought, huh, what curse word could start with a ‘V’? Then, once I came to it, I thought what a strange word to use among grown men on a message board… then, finally, I realized you meant the word ‘veto’. Whew!
Glad I did something right with this post.
Until your post I had no clue he meant Veto…
I was thinking “victim”.
I always check when I see the trade block updates. I often follow up with an inquiry asking what they are looking for in return, just for reference even if I’m not interested in who they are trying to trade.
I also always check the trade block updates, even if they get numerous and are usually pretty vague. I still am very disappointed when I miss out on guys on those trade blocks, though… like I knew I could have had so-and-so if I just pressed the issue. Oh well.
My concern with shopping a trade like that… If I go to the effort and work with another owner to find a mutually acceptable deal and then that owner turns around and says yes I’ll accept however I want to tell everyone else and see if I can get something better first, then I just feel like the Scott Boras mystery team. If that was the path, I would likely walk away from the deal rather than be used against the rest of the league. If you don’t want to make a trade with what I can offer then don’t ask.
I’ve never had a problem with it.
This seems to be your meta-problem. It’s a whole bucket of “you” and assuming anyone (never mind everyone) is like you. You’ve never had that problem. This guy has. Neither of you are right, you’re both talking about your personal experiences. You never experiencing it doesn’t mean dsz is a wrong, or a liar. dsz feeling this way doesn’t mean your experience is wrong.
This is all just like, your opinion man. This feels like one of those instances where you injected yourself into the writing expecting people to understand and agree with you and some just don’t. I work in gaming, and we have to do a lot of thought on how/why people find things “fun”. There’s plenty of times where someone on the team will say “isn’t this great? won’t it be fun for the players?” and half the table looks at them funny and shreds their idea because it will be fun for some people and horrible for others.
There’s a downside to what this guy did (he pissed off his league, and MAY have “left money on the table”). It’s entirely possible neither of those things came into his value assessment of this deal. It’s entirely possible that even in spite of the downside, he felt this deal was worth it. This doesn’t mean he’s playing the game wrong, which is what the tone of your article implies. He’s just playing a different game with you, using the exact same parts. This happens in literally every game ever.
Then we would never make a trade. Why put effort into a deal and then have your partner pull the rug out at the 11th hour? Not worth my time.
Many players feel this way, as you can tell from the comments.
Hate to pile on Brad, but as someone who makes frequent trades in a -NL only, a very off first offer makes me think that the other team values my player differently than I do, and it is probably not worth my time to spend a lot of effort figuring out exactly what their value is. I also think if I have a good and fair offer, posting a bulletin board message sent out to all (including the team I am about to trade with) saying ‘hey, beat this’ may get that original offer pulled. Maybe individual emails would be wiser?
Sounds like you got beat brah
Counter-point: Don’t shop your trades. Put yourself in the shoes of the Saratoga Grays. You reach a structure that both you and Dipoto agree to. Instead of finalizing the deal, Dipoto posts “HEY EVERYONE, TOP THIS OFFER.” It’s infuriating.
Y’all are acting like you can only negotiate like cavemen. Be subtle, it’s not hard.
If Saratoga just sent this offer to Dipoto, I don’t think anyone would be upset if Dipoto posted the message you described.
If, however, they reached the deal after protracted negotiations, the party who didn’t shop the offer would likely be upset, and with good reason (in my opinion).
Why would you be mad another owner shops their guys to other teams? I expect that to happen and I’d think the other team was negligent if they only engaged a market of one team. I might not want them to relay the specific details of my offer, but I would fully expect them to at least go say “hey, I’ve got an offer I like for these 3 studs, give me your best offer in 48 hours or they’re gone.”
I’ve also told others transparently something to the effect that “i like that offer, but I’m going to shop it around before accepting,” and that’s never been a problem. Maybe you get a better offer or maybe the original team improves their own offer. If not, the original team would be cutting off their nose to spite their face if they decided to leave a deal they think is good value just because you talked to other teams.
That would usually depend on how much work has been done to agree to a trade. If I have gone back and forth with someone for a total of hours on a big deal, I would hope and assume that he has already shopped the players around and we are getting close to actually making a deal, not getting an “offer” that can be shopped.
I often get irritated by this situation too, but you have to step back. If the guy says “I have an acceptable offer, someone come beat it” its an insult to the guy who already did the work to get a deal done. I know I’d be upset if I worked out a trade then had the guy pull it for another offer. Either way someone is going to be upset. I agree that teams should let the league know that top asset X is on the market, but I dont like the idea of leveraging an acceptable offer, its going to lead to no one wanting to talk trade with you down the road.
I just don’t understand this line of thinking. In any league, you are constantly in competition with every other team. It’s a feee market! Why would you expect the whole thing to stop and just revolve around you because you made a good offer? No one who is selling something should limit themselves to only one buyer and any buyer should never assume they’re the only potential buyer in the world
What’s a “feee market” and who is getting the fees?
Again, if I put a weeks worth into a deal we agree on it and you then shop it around? You’re done. I’m not wasting my time negotiating with you again.
Precisely. If my deal is acceptable then accept it. Brad doesnt seem to understand that to have a good long running league you need mutual respect for other owners and the league as a whole. These ethical issues have come up before in his advice columns.
If you offered me Soroka for Trout Brad I wouldn’t waste Another breath. And it’s up to YOU not him to come back with something better. If you want the guy (Trout) then pay for him and don’t mess around upfront. That’s the lesson of this article and every other piece of advice here (no offense to you) is bad advice. Sorry.
Taking the average PAR of every projection system on Fangraphs – the Trout side has ~205 PAR more in total than the Rendon side.
We’re talking 20.5 PAR per player in the trade, and given the other side is getting +4 players, if they needed to fill those slots, I would call this a fair trade.
Regardless of how this trade was shopped within the league, this trade is fine THIS YEAR and possibly pays out well long term for the team receiving Tatis.
The only thing that appears wrong about this trade is your perception of it as an outsider looking in on a good deal.
edit: spacing (+4 as McCullers will not play this year +3 with McCullers included)
Sorry, Brad, I think you made a few mistakes here in your criticism of this owner. The first and primary one is assuming that everyone in non-industry leagues is able to act like a fantasy sports professional. They can’t. Your suggestion that big fantasy trades should go through things like Boras and getting Harper signed shows your hubris. Actual working shmucks just don’t have that kind of time. Yes, it is probably different for people who do fantasy sports for a living. Gripe at people in industry leagues for things like this.
The second is related. If you start with a low-ball offer generally and expect things to develop from there, some people (me included) just won’t engage. We don’t have time for that kind of song and dance. Likewise, the same problem affects you theory that someone should go through the long negotiations needed to finalized a big deal like that and then shop it around so they can go through that song and dance several more times. Even you acknowledged that you might not have beaten the offer. But you would want him to go through more long negotiations with you. Again, you assume that everyone has the time to devote to fantasy baseball as a professional does.
You final thing is a bit separate. This owner did post on the “on the block” function. Yes, it may be clunky and lousy like most of them are (I don’t play ottoneu, but I have yet to find a good on the block function anywhere). Still, you are criticizing him for using only the exact function that FG provides for these things. And you are the FG employee/contractor. Sorry, if you take the paycheck, you should not criticize others for using what FG provides.
I agree that there should be some veto provisions in leagues. However, I would never support one that allowed vetos for trades when someone does not spend as much time as a fantasy baseball professional would on a trade. That’s ridiculous.
“The owner claims he used the trade block to inform us. I don’t get those emails. Hardly anybody ever checks them.” It sounds like the issue isn’t that the guy didn’t shop his trade, it’s that everyone in the league is not using the same lines of communication.
Also why wouldnt you get the on the block emails, it takes literally 3 seconds to scan each of them even with 10-20 a day coming in. Seems like the fault is on you, the trade block is specifically designed so that every team gets the info.
Saw the post below about Ottoneu issues, it is functional everywhere else.
Trading is simultaneously the best and worst part about a roto league. I love your suggestion about posting a note to the league that you have an acceptable offer and you’ve got x days to change my mind…I’m stealing that.
Regarding the question of reading trade block posts…
I am in 3 deep leagues, a 30-teamer and two 28-teamers. The 30-teamer is the busiest trade league I have ever been a part of. This is our 4th offseason and we have had 1,190 trades since the league began, including 38 trades just in the last 30 days. In that league, posting a trade block results in a minimum of 8-10 GMs reaching out to start trade talks just in the first 36 hours. It winds up being an incredibly efficient trading market because no one ever need take less than fair market value for anything. Every one of the “bad” trades I have seen in that league was one where no trade block was used.
I own Yelich. He is not currently on my block. If I received an offer for him that seemed vaguely close, I would almost certainly respond that I felt an obligation to post a block with him on it for a couple days. I also own Hoskins. Hoskins IS currently on my block and has been a few weeks. If I got a solid offer for Hoskins this afternoon I would just take it. Everyone else in the league was well aware he was available, they had their chance.
My gripe about trade blocks is ottoneu-specific. They’re not very functional as it takes 4 or 5 clicks and some cross referencing to even find the block in question. Then there’s no indication of what has changed. It could be anything from a fresh new block to an extra period added to a note.
On CBS, I use the trade block religiously, sending some kind of inquiry with almost every update. And receiving multiple asks anytime I update mine.
Another reason why every league I am in is on ProBoards. It just makes life so much easier when it comes to keeping league records and communicating with other owners. Whether the league is on Fantrax or Yahoo or CBS or any other platform, we don’t use the native systems for trades and trade blocks. To be honest, all of them are terrible. It’s a significant weak link in fantasy platforms.
Open the trade window
Go to trade block
Scroll down and look for the latest dates to see who’s recent and who isn’t.
It’s super easy.
Also you can open up and initiate a trade now and the players on that’s team block are highlighted.
Niv has gone to great lengths to improve this fwiw.
I don’t know, man. I get the sentiment of the article, but honestly… this reads like a bowl of sour grapes.
Last I checked – this is still a game and you shouldn’t get ridiculed for doing something that you wanted to do. Unless you can prove a clear case of cheating being involved you should just file this away and move on.
I guess I don’t understand all the vitriol about this, because I think a lot of the blow-back Brad is getting is based off of straw men and miscommunication on the point’s he’s trying to make.
1. There seems to be a lot of “Mike Soroko for Trout is so insulting that you deserve anything you get” sentiment. But it seems that people are seeing that from their non-contextual view, instead of Trout’s owner’ view..ie..”I’m insulted by that trade, so DiPoto must’ve been insulted too.” But the trade talks weren’t tabled because Brad made poor offers; they were tabled because DiPoto said he wasn’t going to move Trout. That’s a big difference and I don’t think you can just assume that Brad’s offer was a crappy starting point in DiPoto’s eyes. Especially considering that he seemed to be motivated more by salary-relief, rather then trying to get equal value for Trout. This happens in my league a lot, where we use the MLB salaries of our players to base our yearly buy-in off of. Really good players get moved all the time for nothing, because of their salaries. The trades sometimes look ridiculous if you don’t look at their whole context because contending teams buy expensive studs with just prospects, all the time. Without knowing all of DiPoto’s plans, it’s reckless to assume that he froze Brad out of Trout because of an insulting Mike Soroko offer.
2. I’ve been going back and forth with a guy about trading for his Rizzo. If trade talks fizzle because we can’t come to an agreement on asset balance, then I don’t care if he then moves Rizzo to someone else without notice. But if we table talks because he either decides he doesn’t want to move Rizzo at all, or just not right now; and then he trades him without a courtesy message to me about it, then I’d probably be annoyed. And if it were for MIKE. FREAKING. TROUT., I might be more than annoyed. I file that under common courtesy, not just shopping your trades.
3. I think if Brad had not used “shopped” in the title, the reaction might’ve gone better. I took his point differently and think that it’s valuable advice. I didn’t take it as, ‘you should shop around any offer you get on anyone in order to squeeze the most value’. I took it as: if you are engaged in talks with Team A about Player A, and then Team B makes an offer for Player A, it behooves you strategically to go back to Team A with your new offer(and is also generally polite). Putting the courtesy element aside, it’s just the right move to go back to the team who had the original offer to see if they’ll give you more and I don’t think that makes you a jerk. I think it shouldn’t be a big deal to just tell Team B with the new offer, “I’m interested, but just so you know, so-and-so has been talking to me to about Player A too and I’m going to get back to him”. This literally just happened to me last week, the day before our keepers were due. A guy wanted to move super-expensive Greinke for draft picks. We talked and I made an offer. His response was, “I like that, but just to let you know, so-and-so made me an offer first. You’re in the lead, but I’m going to see if he wants to up his offer”…I took zero offense. For one, he was courteous. For two, say the other guy offered a 4th rounder first, and then I offered a 3rd…He’s doing himself a disservice by not going back to the 1st guy and trying to get a 2nd. And once again, I don’t think that makes you a dick; I just think its practical.
I would’ve left the league