Is Trading Dead?
Trading is an important part of most fantasy leagues. With the exception of a few leagues, most notably NFBC formats, owners are free to swap players with their fellow league mates throughout the season until some imposed trading deadline. Many fantasy owners believe that skillful trading, as one component of in-season roster management, is the biggest factor of success. But after passing the deadline in my one league that I commish, I am left wondering: is trading dead?
Personally, I have never been a big trader. Not that I am against it or necessarily dislike making trades, but I am just excruciatingly patient with my players. Much of the criticism I have taken in my AL Starting Pitcher rankings posts are a result of this patience and refusal to give much weight to small sample sizes. It takes a lot for me to change my opinion about a player, especially if the underlying skills are still there, yet the results just haven’t been as favorable. As such, my trade offers typically seem to take the appearance of your standard buy low/sell high, which don’t work like they used to.
I play in a single-season league, so that eliminates the multitude of dump trades that would inflate the league trade count. Our trading deadline was at midnight on August 29th. All season, we had a total of seven trades. SEVEN! If you are curious, I made one of those trades. I don’t remember how many trades have been made in previous seasons of this league (this is the ninth season of my league), but I feel confident that this has easily been the fewest number of trades I have ever seen in any league, not just mine.
The last trade was made in the beginning of July, a little over a month after the sixth trade was made. It was a power for speed swap that made sense for both teams at the time. Looking back, every other trade seemed need-based, though my trade was somewhat of a buy low/sell high, except my buy low guy, Aaron Hill, pretty much stayed low. I have discussed this in articles on previous blogs and sites I have written for, but it is worth repeating: the buy low/sell high type trade is pretty much dead. Since that eliminates an entire style of trade and really just leaves the category based ones, that results in a lot less trading activity.
Maybe my league mates are more skilled or knowledgeable than the average league and most other leagues still see the swath of the buy low/sell high types, and therefore trades in general. But I get the sense that the continued growth and popularity of sabermetrics and sites like FanGraphs is narrowing the skill difference between owners. When that happens, trading declines. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean luck becomes more of a factor, as well as draft day and free agent acquisition.
So, is trading dead?
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
I’ve observed the same thing and I think it’s easy to explain. Information is simply easier to come by and is of higher quality. There simply isn’t as much variety of opinion as there used to be. Without information asymmetry and given the same goals (in non-keeper leagues), there’s very little arbitrage to be done. On some occasion, you’ll have two teams who can balance each other out. But I’ve seen much, much less of the challenge trades that used to be quite popular.
That’s a good point, but I’ve seen opposite effects in leagues where everyone knows each other, like mine where we had 64 players traded. (And we go back to faxing league transactions & standings.)
When one team knows the offering team has all the information, the first side won’t trade on general principle. But if the first team can easily assess the trade, they might be more interested.
Second, all easy information makes leagues more competitive and categories extremely tight. More competing teams plus accessible points in specific categories = more trades.
Last, you can set up your league to promote trades. Have a tight FAAB budget to promote Player for FAAB $$ trades. Keeper league promotes dump trades. Loser taxes keep teams involved. Have lunch with each other, or some beers.
I am in the second year of my keeper league. We had nine trades last season, four in the off season and four this season. Three of the off season trades and all four in season trades were helped by the trading of draft picks. I think owners are becoming more knowledgeable overall or soliciting advise from ‘fantasy experts’ and after years of playing in leagues were vetoes are common, owners don’t wish to go through the trouble. Plus I feel that owners are afraid of ‘losing a trade’. It is not quite dead but a lot more difficult…
…there’s always a lot of pitching in free agency and closers are born every few weeks, so there are rarely any trades involving pitchers. The only trades I like to make are trading surplus for shortage (e.g. trading an extra OF for a SP) or trading two players for one better player. I’m too afraid to buy low on slumping players and I hate selling high.
Of our seventeen total trades only four didn’t involve pitching and four involved closers. I have been involved in nine of the trades and acquired Strasburg, Hanson, Kershaw, Cargo and Miggy who are five of my eight keepers via trade. Strasburg has been traded twice straight up for Lincecum and later for Matt Garza…
We banged out 16 trades in a 12 team league. (My two were trades of absolutely genius proportions.)
I got Bautista and Ian Kennedy (essentially both “buy high” guys who i expected to stave off regression) at the end of may for Ethier (fresh off a 30 game hit streak) and Tommy Hanson
and i swung teix, stubbs, r roberts and marcum for braun, hamilton, gardner and hanson (same team) around the 4th of july probably at the peak of stubbs’ value
I am in a very deep 12 team keeper league with 35 man rosters. Our number will shock you…50! I know its not the type of # to share with your girlfriend, but it is the only way to acquire players in our league. It has made it interesting and made managers make tough choices if they want to compete. Worst trade of season Soto and Lidge for Ian Kennedy. The Kennedy owner is a dope. t hapened in May just before he blew up. The trade was vetoed then resubmitted.
My home league is a semi-deep 12 team, 28 man roster keeper league. We made 49 trades and people complained about it being a down year. I personally was involved in 11 trades. Our resident trade fiend made 24 trades. Most of the trades were a bunch of mid-tier keepers for a bunch of quality un-keepables.
In our THT Experts league, there were only 14 trades of which I made one.
I have a few rules of thumb I follow when I make a trade.
1. My team has to get an expected net gain. This seems obvious, but people make trades for “better” players while opening difficult to patch holes on their roster all the time.
2. The trade generally has to help my team more than the other’s.
2a. I generally will not trade with owners who are close to me in the standings after June-ish.
2b. I won’t worry about rule 2 if the team is well behind me.
I made 2 different sell-high trades in my keeper league this year alone.
Towards the end of May, I traded Lohse+Nunez for Hamels+Byrd. I sold high on both of those guys, and scored myself a no-doubt keeper for next year.
Just before the trade deadline, I gave Utley+Worley for Pedroia. Again selling high on a pitcher.
The best part is that I picked both Lohse and Worley off the WW about a month before I traded them, got a few good starts from each, and shuffled them off for something better.
And last year at the deadline, I had the crazy-hot Tim Hudson and used him as the main piece in a deal to get Ryan Zimmerman.
Absolutely in my experience. It sucks too, a good trade is really adds to the fun. In the past three seasons I was in 6 leagues total and have only had 2 successful trades.
Totally agree. Everyone is afraid of losing the trade. Only trades I’ve seen were “category” or “need” trades and even those are difficult to pull off.
Well what do you think has led to fantasy owners being more afraid of losing a trade now than they had been in the past? What has happened to cause this phenomenon?
Man, if I had the answer to that I’d NEVER lose!
I think you’re pretty spot-on about the fall of buy-low/sell-high trades perhaps because of the rising popularity of sabermetrics. While a lot of people are still suckers for Wins and RBIs, I do think they’re much more aware of getting hoodwinked or bamboozled by those who appreciate the more advanced metrics. They’re much more suspicious.
For example, I’ve won my (ten-team) league three years in a row and each year I’ve gotten better, largely because of sites like FanGraphs (thanks guys!) and so I’ve developed a sabermetric reputation. Now they don’t trust me. Every trade offer is rejected because they think “I know something” and everyone is on the constant look-out for being “cheated”.
It’s like sabermetrics have become the steroid of fantasy baseball.
If you’re looking for a highly active league, join mine:
http://histakesleague.proboards.com/
Over 100 trades every year…
I made over 20 myself this season.
Seems like the way to increase trading is bigger drafted rosters– like Stros above whose league drafts 35 man teams– and then limit FA acquisitions.
I definitely have noticed that as good information/analysis has become easier to get, more luck is involved in winning.
Physical scouting can replace luck. Had you taken the time to watch Jose Bautista play, you would have known to believe in his abilities. You could have picked him up fairly cheaply, or if you missed the initial boat, you could make an offseason trade as I did – $51 Evan Longoria for $8 Jose Bautista. Even investing in him in a normal draft would have cost at most $30 in most leagues.
In my experience, it’s a lot harder to scout pitchers. I tend to glean more valuable information from my FG dashboard than by watching them pitch. Hitters on the other hand tend to teach me more about themselves if I watch them play 5-10 games.
I just started fantasy last year thought I followed baseball like a fantasy manager prior. I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one who thinks trading is possibly dead. It’s like trying to amputate your own leg to get the simplest trade to go through my league (minus the Commish with his goons but that’s a whole other problem). I find alot of people don’t know much about fantasy and base their decisions off the persons name alone. So unknowlegable people (aka non-Fangraphs followers) don’t know things like Josh Collmenter is having a great year, but keep trying to get John Lester for Starlin Castro. Ya Starlin will improve my team but not as much as losing Lester hurts it you moron. Lack of knowledge and blindly following Yahoo’s rating system has caused the trade to move on life support, it’s dying and there isn’t anything us “pros” to do but comb the FAs and hope for the next Jose Baptista just to loose him to his name the next year….
Must just be your league. I’m in two very active and very intelligent leagues (both dynasty leagues, mind you) where I made nearly 60 deals from January to the deadline. I’ve even managed to make a few deals in Yahoo public leagues this year, too. I love doing it, and many owners I know love it as well.
I think one poster indirectly nailed it in an earlier comment. Sometimes owners are very afraid of losing a deal. If you end up in a league with a bunch of guys like that (along with the excruciatingly patient types like the original column writer), it’s going to be a trade-free zone. But otherwise, trades are still very viable and very very much in vogue. I lose plenty of trades, but I always come out on top of more than I lose. That’s the key — being smart enough to win more than you lose. Once you’re comfortable with yourself enough to know you can do that, trading is one of the most enjoyable aspects in fantasy sports.
only 3 trades in my money league this year. I was the clear winner in that aspect by giving up leo nunez and chipper jones for astrubel cabrera and mike napoli.
Our league had 3 trades. Last one happened in June. Success in our league is all about talent evaluation even before any of players stats are statistically significant. In other words, scouting and luck.
It’s a shame, b/c it is less fun.
If the replacement value on the wire is too high it will hurt trades. I’m in a 10-team with keepers, 24-per-team, and there were five trades all year. My other league is a 12-team dynasty, 30-per-team plus MILB team that sucks up some of the youngsters for appr. 380-400 players reserved. In that league there have been 27 trades involving MLB players + whatever was done in the offseason or minors-only. You also need more people who are confident enough to believe they can make moves that will help their team, whether it’s to contend this year or build for next.
In my experience, trades are much more likely to occur in leagues where all the owners know each other, and i assume this is pretty common.
One league im in has been around for 6 years now, with only one or 2 new owners changing from year to year. We had over 30 trades last year, and 40 this year. Its much easier to get a deal done when everyone can easily contact every other owner via text or in person.
These guys will trade for any reason you can think of, and sometimes i think trades go down just out of sheer boredom.
My other league is in its first season and is the polar opposite. These guys are just as knowledgeable fantasywise, but the difference is they dont know each other that well. On average i’d say each owner knows 3-4 other owners. As the commish I personally know all but one owner, and not surprisingly ive been involved in the most trades. However there have been only 7 all year, and i was actually involved in every single one.
Communication is absolutely crucial, you’re right. Chat services like AIM, Facebook, and Gmail are the biggest reason for successful trades in my leagues. I used to send out updated AIM lists in one of the leagues I commish, and I found it facilitated trade discussion amongst owners greatly. The only reason I don’t do it any longer is because I like having that advantage all to myself.
I almost exclusively make trade offers via chat or email.
“Much of the criticism I have taken in my AL Starting Pitcher rankings posts are a result of this patience and refusal to give much weight to small sample sizes.”
670 innings of Justin Verlander’s superiority over Jon Lester notwithstanding.
The fact that you traded for Aaron Hill shows you have zero credibility as a fantasy analyst. You may be worse than Matthew Berry!
I find leagues that trade significantly are harder to win. I play one team a year and have won 5 of the last 6 seasons and have made 3 trades in those 6 seasons. The only year I lost was because the league let a guy fleece another guy through a series of trades. We were allowed to vote on trades but it was always me against everyone else. The reality is if you are clearly better at roster management then you can win a low trade league easily. At least that is what works for me. Trades can let sharks take advantage of the weak willed or less experienced and that makes it harder to win if your not a shark.
Sounds like you need a harder league.
Some of the hesitation, in my mind, is due to the mediocrity of hitting this year. Martin Prado has set the bar for triple slash (.261/.307/.385). With this being the MLB definition for success, most trades will look pretty crumby. Example, try trading Danny Valencia for Martin Prado. The players have nearly identical triple slash marks, Valencia(.247/.295/.396), both play a position that has been tight this year, yet Valencia has surpassed Prado in HR (15 v. 11) and RBI (68 v. 52). I feel safe saying none of you in this converation would pull the trigger to trade Prado away for Valencia due to the true value of Prado being higher historically and going forward. Most of the trades I have seen involve rookies or players with small sample size. Best example I have is back in June right after Lind went on a HR binge I traded Adam Lind, Matt Moore and Dominic Brown for King Felix, N. Feliz and Charlie Morton. I later traded away Feliz and Morton for V. Wells replacing Linds true value.
I don’t think trading is dead, but I think it’s left to the incredibly savvy managers. I’ve found in my keeper league especially, managers are hesitant to trade because they don’t want to be burned down the road. Back in 2009, I traded Chone Figgins for Cliff Lee at the All-Star Break, right before he turned into the Cliff Lee we all know and love. At the time both parties thought it was an even trade; Lee hadn’t posted the ridiculous numbers we’ve come to know and love and Figgins helped to bump that manager up to third in stolen bases. However, I still can’t make a trade with that manager because he thinks any trade I’m trying to make is out to rip him off.
did u mean 2008 or 2007?
cliff went 22-3 in 2009 bro, he was godly
I feel like one of the problems with trading these days is that people are still trying to make buy low/sell high trades like the old days but now people are more aware and less willing to be taken advantage of. Instead, these offers come off as insulting and people get annoyed. If I’m thinking of offering a trade I’ll usually try to get a community opinion on a site like fantasybaseballcafe.com or tradebashers.com so that I know about how the other guy is going to react when he sees my trade.
It’s just basic psychology that people tend to overvalue their own players, hot streaks are sign of improvement while cold stretches are just bad luck, while undervaluing other people’s, hot streaks are just luck while cold stretches are bound to regress.
I agree with this, I think some people go to the same bag of tricks (fleece-trading) and once they are in a league where they can’t do it because it’s not full of yahoos (pun somewhat intended), they are at a loss. The best trades to me are ones where I see how I am addressing a need on the other team; these tend to be the ones where there aren’t going to be hard feelings after the fact. (Of course if someone offers me a trade out of the blue that is totally in my favor I’m not going to reject it, but I wouldn’t want to be in a league with someone who does stuff like that either because if it’s me one week it could be my main rival the next).
I don’t think it is about overvaluing players, more information, etc. Rather I think it is that in leagues with a good level of expertise the managers correctly deduce that there just aren’t a lot of trades that make sense for both sides AND are superior to dealing with the free agent market.
To me it’s pretty simple – there’s usually no reason (i.e. clear advantage) to make a trade, with the exception of dump trades. Sure, I may need steals, for example. But what am I going to trade for them? I’ll lose points in any other category that I trade away. It is extremely rare that one team will have such a big lead in one category that it’s clear that should trade it away.
There’s also the psychological aspects – it seems to me that trading away a player and having him go on to have a great season is much worse than *not* trading *for* a player like this. And also, like it or not, once we own a player we have an emotional attachment to him. Yes, the same thing can happen if the player is awful (I will never own Trevor Cahill again after this season) but those players won’t typically be involved in trades because nobody else will want them.
So to me it’s a combination of the two things above – one, it’s too hard to calculate/predict how much you’ll be losing in the trade vs. how much you’ll be gaining, and two, we are both attached to our players and are scared of them becoming MVPs after we trade them away.
I’m in two serious keeper leagues, and I’d guess that there are about 30 trades per year in each of them. And I’d guess that maybe 28 out of the 30 are either dump trades (the one type of trade that clearly does make sense for both sides) or inconsequential (“Clint Barmes is coming off the DL and I don’t have a place for him – I’ll take the best farm player I can get”).
I would say that it is a combination of owners not wanting to lose a trade and everybody having more information. Most owners in my league are reluctant to make trades they don’t clearly win and as a result they do not make many trades because those trades just are not on the table. People are afraid to make trades more on the margins in a lot of cases.
When I draft, I generally take high reward guys in the latter rounds. For instance, in one league this year I drafted both Josh Beckett and James Shields later in the draft. As a result, my pitching was incredible which allowed me to flip them for Teixeira (to replace my Dunn drafting) and Bautista (with Beltre thrown in) respectively. In my experience, it’s all about finding cheap value late in the draft and flipping that for another player which, even if you don’t get comparable value, still makes sense compared to pre-draft value and needs (obviously I was short on power considering I was counting on Dunn to provide much of my power).
It is a two-sided coin… on one hand, I think more experienced leagues have more patience so there isn’t much trading. But on the other hand, I think leagues with more casual players or newbies have fewer trades because all the managers aren’t attentive on a daily basis.
Somewhere there’s a happy medium. 🙂
hard to get a good fair deal since owners want the maximum. off season deals are different since people cannot keep em all, so owners are willing to work something out for draft picks.
1 trade in my pub std h2h weekly league. that was it.
3 trades in my other league ( one involving a last place and first place team, which is fishy and another involving two last place out of it teams at the deadline )
some people reject whenever these trades come along.
in keeper leagues if u get burned by a lopsided trade by a jerk owner before u tend to never trade w. that owner again ever. period. thats just how it works. and people will catch on.
My 10 team non-keeper league had 5 trades this season, 4 of which involved myself.
I definitely seem to be the only guy in the league who likes to trade, as I almost never get trade proposals. I propose a lot of trades though, especially to teams lower in the standings who might make a trade just because they need to shake things up.
64 players were traded in our 10 team league before our August 7th trade deadling kicked in. I find these promote trading:
1. We all know each other outside of this league
2. You can “sell” players for FAAB $$
3. Keeper leagues promote dump trades (we tax ($$$) the last 3 place finishers to keep it honest).
I love trades, but only when I feel I have a glaring need and can’t find the solution on the wire. Or occasionally when I get a player I just don’t want (like Ethier around May – I tried so hard to pawn him off but just couldn’t get more than a bag of dog crap for him). In my experience, trades are dwindling because you still have so many people who are rather high on their own knowledge of baseball and try to rip off other managers left and right. I can’t tell you how many ridiculous offers I’ve found in my inbox and that’s a huge turn-off to trading for me. I think it’s the simple fact that you just can’t fool people any more with trades – that’s why their are becoming less frequent.