New Owners Need To Calm The &#%* Down
Um…
The other day, I announced that we filled the four open positions in the Screw Cancer ottoneu FGpts league. Including me, that makes five new owners. Everybody seems pretty enthusiastic. The above picture lists all the trades that have happened since the newbies showed up. If you’re curious enough to take a closer look, I believe you can.
I’m The Least New New Owner. I’ve been there since November. The other new owners are Naming Rights, Mos Eisley, Smithsonian, and Dunder Mifflin. Of the 16 trades (actually 17 now, but I don’t feel like updating), at least one of the newest four owners were involved in every one of them. Counting me, newbies accounted for 25 of 34 teams making a trade. The flurry is likely to continue once these trades process.
The phenomenon is not unique to this league. Anytime somebody new joins a keeper or dynasty format, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll try to make a ton of trades. Even I’m guilty. When I hopped on the Screw Cancer train, I immediately discarded Nick Castellanos, Jameson Taillon, Mike Moustakas, and Blake Parker in a pair of trades for Clayton Kershaw and DJ LeMahieu. I stand by those swaps; I’m just admitting that I’m not immune to the new owner tinkerbug.
From a league health perspective, the worst is when a new owner takes a mid-rebuild team and blows it up Miami Marlins style (the Marlins were actually the inspiration for this post). When you take a team that’s almost back to being competitive and re-distribute their best players to the top teams, it only reinforces the haves and have nots.
In my experience, owners who rebuild via prospects tend to get lost in the weeds. That doesn’t apply to everybody, but there is something sticky about playing in the prospect end of the pool. When somebody performs well in the majors sooner than expected, it’s tempting to convert them into a prospect who better fits your timeline. If you’re lucky, you’ll eventually get a surge of talent reaching the majors. If you’re unlucky, they’ll keep arriving piecemeal. Undoubtedly, there’s a behavioral effect involved. Perhaps some mix of anchoring plus an instinct to nurture your own assets.
New owners can overreach in the other direction too, taking a not quite ready to contend roster, spending valuable resources, and still coming up short. At least this error comes with a silver lining. So long as you didn’t go whole hog on old stars like Joey Votto, Robinson Cano, and Zack Greinke, you should find yourself holding a decent roster foundation. Kind of like the 2017 Miami Marlins.
…Sigh…
The largest mistake new owners make is not properly valuing assets. For example, jumping from 5×5 to FGpts has massive implications for player value. Starling Marte is a great example. He’s a valuable 5×5 asset due to a high steal rate, .290 batting average, and useful lineup role. In FGpts, he’s maybe a $7 or $10 outfielder. Last season, Lonnie Chisenhall posted nearly the same points per plate appearance.
An easy way to avoid this error is to be patient. It’s tempting to take the proverbial bird in hand for fear that an engaged owner making an acceptable offer could withdraw their interest. That does happen sometimes. More frequently, time will simply lead to better offers. It will also help you to learn how others in the league value talent.
When you have the opportunity, solicit multiple offers – even if you know some owners aren’t that interested. A low ball offer still conveys information about your new enemies. Politely let engaged owners know that, since you’re new, you want to give everybody time to be involved. Frame it as you needing help to understand value in this format. They probably won’t go anywhere. They may even include another throw-in to further tempt you.
At the end of the day, I don’t blame the owners in our league for rushing their decisions. With a week until the keeper deadline, there’s pressure to move quickly. Since trades take two days to process, there’s very little time to perform arbitrageable swaps. Unfortunately, that plays to the favor of the existing owners who were already comfortable with their rosters and now sit ready to pounce on opportunities. However, when you do have more than a week to tidy up your new roster, I recommend a slow, plodding pace.
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I have been in OttoNeu leagues for 4 years, and I have never seen that many pending trades at one time. I doubt I have seen half that many pending trades – even in leagues with active owners.
What is your league #? I am interested to see the specifics of the trades. I imagine there are some interesting deals mixed in there.
Sorry… I skipped over the link. I am still under-caffeinated.
🙂
There are definitely some interesting deals. And some deals that seemingly don’t include keepers.
I did this wrong last year. Inherited an Ottoneu roster and went way too fast in flipping the assets on my roster cause I thought – dang, this roster sucks, but there are like 5 assets so I better trade them all real fast. I definitely lost a couple of trades because of it.
Looking back on it, there are still guys I’m happy I traded because they were decent but not great assets and I got different guys I preferred, but I would go more slowly with the best assets.
There are certainly times when a series of moves from a new owner is warrented and will make complete sense. New owners don’t suffer from the endowment effect. They aren’t irrationally tied to “their” players. It’s much easier for a new owner to rationally value the players on their new roster, and make the necessary moves that the previous owner was unable to see due to being blinded by the aversion of parted with “their” players.
Brad, I bet it was much easier for you to trade away Castellanos than it would have been for the previous owner. To the old owner, Castellanos had probably been his “breakout sleeper”, one of “his guys”, but for you he was just another mid-tier 3B.
I agree with the sentiment, and it does happen this way sometimes. I think my own arrival in this league is a strong example of that (but I think about stuff like this for my job).
However, I’ve observed a lot of new owners, and their fire sales usually go well beyond escaping the endowment effect. If I were to make a list of the 10 worst fantasy trades from my leagues after every season, 8 would be from new owners within their first 15 days.
The fire sale really depends on how far a team is out of contention for the next year. If the league has a juggernaut team that’s going to run away with the title, I would dump all assets that can’t help me win the next year, so I can have the money to dominate the draft and in-season auctions so I have a competitive team for the next season.
Even if you end up on the losing ends of some trades, if you’re freeing up more cap space, it should help you down the line.
It’s amazing how often those juggernauts aren’t. One Tommy John surgery and an off-year from a key player and they’re right down in the muck with everybody else. Sure, sometimes everything goes as planned for them and it’s not close, but personally I’d rather field a competitive team and hope some things break my way. When I’ve taken over teams, I’ve gone in with the goal of competing in year 1. You can always sell in-season if it doesn’t work out.
It’s also more fun for me to try to be in the mix year-to-year than to concede a season because I’m trying to build the next juggernaut, but that’s just personal preference.
No doubt new owners can take things too far. I think many (most?) fantasy owners just enjoy deal making. And once you start making a few trades that deal making spirit can just take over.
I know I’ve fallen prey to that mentality a time or two. You make one trade and immediately start thinking about how you can trade your newly acquired pieces and flip them for something even better!
I am Smithsonian Bateleurs, and I am so far responsible for 8 trades in the last 48 hours. I think it is really important for context that Dave Cameron’s old team has something like $580 of projected value for next season. That team is a juggernaut and will be next year too. Plodding along against a team like that only gives them extra time to retool – you MUST force front-runners to play for this year and not start planning for next year while cruising to victory. Otherwise, you end up in an endless loop of defeat.
I personally see no point in waiting on an offer I like. If you have an idea of how you value player x and y, and you prefer player y to player x, why not trade them? If your evaluation is correct, then there is now the opportunity to deal player y for player z, whom you might like even more than player x. Of course we are all wrong sometimes – everyone loses trades. Patience with players who you believe will grow is one thing, but you can certainly grow player assets in other more seemingly impatient ways too.
We have a new owner in one of my dynasty leagues. He just traded his Byron Buxton for Royce Lewis. I was pretty surprised by that move. By no means is Buxton a bust.
Plus, it’s fun. For me, baseball is about irrational joy. I love making decisions based on gut instincts, not FB%. Fantasy baseball is a perfect avenue for that. New owners are passionate about their decisions, often ignoring value and tapping into that feeling of excitement all of us got when we traded a Ken Griffey Jr rookie card for a whole two Roberto Alomar cards and maybe one obscure Diamond Kings (maybe that was just me). It’s a bit snobbish that there is a stigma against new owners being proactive. Let the newbies have fun! I’m definitely over paying for Marte in all my leagues this year.
Mr. Johnson I appreciate your columns. Keep up the good work.
Fun is the point at the end of the day. I spent a long time deciding on crappy backup outfielders in my Sim league set in 2007. Settled on Cliff Floyd and Jason Tyner.
Tyner hit one HR in eight years of big league ball. Is that even possible? Guess so.
It isnt just the new owners at fault for this phenomenon. The existing owners generally flood new guys with trade offers for all their good assets. The vultures are equally to blame.