Stealing Signs in Fantasy Baseball
Make no mistake, the Houston Astros are not the only baseball team stealing signs. They’re simply the most cavalier with their flaunting of convention. They chose to be confident about their narrow reading of the rules. They allege their actions to steal signs were legal because they used an already existing outfield camera. Basically, they claim to have misinterpreted the rules. Clearly they broke the spirit if not the letter. We’ll see if they’re truly punished or merely slapped upon the wrists.
This, of course, isn’t about real teams stealing signs. I want to focus on the fantasy equivalent. Whether you think of it as sign stealing or “reading” an opponent like a poker player, there is indisputable value to predicting and anticipating the actions of your rivals. The comments are open for you to share the ways you steal signs.
Common Projections
The FanGraphs auction calculator is an invaluable tool for building quick and dirty auction sheets and ADPs. It has become more customizable over the years, allowing us to incorporate a range of projection systems. As FanGraphs readers, many of you know at least half your league will reference the tool in some way.
However, once it’s made available, most people opt to use a 50/50 split of Steamer and ZiPS projections. If you’re in an auction league, this will serve as a free cheat sheet to the players who will be coveted. It might also indicate who will slip through the cracks – just find the guys whose public projections most widely diverge from your own. If you know enough of your rivals are using the calculator, consider taking a contrarian approach to pricing.
In snake drafts, the site ADP is probably the most informative signal. If your leaguemates have particular experts they subscribe to such as Paul Sporer’s pitcher rankings, it could pay to figure out who they like and dislike.
Trade and Waiver Tells
Humans and fantasy owners are creatures of habit. Many of us telegraph when and how we plan to use the waiver wire. Often, this is proceeded by efforts to make a two-for-one trade. Unless an injured player needs to be activated, such efforts are a sure sign your rival perceives a great value to be freely available on the wire. You could (and should) try to identify the player for yourself, although it’s likely you won’t necessarily agree about the perceived value. Instead, work the phone lines. Your opponent might be so keen to open a roster space that they’ll hand you an easy win. Sometimes, they’ll even (arguably, always arguably) toss you the best player in the trade.
Tells in ottoneu are especially easy to spot. The format uses two-day auctions for all free agent additions. Frequently, an owner will cut players in sequence with putting a player up for auction. While knowing who wants a specific free agent won’t always spur you to action, you could consider price enforcing against certain foes.
Tactical Patterns
Again, humans like habit. It’s amazing how many fantasy managers build their team the same way year after year. Others will stumble mindlessly into whatever groupthink emerged from the most recent season. Even my flexible and much ballyhooed contrarian approach is predictable in its unpopularity. It’s not hard to anticipate what I’ll avoid – basically anybody everyone else loves (Mike Trout excluded).
If you know a tough opponent has a certain cadence to their roster building, consider building disruptions into your own strategy and tactics. In an auction league, an owner who spends half his budget on top pitchers should be price enforced early. And while it needn’t be stated, if said owner rarely contends, let them fall down their rat hole to ignominious obscurity.
Prompt
So. What do you do to steal signs?
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Sure do. Here and there guys will put their aggravations on the message board, and if somebody posts “I’d trade Joe Bflstk for a bag of infield balls” then is a good time to look up Joe’s expected performance indicators and compare them to actual. This usually happens early in the season, so if a pitcher has had terrible starts at Coors or TEX or against NYY, HOU, or BOS, and there are no injury rumors … offer this guy a bag of new baseballs and a beagle. It works now and then.
ill do the inverse- if a good pitcher has a slow start coupled with a drop in velocity, zone % or anything that signals injury, i’ll do a fake inquiry about them to reinforce their value to the owner. When they inevitably hold, i give them an “aw shucks” type of response and tell them i dont blame them for riding it out
wickedly delightful
Roster construction is an important tool to pay attention to.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I have historical information for every team that’s played in my league to pay attention to how many hitters, SPs, & RPs they leave a draft with. In H2H leagues, that helps when you can figure out what the player-verse looks like. (How many total hitters will be taken, etc.)
Also, on a week-to-week basis, paying attention to how teams stack up with what categories they lean hard into between pitching stats helps when making waiver moves to plan for your opponent.
@whiptydojoe: “… how teams stack up with what categories they lean hard into between pitching stats helps….” What does that mean? And what do you mean by “lean hard into ” ….? Can you give an example?
Well in my league full of mostly Braves fans, I always nominate braves players in the auction as early as possible and bid them up to the moon
GOAT move to be honest
On this note — I find it’s pretty reliable to discern fanship by looking for concentrations of players on certain “real” teams on other fantasy teams. Especially if you see multiple players outside the top-200 — speculative relievers, fourth starters, prospects. This helps me figure out when an opponent might pay extra, and when it’s not worth it to even ask.
In yahoo leagues, if you know your opponent streams starters to bulk up pitching counting stats, they’ll often just look at the projected starter list in the system and add the best from there. However, the projected list on yahoo only shows starters for tomorrow (or in leagues with move effective same day, it shows starters for today). If you have a roster spot or two to spare, or an expendable player, you can front run this yahoo list and look at the MLB projected starter list, which shows starters for like a week out, and add any potential useful streamers before they show up in the yahoo list. Heck, you can even add them for a day, and then drop them the next so they just end up stuck on waivers and are unusable for that start.
I’ve done that to some small extent, but we are very limited on this with a 3 add limit during each week.
I continue to be disgusted by this site’s minimization of the Astros blatant cheating. Some of the pieces, including this first paragraph, are borderline admiring of their egregious behavior. I don’t know why you FG writers all seem to think you are too cool to care, but the scandal doesn’t require your permission to exist. The Astros have made a mockery of the sport and the staff and players who participated should be banned from the game.
Other teams??? Pure whataboutism. Where is the evidence since you seem so convinced? We have plenty of evidence re: the Astros.
Honestly, you’re right. I don’t care. It’s irrelevant to fantasy baseball. I certainly don’t admire the Astros for coming up with the world’s dumbest signaling system.
Accusing up to 29 teams of cheating with zero evidence is a pretty WILD accusation. The fact that you don’t care is pathetic, frankly.
to think that no other team is stealing, or attempting to steal signs, is naive as hell.
Lemme put it this way, I’m not interested in jeopardizing any relationships to make a point on a fantasy baseball website.
This. The Blue Jays were the other sign stealing story a few years ago, and while Brad can’t say it there are most likely other teams that do this. The rise in pitch mix-ups between catcher and pitcher is a sure sign that other teams know this is happening as the catcher has to go through 3 sign variations to call a curveball, pitcher misses the sign and throws a fastball. An umpire is going to get hurt eventually, so IMO MLB needs to come down hard on the Astros. Not all teams do this by the way, but it comes down to the President of baseball operations in most cases and how ethical that person is within the organization (and/or desperate to win).
Multiple teams were caught and penalized by MLB… and stories at the Athletic pointed the finger at a few others that were not.
ironic coming from a pitcher who abused cocaine
There’s not much to say. I don’t think anyone on planet earth approves of what the Astros did. But our opinions on the matter are irrelevant because it is the leagues themselves who have full control over these narratives (same in the NFL, NBA, NHL, etc.) If you want talking heads about “cheaters” and “scandals”, then just go to ESPN/BR/etc. where you’ll also find the TOP STORY that LeBron’s season has been difficult because he can’t watch his son play prep school basketball.
You are ignoring some well documented recent history if you believe only the Astros bend the rules. Go back into the sports archives of the last 5 years and you will see a consistent pattern in the league beyond Houston.
I did not interpret Brad’s comments as minimizing the Astro’s cheating (if anything he seemed to be rolling his eyes at their weak excuse). Relax.
Too many managers from my dynasty league are on this website to share anything like that.
If that’s the case, you should have posted false strategies to bait them.
In relation to weekly FAAB: I may be an addicted psychopath but I collated each owners average winning bid, highest bid and average lowest bid. (CBS function that shows all winning and losing bids in the weekly FAAB report).
Not sure if I gained an advantage. It was very time consuming so I didn’t do it the following year. It was fun though.
This is a good idea, even if it is time consuming. I know for a fact that I rarely pay above a certain level, so if someone was keeping tabs on my bids they’d know I would only go so far.
In keeper leagues, there are a number of ways to get a good idea of players other teams plan to keep. As you get close to the keeper deadline, great deals can be had on players other teams are cutting.
My big money league drafts using a dummy league so that no one knows the identity of the other owners. This stemmed from the commish being nearly unbeatable in the early years of the league, and other owners started to use a “+1” approach where they would simply bid on anyone the commish had bid on.
The dynamic of the league has since changed and the commish is now too busy with golf and swimming in the Atlantic Ocean to dominate the league, but we still utilize the blind auction. Kinda our version of using complex signs with a runner on 2nd.
sounds like someone should “hack” into his account.. maybe his password is still the same as it was before?
(1) In a deep auction/keeper league, I have found it more beneficial to focus on executing my strategy rather than discerning the strategy of others and try to disrupt it. Doing the latter creates a risk — you stay in the bidding to guard against cheap acquisition by key rivals but risk acquiring a player who might torpedo what is otherwise a sound strategy.
(2) In pursuing your own strategy, you need to vary which players you nominate; if you tend to name players early that you don’t want or need to drive up what rivals spend, it is helpful to sometimes nominate players early who you do want, so that rivals are unsure if you want a player you nominated or simply want to drain the coffer of rivals. By mixing up my approach, I have been able to acquire early under-valued assets. I also try to vary my cadence and speed of bidding, a legacy of a playing poker when I was much younger.
(3) As an exception to (1), I do react if a rival is bidding in a way that is specifically intended to disrupt my strategy, which sometimes happens because I have dominated my main league. In that circumstance, I tend to bid up a high-production player who does not fit into my strategy (because I expect regression or because I have greater needs elsewhere positionally or in scoring categories) — I once bid up a player to such ridiculous heights that I drove a rival to break his budget over a player I did not want. There is risk in this practice too, but less risk then allowing a rival to force up your bids on every player you want to acquire.
(4) After our action, we use a snake draft to fill a 17-man reserve, and since a fair chunk of those 204 reserve spots (12-team AL-only league) go to prospects, it is helpful to discern if certain rivals are using specific prospect rankings to guide them. When you sniff that out based upon whom they select each round, you can much more easily predict whom they would take next, and that can inform your own choices.
I think we might add some value to the discussion both in fantasy and reality by stating their is a spectrum of seeking advantage, with one end completely laudatory — a batter noticing how a catcher sets up — and the other side what might better be called cheating. Noticing how a poker player changes cadence is fair game; having a partner peak at his cards is not.
I like #2 particularly, especially since I tend to toss out players described in the two scenarios. Might as well be like this holiday season and buy someone I want for a change.
Related to your 1 and 2 strategies. When I carry less cap space into an auction, I will send the big fish out early to deplete my rivals cap advantage and then target players later who I would like to acquire for $1-3.
If I am coming off a rebuild situation, I try to follow #2 more closely. I identify the players that I want to actually acquire and mix with the players who I believe will be overpriced in auction.
I have learned in my ottoneu league, for the waiver wire auctions, to figure out my price and then add $2 to it. If I get the player great an extra $2 should not kill me. If I lose out then, the winning owner is likely paying at least $3 more than market price.
Some owners are really into prospects in dynasty leagues. Figure out who they are and save your prospect deals for them.
Many good suggestions here Jonathan! And I completely agree with your paragraph on ethics.
Re your 4th point, do you find a lot of your league mates are picking straight from a specific prospect ranking? I might find it difficult to track that, given all the prospect lists on the web, and players omitted because of keeper lists.
I’ve tried part of your 2nd strategy, with somewhat less success re “mixing up my approach, I have been able to acquire early under-valued assets..” Usually the players I can acquire at (relatively) bargain prices are those I’m not targeting.
My league often copycats the previous winner if there is an identifiable strategy in use. One year I punted AVG and won due to a cheap offense (and a undervalued 40hr Jose Bautista). The next year no less than 4 teams punted AVG.
More recently, our league settings (and general MLB trends) made middle relievers fairly valuable, and leveraged their contributions to go cheap on SP and still crushed pitching categories. The next season, all of the returning owners in the league spent at least $5 on a middle reliever, and left the auction with multiple MRs rostered, while I waited til later in the year and grabbed guys like Nick Anderson, Oliver Drake, and Drew Pomeranz for free.
yea i punted wins/strikeouts and went reliever heavy right when the trend was forming. over the next year or two, a few leaguemates followed me
Our draft is an offline draft with 4 hours to make your selection. It provides plenty of time to evaluate other teams roster and examine what they need a the time and make drafting decisions based on what you think will still be available.