Strategic Reminders
I now realize I kind of hate April. I want to do analysis, but the best I can do with the current data is note peculiar observations. Rather than pluck out more guys based on some tenuous indicator, let’s refresh ourselves on a few critical strategies.
Trading 101 – Gain expected points from (almost) any trade
Owners can get tied up on the names involved in a trade discussion. For owners in a roto league, any trade should help you collect more points in the standings. Perhaps your team is power deficient but has a ton of starting pitchers. In that case, you can trade from your depth to add a few home runs. If you give up one point in pitching to win three in home runs and RBI, then you made a good trade.
Sometimes you’ll receive an offer that doesn’t directly help you but is too good to pass up. Immediately after an ESPN draft, I was offered David Ortiz (DH only) and Brandon Moss for Brandon Belt and Chase Headley. The deal unbalanced my roster a bit, but the pair I received were the two best players in the deal – at least based on my preseason analysis.
You know all of this. What I see people forget is…
Trading 102 – Don’t help your rival more than yourself
It’s not enough to benefit from a trade, you also have to make sure that your rival doesn’t benefit more than you. The exception is if they are miles ahead or behind you. If a rival has a similar quality roster but a problem in their outfield, it’s in your interest to watch them squirm. They might be able to trade you that closer you need, but if that helps your team less than an outfielder helps his, you should probably find a closer elsewhere.
The tricky part of this lesson is that there are other owners in your league and some of them may not follow this tactic. A leaguemate and frequent reader spat on my preseason offer of Marlon Byrd for Sergio Santos, even though he didn’t need relievers and did need an everyday outfielder. At the time, Santos wasn’t even the obvious front runner for the job. My rival recognized that I was in unprecedented waters with only two closers (I usually roster five in this 12 team league), and I also owned nine viable outfielders and a prospect in a five outfielder format.
So I turned around and dealt Gregory Polanco for Fernando Rodney. He’s not the best closer, but he’ll get me some saves. Meanwhile, the guy who spurned my original offer was peeved. Sometimes you have to make a judgment call if it helps your team “enough.” Maybe he should have taken Byrd after all.
Conversely, in this same league, one of the owners had a thin outfield before Avisail Garcia and Josh Hamilton hit the disabled list. I still have eight viable outfielders (and Justin Ruggiano), so I’m the obvious trade partner. But I don’t need anything and he does. As such, we’re not making a trade if I don’t come out the clear winner. He’ll probably have to solve his roster problem via the waiver wire.
Stream your way out of a catastrophe
What if you were the owner who lost Garcia and Hamilton? What you should do is stream (if allowed) based on batter/pitcher matchups, park, and handedness until a solution falls in your lap. Guys like Chris Heisey, Dayan Viciedo, Garrett Jones, Jesus Guzman, and Lucas Duda are drawing good positions in the lineup. They’ll give you acceptable production if carefully cycled until something better comes along.
The harder part is catching one of those breakout studs before your rivals.
Relievers can save you from bad starts
Non-closing relievers are oft overlooked in most roto leagues, but they can save your season. If you wound up short a few pitchers, dealing with injuries, or digging out from a Jordan Zimmermann clunker, then a few relievers can easily set you right. If done properly, you’ll get an elite strikeout rate, ERA, and WHIP. The downside to this strategy is that it can negatively affect your win total. You can mitigate this effect by using multi-inning middle relievers like Adam Ottovino and Brad Hand, but they’re usually less elite in the other categories.
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I’m not sure about “Trading 102 – Don’t help your rival more than yourself.”
I think people get too caught up in it. For a lot of situations, it makes sense to “lose” the trade compared to your trading partner as long as the trade improves you against the other 10 (or however many) owners.
If you are going to help your rival, we can trade all day long.
Well, I’m obviously not going to help a team I am fighting with for the last paying spot in the standings.
But in a lot of cases, if a trade is win-win, you shouldn’t worry too much if the other guys “win” is bigger than yours.
Agree completely. Always pull the trigger on a win-win trade. Falling to do so is essentially costing you ground against 10 players. Plus, it’s hard to know who wins any trade until all is said and done. Unless there are exception circumstances, make your own team better.
You’ve got to also build trade relationships. Walking away from a win-win trade is not a good way to do this.
Jones has it right. If you can beat out 10 of 11 other teams from a trade, do it! Additionally, you can lose a trade to your partner if what he gains doesn’t exactly hurt you but does hurt the other teams in the league. ie: You are in second place and have little wiggle room to gain on first. But you trade Hamilton. The guy who gets Hamilton passes first place in SB’s. You just gained a point on first. It’s picking nits but it’s a way to win.
That’s an end of the year tactic. And a good one.
Exactly Brad. Yes.
One of the keys to trading, to me, is to retain approachability. Most times you are playing wtih your mates so you should be able to talk to them about trades no problem. But if you develop a rep of always ripping people off or offering lopsided deals, owners tend to avoid trades with you out of spite. If you make a few ‘even’ looking trades but benefit your team more because you are clued into what it takes to win, then this invites the more reluctant folks to make more offers to you.
Plus you can win out on volume if you take small upgrades along the way. Figuratively speaking, There is no need to a hit homerun with every deal (a common poor approach). If you make 10 trades and win 7 of them, you are likely in the hunt to win.
The tricky part is finding a long standing league where 10 trades are made all season. For a typical 12 roto, I find that the equilibrium number of trades is around 5-10 league wide. Usually it takes several years to get to that point of few trades.
Sometimes you need to give someone a reason to trade. Last year when I was in 4th place I traded with the 5th place team, even we though were fighting over the last playoff slot. I needed hitting, he needed pitching. I traded Cain for his Adam Jones. We both made the playoffs (with me having the league’s best record.)
I told him “That owner in 3rd place is a piece of shit who makes bad roster moves and terrible trade offers. He doesn’t deserve to make the playoffs while our season ends early.” The other owner agreed and ended up stealing that guy’s playoff spot.
“Sometimes you’ll receive an offer that doesn’t directly help you but is too good to pass up. Immediately after an ESPN draft, I was offered David Ortiz (DH only) and Brandon Moss for Brandon Belt and Chase Headley. The deal unbalanced my roster a bit, but the pair I received were the two best players in the deal – at least based on my preseason analysis.”
i always live by this. i will make an overall upgrade even if it doesnt immediately help me. i always want to buy low on guys regardless if the need is there or not. people get too caught up in needs
On that last point, any recommendations on SP-eligible relievers? I like the strategy, but all my slots where RPs could go (only 3) are filled with closers. I don’t use all my SP slots every day, though, so a reliever in there would be great.
There aren’t many SP eligible relievers, at least in ESPN leagues, but the most interesting candidates I could find are Todd Redmond, Yumiero Petit, Tyler Thornburg, Carlos Torres, Zach Britton, Justin Grimm, Kevin Slowey, and Ross Detwiler. Nobody terribly exciting, mostly middle-relief type of guys, but it’s a useful strategy that can help your rate stats and pick up the occasional win or hold.
I was that “guy” who spurned your offer. I also held of using the phrase “praising with faint damn” when I read your overviews of our two drafts, both of which used words which suggested humility but, at the end of the day, just showed your smarts. Another commenter added as much to the latter draft piece. Don’t get me wrong, you have a reason to be sure of yourself, as you are very good. But while you started off strong, so many of your pieces seem more about how right you are in all of your moves. And now, how wrong anyone is to deny them.
To whit, you offered Byrd and Perez. You subsequently dropped BOTH of them, since no one wanted them (including you). And I always thought there was a great likelihood that Santos would close; just because you didn’t, well, that actually made you wrong. And I didn’t need an OF you intended to drop, because I thought he should be dropped myself, while also having Bruce, Holliday, Cruz, Aoki, de Aza, Ethier and Young (and, at the time, G. Jones). Considering that my offense is fine, a throwaway OFer (as you did throw him away) was not worth a guy who I (rightly) thought would close. As you said, you usually want five CL. Me not giving you one is now a case where I should have done it? Come on, Brad. (And I also have Rendon as a U, since the rest of my lineup is stacked, so it’s not like I need all of those OFers.)
And have noted repeatedly that managers are dumb to go for prospects over win-now. Well, um, Polanco. I know what you value and don’t, so it just means that because you got a CL (and have since bragged on the site that you only had two before and now have four) only means you found a whale, not that I should have known better and given you one for two players you almost immediately dropped.
You are too good a writer, analyst, and fantasy player to give in to your ego with so many of your pieces. We all know that you are smart and a successful player… but it often would help to learn from what you learned from when things didn’t go your way. I will never win your home league, since I wouldn’t think to offer what you do (even though I see you get goods in return from others), despite myself not helping you out in the same way. And that’s fine (I’m fine kicking butt in the other league, for what it’s worth). Just don’t use me not playing into the tendencies to prey on others as fodder for propping up your bona fides. You don’t need to, we know and respect them and, the most important thing, your readers would benefit so much more if you were open to analysis that didn’t always point out where you are in the right.
Well obviously I did think Santos would close, as I mentioned in many draft season articles. But the Blue Jays were still saying Janssen would be ready at the time or that it might be Delabar if not. So I wanted to gamble on them choosing the best pitcher.
Sorry if it comes off as ego stroking when I give examples from my own experience. Those happen to be the examples I have and I think they serve as better advice than hypotheticals since they actually happened.
I’m also not suggesting you should have made the trade. I probably wouldn’t have in your shoes, although I obviously think Byrd has more utility in an OPS league than you do. I am using that particular circumstance to point out that intentionally not trading with someone doesn’t always stop them from getting what they want.
If I’m reading Will’s comment correctly, after not getting Santos for Byrd you dropped him? Seems like that should have been included in the piece, especially if you are going to suggest in conclusion that the Santos owner should have made the trade. I’ve never regretted turning down a trade offer for a player who hit the waiver wire shortly after I turned down trading for him…
Yea I was forced to drop somebody when Chapman hit the DL. I still only had 2 closers at the time. I had shopped Byrd around the league and found that nobody was biting, so I thought I could pick him back up once he cleared waivers. I couldn’t, but I got an upgrade in Abraham Almonte.
While Will was a bit TL;DL on that, he definitely does have a point. Bringing up “Marlon Byrd for Sergio Santos” as a trade that someone would be kicking themselves for losing out on is crazy, unless you happen to be a 5 OF league or something else that depresses the value of a potential closer compared to hitters.
Your statements in 102 are also terribly hypocritical:
1. Never make a trade that helps someone else more than you
2. However, other people should make trades with you that help them less (So basically, you should assume that others are too dumb to know #1)
3. In particular, if someone has a need, you should really squeeze them for value.
4. You *need* closers. You offered Byrd for Santos, which most people would see as you “winning” that trade.
In general, these rules read kind of like “Never do this, unless you are the guy I am trading with, please.” While that kind of strategy might work in a league where you can always find a chump, in a competitive league it will just lead to other owners seeing you as impossible to deal with and not worth their time. Meanwhile, you’ll lose out on win-win trades that help you and your trading partner get some distance from the pack.
As a general pattern, leagues with a lot of owners following the what you’ve stated tend to have very low liquidity and trading. That is seldom a good thing for either the play or the competition. Teams who drafted into good balance tend to win in this case, while teams with a ton of value but worse balance sink because no one is willing to exchange their surpluses at a reasonable exchange rate.
It’s a 12 team 5OF + UTIL league with OPS instead of AVG. The format and scoring makes Byrd a must own based on my numbers. One “metric” I use for judging fringe trades is distance from waiver wire. At the time of that trade, I judged both players to be equidistant from the waiver wire. Byrd made it there because he was on my overstuffed roster while Santos received a role upgrade a couple weeks after the offer. When you look at it now, sure it’s not a great offer. At the time, it was solid.
You make some good points at the end there about the value of balance. I do focus most of my attention on balance in a draft unless there is crazy value to be had. I’m not sure I can get behind your normative conclusion that low liquidity is seldom good. It’s an equilibrium outcome, goodness is irrelevant.
That section could be better written to allow for situations where losing ground to one owner is outweighed by gaining on 10 others. In my experience, the people I can trade with are usually the ones I’m trying hardest to beat, which takes most offers off the table. At that point, you’re trying to find differences in valuation rather than an actually mutually beneficial trade.
Just want to reiterate, though, that I think Brad is a stupidly skilled player and analyst, and always plays within the rules (even if I don’t use the same approach).
You suggested that “Maybe he should have taken Byrd after all.” Sorry if I somehow misread that as not being a suggestion.
While some of the criticisms in these comments seem like they may have a basis, I must say I am really impressed with the poster being able to respond in a measured way and not turn it into some kind of flame war. Nobody is perfect, so the possibility that the poster wrote something that unreasonably discounted other points of view doesn’t really affect my sense of whether he is a worthy/reliable source in general. But coming off as thin-skinned and defensive in the comments would have.
I mean, it’s not like you deserve a medal for just being reasonable and thoughtful, but, um, on second thought, sometimes on the Internet it seems like you do 🙂 Good job by you!
By the way, this approach to criticism/disagreement should be Trade Rule 105 or something. It only takes one snide comment about a trade offer or someone else’s roster in general to shut down a trading relationship for good. On the other hand, if you assume that every person who makes a stupid/insulting (in your view) trade offer isn’t necessarily a stupid owner or intentionally trying to insult you, and take a minute to respond briefly but considerately on the merits (“Can’t do this one, man — I just think Pence is way more valuable than Prado”) you might leave the door open for later.
Just to illustrate the point, there is a guy in my league who rejected an offer last year with something along the lines of “are you freakin’ kidding? how does that remotely help me? have you looked at my roster? I don’t need pitching. why would I do that trade? no thanks” (not sure if that fully conveys it, but the tone was really nasty and dismissive, and personal). I thought I was offering him some value, and sometimes people will take what they see as value even when there is no specific need, so I didn’t think it was a crazy offer. But that’s not really the point. Even if it was a crazy offer, even if I got twisted around and talked myself into thinking that what was really a self-serving/one-sided offer was actually remotely fair, he should have remained cordial. On my better days I’ve made plenty of fair trades (and on my worse days, I’ve been fleeced a few times), but the tone of his reply was so nasty that I’m done with him. If I was on fire and he offered to trade me a bucket of water, I’d reject it on principle.