Last season I kicked off April with some early trade reviews from the Ottoneu community, and today I’ll do the same, hoping to peek under the hood of some early player perceptions as transactions start to take shape across the fantasy baseball world.
As a quick reminder, Ottoneu is a keeper system by design that shifts the balance just short of traditional dynasty leagues, and offers a variety of scoring systems (including H2H).
Welcome to the Ottoneu keeper deadline, 2018 edition. Today (11:59 PM EDT) is the final day to make that difficult decision about your on-the-bubble players before rosters lock and you set your sights on your upcoming league auction. Per the rules:
Between the end of the Major League Baseball regular season and the end of arbitration, players may be cut. Between the end of arbitration and the keeper deadline, players may be cut or traded. After the keeper deadline and before the auction draft, teams may not cut or trade any players.
Since the keeper deadline also serves as a de-factor trade deadline, I’ve lined up a few final resources for you below and I’ve asked a handful of Ottoneu experts (Justin, Chad, Brad) to check your questions and comments periodically throughout the day to offer their input on your toughest decisions. You don’t play this game? You should, but even if your non-Ottoneu keeper deadline is still a few weeks away, feel free to fire your questions below and we’ll do our best to give you feedback (for context, don’t forget to let us know details about your league format).
2018 is here, and the dawn of a new year is the best time to reevaluate your overall fantasy strategy. But before digging into the finer points of roster construction, auction value calculations, and post-post-hype sleepers, January is also the perfect time to step back and ask whether it might be time to trade in your entire fantasy experience for one of the more advanced, up-and-coming fantasy platforms around.
This is a shameless plug for Ottoneu, a fantasy sports platform so addicting that it has also launched a community of more than 1,000 hardcore baseball fans that sleep and eat baseball year round. But don’t take my word for it. There are many reasons why you should try Ottoneu (including some exciting new features launching in 2018), but today I want you to hear from some of the “rookies” who just finished up their first full year of Ottoneu in 2017. This growing community of raving fans is a big part of the Ottoneu experience, and their Season One feedback may help you make the final decision to drive your own league to Ottoneu in 2018.
I once took an excellent training course on effective communication. At the beginning of the course, our teacher started with a game:
In my hand is an envelop with a $10 bill inside. I want one of you in this room to take the deal I’m offering you. I’m going to ask you a simple trivia question and, if you get it right, you get the ten dollars. But if you get it wrong, you owe me two dollars. However, if you don’t know the answer, you can ask one person in the room for help. Who wants to volunteer?
After a few moments of people looking at each other wondering what the catch might be, I volunteered. “How many states make up the United States?”, he asked.
I have made a lot of trades in my fantasy baseball “career”. It’s one of the parts of the game I enjoy most, but I’ve learned over the years that there is a wide range of comfort among owners when it comes to shaking up their rosters via trade. For some fantasy owners, the process and preparation required to put together a good trade is a burden, and for others the uncertainty of the resulting impact (“will this really help my team?”) and/or the feedback from their league (“did I win or lose this trade?”) is enough to cause anxiety.
Part of the reason I enjoy fantasy trades is because I’ve had the benefit of corporate negotiation training throughout my professional career. While it’s certainly true that my fantasy baseball experience has had a positive impact on my professional bargaining skills, there is no doubt my vocational training has made me more confident (and successful) in the fantasy “trade room”, too. Today I’ll share a little of what I’ve learned throughout my own trade history in hopes of offering something you can use as well.
How to Talk Trade
All too often it’s not necessarily what you say but how you say it that makes the difference. What follows are some alternative ways to phrase common trade responses that might make the difference between closing a deal or stopping one early in it’s tracks.
Hard to believe, but it’s almost February. Almost all the top free agents have signed. It’s almost prospect season, and it’s almost time for pitchers and catchers to report. All these things add up to a baseball season that is almost here.
Patience.
But patience is a luxury we don’t have these days in fantasy leagues like Ottoneu that have a keeper deadline (January 31st) fast approaching. Auction formats make player valuation even more complex, and now that it’s crunch time, tough decisions need to be made. How comfortable are you hanging onto that $20 Corey Dickerson while the risk of a possible trade out of COL remains a real possibility in February or March? Despite the power and the incoming fences, how does Giancarlo Stanton’s unavoidable injury history influence your decision to keep at $56? How much value, if any, has Zack Greinke really lost moving to Arizona? Is he a $35 starting pitcher? Everybody loves Kyle Schwarber as the next best thing (C and OF!), but where’s the line? $20? $25? $30?
It’s cliche, but January is as good a time as ever to consider changing some behaviors (probably in response to learning from our mistakes). Let’s dive into how this annual opportunity to manufacture inspiration can help us improve our fantasy trade skills by reviewing why we trade in the first place.
The foundation of trade is mutual gain. It really is that simple. Whether we’re discussing economics or fantasy sports, trade is beneficial because it enables each party to get more of what they want at a (perceived) cost lower than what they could produce it for themselves.
If trade is mutually beneficial, it stands to reason you should consider doing it more often. In the context of your Ottoneu league (where trading is active and sophisticated), if you’re going to make more trades, you’re going to have to make more trade offers. Some owners are reluctant to make trade offers, so let me encourage you to live a little more dangerously this year because, in addition to improving your roster, making trade offers will provide you with a lot of additional benefits.
One of the most exciting aspects of fantasy baseball is trading. It can also be the most frustrating as well. We’ve already talked about those stupid early season offers where people are constantly testing your knowledge and your patience — something like his David Freese and Livan Hernandez for my Jose Bautista was a personal favorite. But now we’re two months in, things have settled in for the most part, your waiver wire has been picked clean, and now everyone is trying to improve their squad via the trade. Getting the right deal done is tough enough, but the process to get there can be a tenuous path riddled with both ignorance and annoyance. Today we’re going to go through some do’s and don’ts which may help expedite the process with little fanfare or, at the least, keep you from wanting to choke the life out of a moronic competitor. Read the rest of this entry »