Trade Intransigence In Keeper And Dynasty Leagues

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You try to acquire a top prospect using a high quality established veteran – say J.D. Martinez or Charlie Blackmon. You’re quickly rebuffed. Sensing the possibility of market distortion, you try to sell your top prospects – like Nomar Mazara. You’re offered piles of dross.

Or how about this? You try to sell an over-30 core player. Crickets. You try to buy an over-30 core player. You’re told, and I quote “there’s no one on your roster that would get Robinson Cano.” Said roster still includes Martinez, Blackmon, Mazara, and many other quality keepers.

How do you overcome these sorts of stalemates when you’re told both sides of a market doesn’t exist. If young players are exorbitantly expensive due to their youth and long term value, then it follows that old players should be relatively cheap. If post-peak veterans are still worth boatloads because they help you win now, then younger talent should be more affordable?

This is the current state of affairs in my dynasty league, The Devil’s Rejects. I share a team with Chad Young. Eno Sarris also manages a separate roster in the 20 team, 45 player per team monstrosity. We can keep 28 players. Trading is allowed all offseason long with a month long pause for our 17 round slow draft.

Chad and I are trying to put the finishing touches on a competitive roster. Last year we finished sixth. The top five teams get paid. Presently, there is a high volume of rebuilding clubs. At least I think so, maybe it’s equilibrium for this league. However, the result is that a lot of the top talent resides on just a few rosters while several owners manage minor league squads.

That puts us in a challenging position. We need to acquire a few stars to supplement Martinez, Blackmon, and Kyle Seager at the top of our roster. Since the market is very resistant to trading players like A.J. Pollock, we thought we could patch things together with older guys like Cano. Nope.

We have actually used that approach with some success. We bought Ben Zobrist during the 2015 season and acquired Jayson Werth in October. The problem is that both players fit firmly in the roster glue category. We need more than adequate production.

It’s nice when I can say “here’s the problem, and here’s the solution.” I’m still searching for the answer to the mutually exclusive valuations in our league (Chad and I participate in the behavior too). I can see the behavioral tendencies that lead to this outcome. Everybody is trying to extract every last cent for their players. Nobody wants to be the guy who foolishly sold low.

Baseball has a way of making any fantasy trade risky. When we acquired Seager, we used Aaron Altherr as the centerpiece (there were other components to the trade). That seems pretty safe from our perspective yet there’s still a chance Altherr outperforms Seager next season. There may even be an alternate reality where Altherr busts out and turns into a 30/20 monster. In this case, we (rightly) chose to focus on expected value rather than agonizing over the risk of looking dumb. Presumably, Seager’s owner did the same by betting on some young players.

There’s also a tendency to adopt the valuations of others. Since we know Carlos Correa would have cost at least Andrew McCutchen before the 2015 season, that’s what we’re now asking for Mazara. When I originally joined the league, I would have taken either side of a Correa – Blackmon swap depending on the disposition of my team. Now I want more for my prospects.

Odubel Herrera may provide a better example of my own intransigence. I expected to cut him this winter for nearly the entire year. After some end-of-season analysis, Chad and I changed our opinion about his future. When an owner asked us about Herrera, we opened with Rougned Odor or a package for Pollock. That’s a hefty swing in valuation from borderline cut to Odor in a very short period of time.

When a league settles into these seemingly conflicting valuations, the best thing you can do is outperform your rivals in the draft and waiver wire. That gives you the flexibility to risk taking a loss in trades. That’s how the top team in our league built their monster roster.

Of course, “do better” is also pretty lousy advice. Chad and I will continue to patiently search for trade matches. If and when we find them, I’ll report on the strategies and tactics we used to seal the deal.