Trade Season is Upon Us
I’m a big fan of patience in fantasy baseball. I think it’s essential to success. Obviously, there are times when aggressive action is needed so you can get the year’s J.D. Martinez or Michael Brantley (hard to remember that the top 30 pick from this year was an afterthought heading into ’14), but by and large I will lean toward the side of patience throughout April and into early May. I’m not averse to an April trade, but they are few and far between for me as I’m often willing to give my drafted players at least a month before any major moves, especially with the top half of the draft.
However, as we approach the two-month mark, we actually start to get a feel for our fantasy teams. Strengths and weaknesses are becoming more evident and with that, trades become a bigger part of the equation. With that in mind, I have some dos & don’ts that will improve your trading experience this season and going forward. I’ve been refining these for years and they’ve served me well thus far.
DON’T tell the league to make you offers – If you are serious about improving your team with trades, then sending a mass email with guys you’re willing to part with followed by a call to action for other owners to engage you for those players isn’t the way to go. First off, the players available are usually the flotsam of said team and thus there is little attention paid to the email in the first place, but then the idea that they’d have to do the work to acquire these players is ludicrous.
You can send out a trade block email just to make it known that you’re in the market, but only do so in addition to also going out and making your own offers. Expecting the league to come flooding with offers after a trade block email is silly. How often do you really respond to those? I know, never. So why would you expect the rest of the league to respond to yours?
There is one exception – If you are already talking to someone about moving a blue chip prospect to strengthen your title chances or selling off studs to look toward the future, it is beneficial for both you and the rest of your league to announce your intentions in a league wide email so that you give everyone a fair shot at the guy(s) in question and also get yourself the best deal possible. Now, you don’t have to do this, but there’s zero downside for you.
You can let the initial trade partner know at the outset, “hey, I’m going to give everyone a crack here, but I like the deal we’re discussing” and he/she should be totally cool with that. Meanwhile you let the league know, “hey, there is a leader in the clubhouse for the services of player x, if you’re interested please let me know, otherwise I’ll be moving forward. I just wanted to give everyone an equal shot at this high quality asset.” Again, there is just no downside for you to do this.
DON’T downplay the guys you’re getting in an attempt to advance the negotiation – The minute you start sending me emails telling me how bad my players that you want are or will be in the future is the minute I know you’re a) lying to get the deal you want as you clearly believe they will be status quo or better going forward or b) stupid because you’re purposely taking on bad assets. I highly doubt it’s ever b), so ditch the negativity and just play it straight up. Just think about how ridiculously it reads for the other guy as you’re doing a to 10-point teardown of Tulowitzki as you try to convince someone to trade him for Zack Cozart and Aaron Harang.
DO try to make sure the deal is even for both sides – The definition of “even” is contextual and varied based on your league, but the goal is to make sure that both of you come out of a deal feeling your team has improved. Win-win trades are absolutely the way to go. If you purposely try to rip someone off in a trade, you’re burning a bridge and possibly losing a trade partner for rest of his/her time in that league if not several.
Remember the old customer service adage, a satisfied customer might tell 2-3 other friends, but a dissatisfied customer will definitely tell 10 or more. If you become known as the ripoff artist in the league, you will have a hard time consistently winning unless you draft perfectly and then ace the waiver wire all season long. We’re not in customer service per se, but I think it still plays in terms of your reputation for dealing within a league.
Obviously some deals will work out overwhelmingly in one side’s favor by the time we review in October, but that doesn’t mean it was a ripjob when it was consummated and that’s really what I’m talking about here. I’m focusing on trading hurt assets, taking advantage of breaking news that everyone might not be privy to, and things of that ilk.
I understand it is everyone owner’s responsibility to complete their due diligence before making a deal and they would have no one to blame but themselves if they got hosed by dealing for a guy who had just gotten hurt, but that doesn’t mean it won’t still hit your credibility. If you make people afraid to trade with you, you may benefit in the short-term with that first ripoff trade, but you’ll do more harm than good to your chances in the long-term.
DO put thought into your offers – When sending an offer, focus more on the guy you’re trading with than yourself. You know how no one wants to hear about your fantasy team when you’re telling them about it at a party? The same thing applies when you start off a proposal discussing the guys you want your trade partner to give up. Begin by letting them know what they can get out of dealing with you. “It looks like you need some home runs, which I can definitely supply. I think you might be interested in Mark Teixeira.
Meanwhile, I was thinking a trade of Teix for *insert player(s) you want in return* would work well for both of us. You’re five homers away from three points and then another handful away from another group of points” or something to that affect. In that scenario, you’ve made just a cursory mention of who you want while focusing the attention on how much they can benefit from talking trade with you. If you start the email by telling me how poorly your pitching has gone and that’s why you need my Jake Odorizzi, I’m unlikely to care. At all.
DO respond to ALL offers – There’s nothing like sending out an offer and getting crickets. Just respond, it doesn’t take long. I’ll go so far as to say that even if the offer is utter garbage in your eyes, simply reply saying, “no thanks, that doesn’t improve my team and the offer would need A TON of work to get talks going.” That’s direct without being entirely rude and it gets home the point that he’s nowhere near a trade with track he is on. I will freely admit that this is still something I struggle with at times. If I’m not interested and don’t respond right away, sometimes I will forget to circle back and then four days later when the would-be trade partner pulls the deal, that’s when I realize I completely left it unanswered. Don’t do that.
DON’T veto trades – OK, maybe I shouldn’t make a 100% blanket statement as there are some outlandish situations where it may be called for, but by & large vetoes are utter trash. Don’t impress your player values on the rest of the league. What if at the end of April last year, someone was buying into Jeff Samardzija’s surge as a breakout and decided to move Prince Fielder for him after worrying that Fielder’s slow start might be a continuation from 2013’s downturn (relative to his previous excellence) or the start of something worse.
You may not like it and you may not have accepted the deal if you were the Fielder owner, but there isn’t something overly objectionable about that deal even before hindsight because we don’t know the reasoning behind the Fielder owner making the move. Maybe he’s a better scout than you are and wants to roll the dice. Who are you to say he can’t?
Maybe he thought Fielder just wasn’t going to put it together as the season went on (and of course now we know he got hurt and his season was over in mid-May), but the point is, he/she paid their money into the league and unless you can prove collusion (and good luck doing that), it’s a deal that has to pass. That’s an extreme example, but few things about this game piss me off more than trade vetoing, especially in a cash league where adults have paid to manage their team however they damn desire.
Just because you might not make a move doesn’t mean it’s unequivocally wrong. Unless you’ve got a collusion charge that will stick, stop vetoing trades. It’s pathetic. You don’t know the future any more than any other league mate so stop pretending you do. You suck if you do vetoes. You really do.
DON’T tell the league to make you offers on your guys – Yes, I’m repeating this one because it is important (though not more important than avoiding stupid vetoes). “Hey guys, I need power and I have Definitely Regressing in the outfield, Never Good to Begin With in the infield and Piece of Crap Pitcher I Got On Waivers Eight Minutes Ago now available for trade. Send me offers! Thanks.”
Yeah, no. And it’s not even that much better if the three players are Superstar Bat, Stolen Base King and Ace Arm, either. But it’s usually the garbage that is being made available AND you now want me to do the work for you to acquire the worthless pieces. Gee whiz, thanks. Now these kinds of emails are something worth vetoing.
Who are some trade targets at this point? Guys that are underperforming that we should be actively looking to acquire?
Kluber a week ago. Boom, high five me!
Strasburg seems like another good target, assuming you believe he’s not hurt.
I can’t imagine he comes cheap regardless of performance.
I’d say Carrasco fits that bill based off his strong FIP and xFIP. A number of the top Aces are in similar situations but most have rebounded recently, Carrasco still seems gettable though.
As for hitters I’m less confident in my picks for resurgence. One guy I might look at would be Jay Bruce, but so many of his peripherals are on the decline I would have a hard time actively seeking him out.
Awesome article. Spot on.
I disagree , I thought it was mostly horrible.
As the author comes off as kind of a lazy schmuck who probably misses out on a lot of trades because of it, and he doesn’t even realize it.
Blazing hot!
Please explain grassy. It seemed like he was encouraging people to do the exact opposite of be lazy.
I thought I drafted a killer team, and I’m in the hunt. But I went too heavy on offense, especially in the outfield, and since our mid-March draft, I have made nine one-for-one trades. This is a crazy pace I hope slows down. But Paul’s rules are what lets this happen for me–respond to every offer, no matter how crazy, and say, this is the guy I like in the offer or if you like this guy, how about this? Then things get done! And the game is about fun, and let’s admit it, trades are fun.
Compliment other owners when they make good pickups, It makes ’em want to work with you. I used this to trade my Keuchel for the Klubot… the day before his 18K gem.
I did tell the league to make me offers and I believe it worked out in my favor. It kickstarted a bunch of teams hoping to win this year that probably should have taken a bit longer to see where they were at (the 8th place team trading their first round pick, for example, to the 11th place team) while I (tied for first at the time) traded Boegarts and a 9th for Cano and 2nd.
Overall, I view this league as pretty smart, but saying I was buying forced teams that hoped to compete for this year to make premature moves if they wanted what could be the best players available at the deadline. Panic moves are often not smart moves.
That response is pretty rare, and that is Paul’s point. It might have been better if you sent out a few offers after posting on the message board and used your offers to anchor the trade discussion. But it all depends on knowing your league
Very true, and I guess that was the kind of point I was trying to make regarding knowing the league. In the past some in the league have been prone to making moves because others are making moves and I was trying to prey on that. Of course, I had to make a move or two to show I wasn’t just blowing smoke, but the moves I made were also calculated offers.
Great post. I was just thinking about some of these things. It’s that time of year! For me, trading in April is a continuation of the auction/draft. When building a team, I focus on acquiring as much value as possible and don’t concern myself too much with having a balanced team. Throughout April, I continue to look for ways to build up the value of my team, be it through the waiver wire or trades. I’m still basing most of those decisions on my pre-draft projections. Now we’re at the point in the year where I start looking at the category standings to assess my strengths and weaknesses.
I hate when trade offers get crickets. I spend time making sure the deal is fair and benefits both teams, and then nothing. I had to learn the hard way to make sure that I withdraw these offers after a day or two. I had let an offer sit for a week and got no response until the other owner accepted it immediately after one of the players I wanted got injured. I thought about petitioning for a reversal, but I came to believe that in this case the timing was just a coincidence. But it made for a valuable lesson.
Above all else, trading has to be a fun process. You can’t take it too seriously because that great player you just snagged could fall victim to a tweaked oblique or violent sneeze.
If I have an offer sit for over a day, I’ll pull back the offer and re-offer it just so they get a few more notifications via email. Of course, if I know the person, I can contact them in various ways. But I have found that not all trade offers with friends warrant direct contact.
Hi Paul, thoughts on Wada ROS ? Do you like him more than Evoldi ?
In some leagues, trading is near impossible. The is so strong that even recent waiver wire pickups and late round draftees become untouchable.
People are always trying to pull off the two mediocre players for one superstar trade, which is never going to be accepted. The few trades I’ve been able to get done over the last few seasons have involved two very good players for one better-than-very-good-but-not-superstar.
The most useful advice I can give is to simply list for the Fangraphs crowd the players that I’d be most open to trading right now, and which ones I’d be least open to trading. Perhaps other people can post their own subjective feelings on their roster, so people can get a sense of which players are likely to be more available for trade:
I would be quite open to trading: Howie Kendrick, David Ortiz, John Axford, Yordano Ventura
I would not be very interested in trading: Miguel Cabrera, Chris Sale, Christian Yelich, Chris Sale, Rubby de la Rosa
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I’m not so sure underachievers are the best trade targets, especially when it seems pretty obvious that they’re likely to turn it around sooner than later. People don’t want to sell players when they know their value is at its lowest. What people don’t like on their team is risk—injury risk, role-removal risk. That’s why I think closers tend to be quite tradable, as people know any closer is a week or two of bad performance away from being demoted.
Strasburg and Tulowitzki are #1 and #3 on yahoo’s most traded, and you can see why. People are nervous about their health, which makes them tradable.
Gave it a shot there with the html hyperlink. Didn’t go as planned. My bad.
I agree that vetoes suck, but they are a necessary evil in some dynasty/keeper leagues. It’s really the only way to protect a foolish owner from himself. For example, I joined a brand new 30 team dynasty with 40 man rosters this year. Before the inaugural season even started, one team traded away Hanley and Shields for 5 Dback prospects (none of which were Archie Bradley). Another team traded away JD Martinez for Josh Bell straight up. If those trades hadn’t been vetoed, the competitive balance of the league would’ve been thrown way out of whack. It’s one thing to trade away aging stars at the deadline for high upside young players/prospects, but to do it before the season even starts without letting the rest of the league know you want to move those players? You have to have a veto system for scenarios like that.
In the keeper leagues I commission, we have a rule that if you’re going to have a ‘fire sale’ of your top players for younger guys/prospects, you have to make it known to everyone in the league before you make a deal, so that everyone has a chance to make an offer. This prevents all the ‘I woulda given you way more for Player X!!’ messages and outcries about vetoes/collusion that typically come up from those types of trades.
I don’t agree. First off the idea that you have to protect someone from themselves is arrogant in that it suggests you (or the veto’er) knows best over the others.
We don’t reverse a draft pick when someone makes a “dumb” pick, so why tell them how to trade? I don’t think either of those needed vetoing. What does the player really learn from that? If you really wanna protect a player from himself, let him make the bunk trade and feel the sting.
Vetoes are disguised as protecting other owners from themselves, but they’re really ALWAYS just jealousy and sour grapes unless collusion is involved. Someone is just mad they didn’t get the sweetheart deal. The idea that competitive balance needs to be perfect is flawed, too, because then again, you’d have to reverse draft picks that were too good or too bad. And we certainly don’t do that.
Vetoes impress your player valuations on the rest of the league. They’re garbage. I just don’t agree w/the idea that they’re useful outside of collusion (which is pretty difficult to prove).
Thanks for the response Paul. You certainly make some fair points, especially about reversing draft picks; I had never considered that angle or compared vetoes to that before, but it does make a lot of sense. Like I said, I’m not a fan of vetoes in most cases, and I agree that the majority of vetoes and complaints about trades do stem from jealousy/sour grapes/other owners being mad that they weren’t the team making the deal. But I still think there are a few rare situations where puting a trade up for vote is the right thing to do.
Regarding ‘impressing your player valuations on the rest of the league,’ what if, as was the case in those 2 trade examples I gave, literally every other team besides the 2 making the deal voiced their opposition to it? If 95% of the league thinks a trade is so overwhelmingly one-sided that it needs to be vetoed, then you’re not impressing your valuation on the players because the trade being wholly unfair and one team getting far and away the better players IS the consensus valuation.
I traded Matt Kemp for Mike Trout in 2011 in a keeper league and it got vetoed. I left that league because of it.
I think you need to take other factors into account. If the owner is new and the owner won’t “feel the sting” for a few years, you absolutely veto a trade like that. Chances are that owner checks out within a year and your other dedicated owners have to deal with the mess.
You don’t reverse draft picks (assuming a slow draft) for two reasons: (1) because a bad draft choice hurts the one team, but benefits the others equally, unlike a bad trade (2) because draft picks are usually rational: you pick one of the next guys on an a generally accepted list
I’m very much against vetoes in most instances because you shouldn’t impose your values on others, but I’m not going to be rigid
Here’s the thing, what if you’re just wrong? What if you veto something where the person y’all were trying to protect would’ve netted a win?
If said person is going to check out because of this trade, then they are going to check out regardless and maybe shouldn’t be in the league if it’s a serious one.
The problem with vetoes is they pretend to know the future.
That’s right, I would never be 100% certain. However, the error costs are low:
In the rare trade I/we would veto, the cost of a mistaken veto is very low. The odds that the “loser” actually wins the trade is very small. The magnitude of the gain you are depriving the “loser” of is also very small, as they will still be able to trade the player for a similar package.
But a mistaken trade approval in the above instance has a higher probability of damaging the loser/benefiting the winner and a higher magnitude if the loser actually loses.
I think you would like decision theory.
I think fair trades are actually extremely hard to execute, because rarely does someone have enough of a cushion in a strong category to give up a major one category contributor in order to improve in another. A few years back I made a big trade built around improving my pitching staff. My offense was extremely good at the time, and I had to give up some of that offense to obtain pitching. It was a good trade for me, but my offense spent the rest of the season sliding while my pitching spent the rest of the season surging. What made it work for me wasn’t the offense for pitching aspect of the trade, but the present for future aspect. I gave up a lot of cheap young talent in order to obtain quality veterans on expiring contracts.
Which brings me to the only trades that can be consistently executed in a fair way (which isn’t to say category for category or buy low sell high type trades can’t happen, they’re just really hard). The present for future trade, this doesn’t work in non-keeper leagues for the obvious reason, but its the only trade that I think really consistently works apart from different valuations of players by different owners. But for it to work you need one owner to have given up on this year and decided to build for next year, which frankly, I don’t think anyone should be doing in May no matter how shitty your first month and a half was.
People that veto trades are truly a$$holes. The entire concept of vetoed trades doesn’t make sense on any level. The idea the league has to weigh in on what players are worth is insane. A trade by nature is going against conventional wisdom, especially the best, boldest trades. Why would we then subject the permission of these trades to conventional wisdom? The league conventional wisdom is wrong on who is “winning” or “losing” a trade 50% of the time, as if that matters anyway.
They dynasty league examples above are terrible too. So you are telling me you are in a 30 team dynasty league w 40 rosters and the league didn’t approve of a team that did what nearly every well run bottom feeder franchise would do which is stock up on prospects for the future? What’s the point of your league again?
Any owner that objects to a trade should be forced to make a binding counter offer that the vetoed owner can unilaterally decide on, especially if these trades are so “obviously” offensive.