Trading Over the Final 4 Weeks

We’re just one day away from the final month of the season! As we head into the final four weeks, the impact that any individual player will have on your place in the standings, particularly the ratios, will continue to diminish. We’re also likely going up against imminent trade deadlines, so your chances to dramatically improve your team is quickly dwindling.

Right now, you need to essentially throw rest of season player values out the window and trade for needs (or make pickups) based on your position in the various statistical categories. Don’t worry about overpaying if you still expect the trade to net you positive points. Though obviously, you still want to make a trade that brings back the greatest value in return and gain you the most standings points, while also not giving a competitor a positive net gain to leave you no better off post-trade. However, if the best return offered to you is a player our auction calculator projects to earn $7 the rest of the way for your projected $13 player, it’s still absolutely worth accepting if you determine that doing so would gain you total points.

At various points during the season, I put together an Excel spreadsheet to help me determine which categories I could gain and lose points in, and how many. The exercise helps me identify the type of players to target and which players on my own team are tradeable. It looks like this:

Column A — the scoring metric you are analyzing
Column B — the points I could reasonably gain in the category without any transactions
Column C — the points I could reasonably lose in the category without any transactions
Column D — the points to gain, plus the absolute value of the points to lose
Total Rows — the points I could reasonably gain and lose in the hitting and pitching categories and in total

It is important to remember that we’re not attempting to be perfectly accurate by consulting rest of season projections for every fantasy team in your league. While such additional work couldn’t hurt, it would be far too time consuming and fail to provide enough incremental value given the small sample size those forecasts are over. This exercise simply helps you visualize how clustered the scoring categories are and which categories you’re more likely to gain or lose points in over the final month of the season. Remember that when performing this exercise, do not assume any future player pickups or trade acquisitions. It’s strictly based on your current team as it stands at the moment and the category standings.

Column D is an important column and could really assist you in your trade negotiations. It tells you which categories have the potential for the most total movement. The higher the number, the more urgency there is to improve in that category, or prevent a loss. A high number usually (but not always) means that there are many points to potentially gain, but that my team is also at great risk of losing points. Sometimes you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the standings in bunched up categories, in which case your high absolute point total will be almost all potential gains with limited loss risk. While the high totals are those I want to focus on shoring up, those categories with the lowest totals are my trade bait.

The ratio categories are a bit more difficult to assess. You could choose to really dive deep by looking at your total at-bats and innings pitched, then running various rest of season rates your team could conceivably record and calculate where your rates would end up given those various rest of season marks. But then you need to also remember that the teams around you could improve or decline in those same categories, so it’s not as easy as just considering the movement of your own team. For that reason, just eye ball it. No need to spend hours trying to forecast the future of every team in your league, when it’s going to be wrong anyway because other teams are going to make pickups and deal with injuries.

After you set up the categorical table above, you could then set up another worksheet detailing all of your players’ projected rest of season contributions. It might look something like this:

For this table, project whether each player on your roster will contribute positive (+), neutral (blank), or negative (-) value in each category over the rest of the season as compared to replacement level at his position. This enables you to quickly visualize who is contributing in which categories and how that relates to your teams’ strengths and weaknesses. Cross-reference this table with the one above and you will instantly learn who you should be looking to trade away, or even bench.

If my team is set in stolen bases, then Nasim Nuñez is not providing me with any value. I either bench him or try trading him away. If I’m atop the standings or close to it in home runs, RBI, and R, I’m earning little value from Kyle Schwarber. These two names would make for excellent targets for other teams needing the categories they generate the vast majority of their value from.

Trading From Depth

In my various fantasy leagues, I consistently see pretty good players sitting on a team’s bench. These are players who I believe have positive rest of season value and should be starting for a team. Whether the player is currently benched because he is in the midst of a cold streak and his owner is waiting until “he heats up” (one of the biggest mistakes a fantasy owner makes) or the owner is starting a better player at the position the reserve player qualifies for, this fantasy owner is giving up potential points.

On the surface, holding onto these players seems like a good idea. They provide a nice safety net in case of injury and peace of mind has emotional value. But you only accrue stats from your active players and guys sitting on your bench are worthless. Why go all season with a $5-$10 player just to have around in the event of an injury? What if that injury never occurs? You have just wasted an opportunity to parlay your depth into more production from your active roster.

So what’s the solution? A 2-for-1 trade. These are my favorite, though sometimes opposing owners dislike receiving them as they consider it a quantity for quality trade. But this type could still benefit the team receiving the two lesser quality players. By executing this type of trade, you use your depth to improve your active lineup, the group that actually affects your stats. You don’t necessarily have to trade your bench player either; instead, you could opt to trade the better player you currently have active at that position, along with another hitter you decide to upgrade. Move your currently benched player into the slot of the player you traded away and you just upgraded a position without downgrading somewhere else, assuming the player moving from reserve to active nearly replicates the one he replaced.

Trading is extremely hard and frustrating. Even if you think you made a fair offer, it’s still unlikely to be accepted. Fantasy owners generally grow attached to their players, and if they drafted them, there’s a good chance they value them more than you do. Furthermore, no one wants to be the chump who trades for a hot player just to get the cold version over the final month.

The best way to successfully make a trade is to focus on the opposing team’s needs and offer them exactly what they are looking for. There are no guarantees, but your chances skyrocket when you offer Chandler Simpson to the team last in steals with six easy points to grab. Of course, that’s if they don’t scoff at the home run points they may lose. You just can’t win!

So after performing a standings and player category contribution analysis, you will hopefully be able to use your newfound knowledge to either trade your team to victory, or manipulate your roster through savvy free agent pickups and benchings en route to that glorious Yoo-hoo shower.