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The Trade Counsel: It’s Never Too Early To Trade!
by Simon Jones
Whatever your thoughts on the World Baseball Classic, this spring seemed to go on for ever. Thankfully (and finally) Major League Baseball is back. Your fantasy drafts and auctions have come and gone and your rosters are set. So now is the time to sit back, take stock and watch the stats roll in for the next few weeks… My question would be, why so passive?
Fantasy baseball is all about controlling what you can, and exploiting the opportunities when they come along. Rest assured those opportunities exist right now.
First consider your own draft. No matter how well executed, unless you are in the shallowest of leagues then you’ll always have holes. Maybe you have a questionable middle-infielder or your starting pitchers aren’t quite as reliable as you’d hoped to grab. Then think that if you went into the draft pretty well prepped, imagine how some of the other owners must be feeling. I always advise owners not to second guess their own drafts too much, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t exploit someone else’s doubts. If you watched your draft chat then we’ve all seen that guy that had all his choices stolen two picks before him, and then reached for a player two rounds too early. Play on those doubts and explore the opportunities.
Another change that will have happened since your draft is that the Major League rosters have been set. There have been a few injuries, plus a couple of unexpected demotions and two or three closer jobs that haven’t gone quite the way people expected (though I have got quite a few cheap shares in both Santiago Casilla and Blake Treinen). The point is that there will be some owners who thought they had reasonable depth at particular positions and now find that it is on the DL, sitting in the minors or in much less valuable roles than they’d envisioned. A gap in another owner’s roster is an opportunity that you can look to exploit
If you’ve done your draft prep properly, then hopefully you’ve grabbed many of your picks around where you value the players or even cheaper. However, even if you did see value fall to you a couple of rounds later than you imagined, you’re bound to have seen other guys fall that you couldn’t take. In one draft I saw Pollock fall 20 spots beneath where I value him, but I was drafting on the turn. I saw David Dahl drop 40 spots, but had even better value with my preceding picks. Now I have no way of knowing if the guys who drafted those players value them like I do, or at the spot that they drafted them. There’s a chance that I value them more than the owner, so that raises another opportunity. The point is that I can’t possibly find out until I ask the question.
Hopefully, most of the readers here have been playing fantasy baseball long enough not to read too much into a few bad performances. However we all know how frustrating it is when a player you own doesn’t perform as expected. If you had doubts in the first place and then he goes 1-20 or gives up 10 earned runs in his first couple of starts, then you also get frustrated with yourself for trusting the player. Now I’m not suggesting that you’ll get a significant discount on Masahiro Tanaka or Gerrit Cole after one bad outing, but it doesn’t hurt to sow the seeds early. You never know quite when the untradeable guy becomes tradeable, and then the highly valued guy starts attracting a discount. It can be especially effective if you have a player available that can help their roster at another position.
So my argument is not to jump at the first offer sent to you, or do things in great haste, but never be passive. Always be looking for the next opportunity and never be afraid to take advantage when it comes.
The Trade Counsel is a weekly trade column – please leave feedback or any trade questions below.
Source: http://rotoprofessor.com/baseball/?p=32484
