Fantasy Baseball isn’t easy. It’s so much more than drafting a team and setting a line up once a week on Sunday evenings. You can’t put in the minimum effort and expect to win.
Adequate measures need to be taken to ensure your team can reach its full potential, including draft prep in accordance with your league’s scoring format, post draft analysis of strengths and weaknesses, staying active on the waiver wire and exploring trade possibilities. The best GMs will keep up on all of this, and you should too because why are you playing fantasy baseball if you don’t want to put in the effort to win?
These guidelines have been touched on previously in multiple articles, however this will be your all-inclusive guide to navigating the 2020 season. I’m putting this out now because it appears the season is finally going to start in just over a week and many leagues are conducting their drafts soon. I’ve always been a proponent of drafting right before the season begins to avoid any and all uncertainties, my main reasoning being to protect against injury. Hopefully your league also practices this philosophy but if not there’s time to reevaluate all rosters and make transactions to improve your team.
The biggest piece of advice I can impart is to know your league mates and their tendencies. Is there someone in your league who prefers big names? Young players? Pitchers? Picking up on these trends can help immensely during your draft by allowing you to infer another competitor’s behavior. For example, in my home league last season I was able to select Manny Machado at the end of the second round (not the best pick in retrospect) because I knew the person before me had a penchant for big name players and chose Bryce Harper. This is especially true if you’re drafting at the end of a snake because who you select with the first of your grouped picks can be determined by who you think the team after you will select. This is a skill that can take a few seasons to develop and requires actually knowing the other participants in your league but can pay off big time. In my home league I know that two competitors prefer younger players and one likes pitchers in addition to the guy who goes for the big names. Knowing this allows me to predict who they’ll draft and can pay large dividends when I’m on the clock.
Another prudent strategy is to ignore where you drafted a player once the draft is complete. It’s commonly said that the earlier you draft a player the longer leash they get to prove their worth after a slow start before you cut bait. In a normal season this is always true because fantasy baseball is a marathon, however in 2020 there isn’t time to wait on underperforming players. Where you picked a player is a sunken cost; there’s no going back. Even if we fully realize this there’s inherent bias to trust the players you selected early because if you don’t it’s admitting you were wrong, something that’s difficult for everyone.
I was guilty of this my very first year of fantasy baseball way back in 2010 (when I was 12). Just before the trade deadline my friend offered me Prince Fielder and Brian McCann, his first 2 selections, for Carlos Gonzalez and Buster Posey. I had drafted Gonzalez round 8 and was lucky enough to get Posey off waivers, so seeing that I was receiving two players better than the ones I was forfeiting I easily accepted the trade. Despite being selected much later, Gonzalez and Posey were the superior players in the second half of the season and lead my friend to the title. The moral here: focus on current value, not ADP (average draft position), once the season has begun.
This anecdote brings me to the similar strategy of buying low, which means something entirely different during the two-month 2020 season compared to a typical campaign. Normally, buying low means trading for a player who has underperformed during the first month or so of action because odds are he’s just in a slump. The problem with that is a slump can last 60 games. A quality player will rebound, but will it be soon enough to actually aid in your 2020 title quest? The converse of this is a prolonged hot streak from a player clearly performing above his capabilities, as is the case at the start of every season. While it’s normally smart to flip these players in favor of more proven options who had been underperforming, would it not be wiser to ride out the hot streak? Most league formats are going to be season long without playoffs, so stocking up on guys who will contribute more at the end of the season is moot. My advice would be to not sell high, as is customary, and to buy low at your own risk.
The final point, as I’ve touched on prior, is to be active on the waiver wire. Every season there are multiple unheralded players who deliver elite production over 2 month stretches and you don’t want to miss out on these peculiar names who can benefit your team. Don’t be afraid to drop a more established player, who you would normally hang onto, in favor of a worse player performing better at the time. Typically, fear of another league mate adding the player and prospering once the production regresses keeps this from happening, but in 2020 there isn’t time to wait on or stash players. The entire season is a sprint and using actual production compared to expected is the best route to success.
If you’re in a league that has already drafted and is sticking with the results, the best exercise you can perform is to reevaluate your roster and, ideally, every other teams to identify players whose stock has changed since your draft took place. It goes without saying that any player who’s opted out of the season, such as Buster Posey, David Price, Ryan Zimmerman and Mike Leake, can be dropped. Fortunately, no superstars have decided to forego the season, although Mike Trout does loom. The other changes of weight are COVID or injury related. Anyone who has tested positive has lost value, whereas some players have profited from the nearly 4 months’ rest. Perhaps you drafted Eugenio Suarez, Aaron Judge or James Paxton, all of whom were expected to miss time during a season starting late March but now appear near full health. These types of shifts in value may seem obvious, but not all GMs in your league may be fully aware of the implications. Attempting to swing a trade for a player on the rise while dumping a player with COVID or another injury and citing ADP as a reason to complete the deal would be a savvy move.
To recap, the best way to succeed in 2020 outside of choosing the best players is to know your league mates and their tendencies, ignore ADP bias while using it to your advantage and adopt a fresh perspective when making transactions, especially if you’re in a season-long league. Best of luck during a 2020 season that guarantees to be like no other.
