Managing your freeze list and making final freeze-or-cut decisions is in many ways the defining difference between a keeper league and a redraft league. By this point, you should know what your overall plan is (compete or rebuild), and you should have some idea of which players your competitors are likely to freeze and which are likely to be available on Draft Day. But there are still things to think about when finalizing your freeze list. Let’s examine a few of them.
Opportunity Cost
When you make the decision to freeze a player, you are gaining something. Specifically, you are gaining the right to keep that player on your roster at a fixed price for this and possibly future seasons. That’s what a keeper is, after all. But one thing that is often overlooked is that you are also losing something when you freeze a player: you are losing a roster spot. And in losing that roster spot, you are also losing the opportunity to acquire any other player to fill that spot. Every player you freeze is one less player you have the chance to purchase on Draft Day, and regardless of how much you want that player or how much of a bargain they might be, your roster spot is locked up and unavailable.
In economics, this is called “opportunity cost”. To put it simply, if I have $5, and I spend it on a pack of baseball cards, I am cutting myself out of any future opportunities to spend that $5 in a more desirable way–say, by buying a banana split. So I’m not just out $5 for that pack of cards; I’m also out my banana split. Same thing with a roster spot. If you freeze Player A, you can’t buy Player B for the same spot. Or Player C. Or D. And so on. No banana splits for you.
We all sense this intuitively when it comes to things like a hitter utility spot. Nobody likes to go into the draft with their DH/utility spot already locked up, because it is extremely limiting to your draft strategy. You never know what bargains will appear during the draft, and if you don’t have a utility spot open, you can find yourself shut out of many players during the course of the draft. We all know this, but the principle applies for every roster spot. If you freeze five pitchers, that’s five pitching spots you can’t fill on Draft Day. Your opportunity cost is any pitcher you might have purchased in the draft for one of those five spots.
This can and should alter your thinking about freezes. The question is not, “Is Player A worth $10?” The question is: “Is Player A worth $10, and is a $10 Player A worth more than what I might get for that spot on Draft Day?” To answer questions like these, you need to know what players are likely to be available in the draft, and you also need to know what kinds of inflation-adjusted values you’re going to be looking at during the draft. Obviously, you can’t know every price ahead of time, but you can know that there are only going to be two quality second basemen available and five teams needing one of them. Or five second basemen and only two teams needing one. Judgments like this can have a great impact on your decision to freeze certain players in certain slots. One last thing to keep in mind is that part of your opportunity cost is the chance to buy back the same player (if you cut him) for a cheaper price on Draft Day. Only you can make the final call, but opportunity cost is a concept you should keep in mind when making your final freeze-or-cut decisions.
Crunching The Numbers
Here’s a question: how do you know what a player is worth in a keeper league? The answer is that, unless he’s in the final year of his contract and can’t be kept for future seasons, you really have no idea. But if you freeze, say, a $15 hitter and can keep him for future seasons, those keeper rights have value. After all, that $15 hitter could provide $35 in production this year, and if he does that, the right to keep him at $15 for following seasons can be very valuable indeed. But if he shreds his knee sliding into home plate one day and never returns more than $3, those rights to keep him at $15 are totally worthless.
Unfortunately, the player values you can get from any number of online or print sources, or even by doing the numbers yourself, don’t take this future value into account in any way. They can tell you Player A will be worth $15 this year, but they have absolutely no guidance about future seasons. But this projecting into future seasons means everything in a keeper league. Player A is “worth” $15 this year, right? What if you have him at $25? Do you throw him back? OK, well, what if he’s a 19-year-old Mike Trout? Do you pay the $25 and take $15 worth of production this year, holding out for future MVP seasons?
A 19-year-old Trout is an extreme example, but questions like these come up all the time in keeper leagues, and sadly there is not a quick and easy solution. Often values will be affected by the league rules regarding freezes, contracts and salaries, so a player’s price can vary wildly just depending on the league and its rules. But if you take the time to really think about each player you’re considering freezing–think about them, their skills, their situation in their MLB organization, their contract status, and just plain old scouting and analysis and what you think of the guy’s talent–you will be ahead of the game. Some of this will only come with experience and judgment, but the upshot is don’t fall too deeply in love with numbers when making freeze decisions. Obviously if you have a $30 pitcher for $5 you’re keeping him, and if you have a $5 pitcher for $30 you’re cutting him. But unfortunately most of your freeze decisions will not be so clear-cut. You need to zoom out and take a big-picture view of the individual player, his skills and career and where he fits in your overall plan for your franchise. You have to have some kind of numbers you trust (at least somewhat) to help you make decisions, but I would advise taking any set of numbers as more of a loose guideline than a hard-and-fast rule. The value of any player depends on his talent and opportunity, but also on the context of your franchise, your plan, and the type of rules your league has. “Book” values are generally suspect at best, even in a redraft league; they can be a real and unhelpful distraction in a keeper league, especially for a rebuilding team.
Value Vs. Production
Another issue to keep in mind when finalizing your freeze list is balance. Obviously, you want good values, but you also want some production baked into your roster, especially in leagues with a lot of keepers and a lot of inflation. Don’t get so focused on getting $8-10 of production for $3-4 players that you don’t lock up a good chunk of production when you can. It’s great to have cheap freezes, but if you have a lot of cheap freezes and not much production, you can find yourself having to vastly overpay for scarce talent, or worse, walking away from the draft with unspent dollars. It is far better to freeze a couple $30 players for $35 than to have a lot to spend and not enough talent to spend it on. Ending up with a few $1 players on your roster isn’t always a bad thing in a keeper league, because $1 fliers can turn into big bargains for future seasons. Much better a few $1 gambles at the end than leaving money on the table. This can be even more important for a rebuilding team that needs a couple studs for trade chips later in the season.
It’s getting close to go-time, and since many leagues will be holding their drafts this weekend, there will be a special edition of “Keeper Coach” on Thursday this week. We’ll talk all about strategies for your first keeper-league draft, with special emphasis on drafting as a rebuilding team. See you then.
