Breaking with tradition in these parts, I will for the first time in this weekly column not be diving deeply into any specific players. There have been a number of podcasts and articles in the industry recently about maintaining balance and avoiding burnout. This won’t exactly be one of those, but instead I thought it might be useful to share my process in evaluating teams at this point of the season. What has happened thus far is useful as a data point, and can tell us plenty about the strengths and weaknesses of our team, as well as the perceptions our opponents may have of their teams. It is now our job to use all of that to our advantage the rest of the way. But how do we go about doing that?
Self-Evaluation
“Know thyself” sounds like it might be nonsense, but it is probably the most important analysis you can do at this point in the year. Being honest with your evaluation is crucial. What categories are you strongest in, and can you expect those strengths to remain strengths? Do you lead the league in HRs and OPS because you have Adolis Garcia and Kyle Schwarber who have been on insane and unsustainable tears? Or have you come by your production legitimately and are now reaping the rewards of strong roster constructions? Is your pitching getting by on smoke and mirrors building you up for a tumble downward in the standings when your ratios evaporate? Analyzing not only players as individual skill sets but how they mesh with the rest of your roster and produce in the aggregate is a crucial but often overlooked aspect of roster management.
Perhaps even more importantly, have you been successful to this point? What even defines success? It isn’t as simple as looking where you are in the standings, or even in the standings in each individual category. What matters even more than that analysis is how much alpha exists in categories you are not leading, and how attainable that progress is. Say, for example, you’re tied for 6th in a raw category like stolen bases, but the 5 teams ahead of you are only ahead by a few stolen bases, and are clumped together so that a substantive move would rocket you past the whole group. Now it’s your job to go out and not just find stolen bases, but even better, see if you can trade with opponents whom you would pass if the player you are acquiring is successful in producing the stolen bases you desire. This allows you to supercharge your transactions resulting in an even more dramatic net effect on the standings.
Targeting Specific Opponents
To expand on that last section of applying your self-knowledge into trades, you want to make sure that when trading with opponents that are also contending, it is just important to help them improve their team in categories where they have little to gain as it is to improve your team in areas where there is far more to gain.
A practical example is once again helpful. Let’s say that you have a particular counterparty that is somewhat of a volume pitching category hog, plenty of Wins and Ks, but ratios that leave a little to be desired. These tendencies may cause your opponent to want to protect those leads, and add additional pitching without asking for someone that would contribute positively to ratios. These sorts of guys are expendable and easy to find, but if you can create value for an opponent while creating more opportunity for you to improve than them, that is absolutely a transaction you should not only execute, but go out of your way to find as many as possible.
David vs Goliath
Part of the application of self-analysis is to choose your overall strategy for roster management the rest of the way, meaning specifically what types of players you’ll want to target via trade and off the waiver wire. While your placement in categories will have a lot to do with that, so will your overall standing. If you are protecting an overall lead, more emphasis should be placed on players with narrower outcomes and higher floors. You don’t want pitchers who will get blown up every fifth start or so even if they flash immense K% upside, because their downside can hurt you far more than their upside can help you. Unexpected strikeout production is of no additional benefit when you are already the leader in the category. In general, with “Goliath” or lead protection strategies, your risk tolerance should go down.
Conversely, if it hasn’t been your year to this point, it is time to embrace the “David” strategies so that if they all break right, can get you back in contention. You might have an idea of who these players are individually. Nick Pivetta, for example, can just as easily give up five runs in the first two innings as he can spin a gem with seven innings of shutout ball and nine Ks to boot. Joey Gallo can go 3-for-27 with 18 strikeouts before leaving the yard in six straight games. Isaiah Kiner-Falefa won’t hit for power, but will steal plenty of bases when he gets on base (and he does that plenty). Salvador Perez seems to always be hurt and won’t be a big help to your OBP category with the lowest BB% amongst all qualified hitters, but man does he provide some pop at a positional eligibility where it is very difficult to make up any ground.
The bottom line is there are risks to all of these types of players, and many others, that make them uneasy to roster for your opponents, but if things go there way, can add a lot of value for you. And if you get the wrong end of the variance spectrum, your opportunity cost was so low due to your poor position at this point in the season, you really haven’t lost out on much at all. This is the season long version of the well-known DFS tactic of using late swap to swap off of a very popular player if behind in hopes that a lower rostered player has an outlier game, since you were dead anyway with the popular player. It also happens to be a lot of fun looking for situations in which you could benefit the most from variance (especially taking into account category placement etc.) and seeing it all come together down the stretch run is an incredibly rewarding feeling.
