Targeting and acquiring the right players for your keeper-league team is one of the most essential parts of building a franchise that is competitive year after year. Last time, we talked about all the things you need to think about before you start making trades and other roster moves. By now you should know the league rules and player pool cold and have a pretty decent idea about which players will be frozen and which will be available on draft day. You also have an idea of who you want to freeze from your own roster. Now you’re ready to start targeting players and making some moves.
Competing vs. Rebuilding
If you’ve made the decision to go for the gusto and compete this season, you’re pretty well set to start making moves. Your main concern is current-year production, so you should make trades and other roster moves with that in mind, and without too much concern about longer-term value. You can just let ‘er rip and build the best win-now roster you can, with strategies and concepts that should be familiar to you from your experience in redraft leagues.
If you’re rebuilding, it’s a different story. When rebuilding, you care little to nothing about a player’s current-year production. All you care about is next year and beyond. That requires not just a different strategy, but an entirely different mindset. Spring training playing-time battles, managers’ closer declarations, and who is locking down starting rotation spots all become virtually meaningless when you’re playing for the future. So much happens in one year of baseball, so many situations change suddenly and dramatically, that it’s nearly impossible to figure out what things will look like in a year or more. There are just too many things that can happen in the interim, from injuries and trades to career years and complete collapses.
Save yourself a lot of trouble by remembering one guiding principle: target talent.
The Talent Show
A ballplayer’s fantasy value is typically determined by two things: talent and opportunity. When you are competing for a title, you need both of those things to be readily apparent. Most preseason sleeper lists are full of these kinds of players. Sure, you’d love that talented rookie who locked up the second-base job in the spring, or that dominant setup man in front of a shaky closer. That’s great, but guess what? Everybody else in your league wants those players too. I can’t tell you how many sleeper I’ve seen get bid up to double what they could conceivably be worth.
When you’re rebuilding, you can forget about this year’s sleeper. First, in any competitive keeper league, somebody probably already has that sleeper on their roster, and probably knows their value and will want the world for them in trade. And if the sleeper is available in the draft, there’s almost always going to be at least one other GM targeting that hot rookie or awesome setup arm. And it only takes one to foil your best-laid plans. Planned on spending $10 for that rookie? Watch him set off a bidding war between you and one other owner and end up selling for $20. It happens all the time, every year. In most competitive keeper leagues, the concept of sleeper is almost laughable. You will score one at a decent price/draft slot every so often, but you can’t build a team of them unless the other GMs in your league all sleep through the draft.
So what can you do? Simple: you target talent and forget about opportunity. You’re targeting the dominant setup man in front of an elite closer, or the talented young player who is blocked by a superstar and can’t get any playing time. Now, you should know right up front that most of these guys won’t pan out. The setup man will remain a setup man, or the youngster will be dealt to the other league and you’ll lose him entirely. But sometimes the elite closer’s arm will fall off, or the superstar will be the one to get traded, thus opening a position for the young player. And when those things happen, cha-ching, you suddenly have a solid keeper. Add a few of these keepers to some bargains picked up in the draft or in trades and a few more plucked from the free agent pool during the season, and suddenly you’re in position to contend next year and beyond.
So, whether you are looking to wheel and deal before the season or are already planning your draft strategy, some of your targets should be players like this, who have a lot of talent and upside but precious little opportunity. There are a couple of pitfalls to watch out for, however.
Buyer’s Remorse
First of all, when you target players without current opportunity, you had better be sure that they have the talent you think they have, because, without opportunity, that’s all they’ve got. Don’t waste your time trying to secure a fourth-starter type who’s currently in long relief behind a stacked starting rotation. You’re not trying to squeeze out a buck or two of profit here; you’re taking shots, and when you’re taking shots there better be a big payoff when you hit. Your roster slots are precious, valuable commodities; don’t fill them up with a bunch of guys who don’t have a chance to return solid value even if they pan out.
Remember: target talent. You should be thinking in terms of ceilings rather than floors. If your guy gets his big break, and if he succeeds and lives up to his potential, how valuable could he be? You don’t care about the floor, because if he doesn’t get his chance, or gets it and blows it, you’re going to cut him before next season anyway.
Also, players like this should come cheap. You shouldn’t overpay. One thing you will quickly realize when you start thinking in this way is that there are a lot of major league baseball players who are long on talent and short on opportunity. It is easy to start seeing a potential diamond in every chunk of coal and start thinking that every target has an 80% chance of making it big when in fact they only have a 20% chance. If “success” is your setup man turning into a $25 closer, but he only has a 10% chance of that happening, his closer potential only adds $2.50 to his value. Don’t pay $15 for it.
Be careful because it is very easy to have rose-colored glasses when it comes to players like this, and to consistently overvalue them. One exercise is to think of likely outcomes for the player in terms of future value, assign probabilities to those outcomes, and add them all up to come up with future-value number. This is just a quick-and-dirty, back-of-the-envelope kind of thing, but it can act as a sanity check and keep you from paying $15 for a guy who only has a small chance of being worth $20. This is clunky when you first start doing it, but over time you’ll develop a nose for it and it will come easier to you.
Finally, think twice about targeting any player over 30 years old. Baseball is, now more than ever, a young man’s game. It’s not always easy to find non-obvious players who have a chance to skyrocket in value in future seasons; it’s even harder to find guys who can do that once they are past their prime. It happens, sure, but you don’t want to bet on it happening very often. The same goes for targeting players who are injury prone. You don’t want to have to count on a walking time bomb to stay healthy for the next three years in order to justify your investment.
There are any number of ways to acquire talent–trading, drafting, free agency–and you should be taking advantage of every possible avenue to add these kinds of players to your roster. The more, the merrier–most of these players won’t pan out, and that’s to be expected. But some of them will turn into valuable keepers and will help put your rebuilding franchise on a more competitive footing.
Opening Day is rapidly approaching, which means freeze lists will be due soon. Next time we’ll talk about things to consider as you make your final freeze-or-cut decisions.
