Don’t Panic!

You won’t be able to trade a Pujols for a Plouffe. Image courtesy of Flickr.

You just had the best draft in the history of Fantasy Baseball, better than anything Daniel Okrent could ever have dreamed up.  Then it happens, your team fails to live up to your lofty expectations.  Three weeks into the season and you are in last place in the league and it seems like each and every one of your top players is having a bad year, meanwhile, something named Trevor Plouffe is leading the American League in Home Runs and RBIs and he only cost a dollar at the tail end of the draft!  The sky is falling, Chicken Little!

Except it isn’t.  As Baseball Prospectus’ Derek Carty wrote in 2011, it takes time for player stats to stabilize.  For areas where a player’s true talent shows itself quickest, like strikeout rate, it still takes more than 30 games for those stats to normalize.  So if you have started freaking out and the calendar still reads April up at the top, relax!  This is not a time to panic, this is the time to destroy your lesser opponents.  Hot players will cool off, and cold players will heat up, and knowing how to identify these types of players and how to value them, will allow you to steal from the other teams in your league.

Even the newest players to Fantasy Baseball understand that the Major League season is a grind.  162 game is a long time and players are going to have ups and downs along the way.  But when your opponents have been sitting around for a month and their team is not producing like they expected, they are going to start getting worried.   You can exploit their insecurity and use this as an opportunity to pluck some talent off of their team for a reduced rate.

Last April, Albert Pujols was hitting just .217/.265/.304 and had no home runs, and just 8 extra base hits in almost 100 plate appearances.  Analysts everywhere were falling over themselves to tell anyone who would listen that Pujols was finally over the hill, and that he must have used up all of his magic in Saint Louis.  In May Pujols picked up a little bit, managed to hit some home runs and drive in some runs, but he was slugging just over .400 and his OBP was still below .300.  At this point in the year Pujols had played 51 games, almost a third of a season, and was hitting .243.  If Fantasy GMs were not ready to move Pujols for anything resembling value after April, by the end of May Pujols was looking downright anemic, and ripe for the picking.  Starting June 1, Pujols hit .307/.370/.571.  Those numbers look a lot more like his career norms than what he did in the early part of the season.

Now, you’re not going to be able to trade any slug on your team for Albert Pujols.  What you need to do is identify those players on your team that are having a great start to the year.  Mabye Mark Teixeira is hitting like the MVP runner-up he was in 2009 rather than the .251/.332/.475 he hit a year ago.  Teixeira is a guy you can expect to regress the opposite direction, coming back down to the numbers he put up recently, so his value will be as high as it is likely to be for the rest of the year.  A high performing player like Teixeira will look pretty good to a guy with a struggling first basemen of their own. Not only are they receiving a guy that’s currently putting up good numbers for a guy who isn’t, but Teixeira is a name they recognize and trust, despite the fact that Tex has been trending down for three years in a row and probably won’t keep things going into the dog-days of August.

If you can make a trade like this, not only are you going to get the lion share of Pujos’ value squeezed into the remaining part of the year, but you’re also selling high on a mid-value player unlikely to sustain his success.

Not everyone slumping through the first 50 games is going to rebound and turn into Albert Pujols, sometimes the Adam Dunn that fell off the earth in the first half of 2011 is going to be the same dead weight in the 2nd half of the season that he was in the first. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to identify these players and try and lure them away from other owners with the promise of a marginal player having the best two-month stretch of his life.

So don’t panic, but if you do, here is how to panic well during your draft.