Finding Trading Partners

There is an art to getting a fair “price” in trades. Photo by Alex Barrett.

10 months ago Clave wrote an interesting article about seeking fantasy trading partners, and even used a pun in the title, which is worth a significant amount of bonus points.  This post will build off of that post such that I assume you will not be attempting to find a trading partner while simultaneously alienating the other owners in your league.

Drafting well is the best way to build a strong team for fantasy baseball 2013, but even the best draft classes can turn into bad fantasy teams after a couple of injuries, slumps, or unexpected changes in playing time.  Even if you drafted well and your team is still performing, you still will want to find a ways to make your team better.

You might be able to find a player or two on the waiver-wire that can contribute to your team, but these players will generally only make marginal impacts, or will have value only for a limited amount of time (such as an injury replacement).  The best way to improve your team once the season has started is through trades.  You have the ability to deal from a position of strength to acquire high-impact players in the area(s) your team needs help most.

Finding a trading partner will generally require a little bit more effort than putting a post on the league message board telling the other owners that you have a Chris Sale for sale and he will cost you a David Price or a Brad Penny.  To help you get started, here are three ways to find trading partners in your fantasy baseball league.

1. Know What You Are Looking For (Do your homework) – This seems pretty straight forward, but have a specific type of return in mind before you go out hunting for trading partners.  If your team is at the bottom of the roto-rankings for stolen bases you need to target speedy players on teams that have managers that are aggressive on the base paths.  This does not mean that you should only target players with high stolen base totals, you want to target players that WILL have high stolen base totals, or who will at least get a lot of attempts.  This means finding fast players, maybe off to a slow start, with managers who are particularly aggressive on the base paths.  This will require a little bit of extra work on your part, but maybe you are the lucky owner than found Rajai Davis in 2012 with only 3 stolen bases at the end of April, who went on to steal 46 bases and lead the MLB in stolen base attempts (59, five more than Mike Trout).
2. Network (Talk about trades) – A lot of the groundwork on a trade happens just by talking with other owners.  Letting other owners know you want to make a trade or that you are willing to talk about a trade needs to go beyond posting on the league message board.  Identify a couple of teams that have specific weaknesses and then talk with the other owners about their teams, try and understand what they like and dislike about their own teams, and then talk about your team as it relates to theirs.  If you can get them thinking about trades before you have even made an offer you are one step ahead.
3. Be Flexible (Negotiate) – A lot of the trades you end up with are going to look different from what you thought when you first decided to go make a trade.  You might have to be willing to give a little more than you initially wanted in order to get a little extra on the back end.  Remember that your initial trade offer should not be so low to offend the good-sense of the other owner, but it certainly should not be your best offer. Most trades that I end up finalizing contain at least two rounds of back and forth.  And that’s what you should be looking for with your initial offer, it should be just good enough to initiate a counter-offer from the other side (Obviously, a lot of this negotiating can happen during your networking with other owners and you might be able to put together the deal in one trade based upon what you’ve previously agreed upon).  Let them tell you by way of the counter-offer how they value your players and their own, then use that information to make subsequent trade offers.  What you are seeking here is a win-win scenario.  Both parties should walk away from the trade feeling that they made their team better.

Working within this framework you will not only benefit from a better team, but you will have identified yourself as a fantasy owner willing to engage in thoughtful trade discourse and you will find yourself with additional trade opportunities in the future.