Fantasy Baseball Mind Games: Anchoring

My best memories of this guy are from 2006. Photo courtesy of Zimbio.

This is the first in a series of 8 posts that will explore the psychology of fantasy baseball. As much as baseball is a numbers game, you can’t remove the human element completely, and this can be particularly true when you are in a league with your buddies, trying to bring home the fantasy baseball championship.

This series is inspired in part from my fascination with behavioral finance. If you are unfamiliar, the principles of finance assume that people make rational financial decisions. But the truth is that humans can be anything but rational. Instead of making prudent, sound investments, people will drop half their paycheck on a lottery ticket, which is a one in a million chance.

Fantasy baseball can be the same way. When it comes to trades, player evaluation and roster building we are often perplexed because we can’t figure out the logic behind our league mates’ moves. Us fantasy experts feed into this with our writing. We write strategy article after strategy article to outline the rational fantasy baseball moves. Yet usually the move made by the fantasy baseball player seems random or down right silly. So much for the assumption that us humans make rational decisions, huh?

So for 8 posts we’ll dive into these mind games. No one is claiming we’ll all come out of this making machine-like decisions, dominating our fantasy leagues with rational excellence like Spock. I think about this stuff, and despite myself, I still make dumb moves. But mind games are fun to discuss and we’ll start with a concept called ‘anchoring.’

Anchoring

Anchoring can lead to irrational and detrimental decision making. I know because I’ve made just as many bad trades as good, and every bad one was based upon some fragment of information that was lodged in my brain about a player, but often still had little relevance to the player.

Similar to how a house should be built upon a good, solid foundation, our ideas and opinions about players should also be based on relevant and correct facts. However, this is not always so. The concept of anchoring draws on the tendency to attach or “anchor” our thoughts to a reference point – even though it may have no logical relevance to the decision at hand.

Studies have been done in which a wheel containing the numbers 1 through 100 was spun. Then, subjects were asked asked a question where they would give an estimate that was higher and lower on the wheel. The random spin of the wheel had a pronounced effect on the estimates. For example, when the wheel landed on 10, the average estimate was 25%, whereas when the wheel landed on 60, the average estimate was 45%. The random number had an anchoring effect of the subjects’ responses, pulling their estimates closer to the number they were just shown – even though the number had absolutely zero correlation at all to the question. Our brains can be a delicate flower.

Fantasy baseball players are drafted for a number value in an auction draft. Often this number serves as an anchor, even though their actually performance on the field could be vastly different. Yet, owners will often hold tightly to that value, rather than based upon the actual statistics of performance.

Another way this plays out is that a player can leave a sort of “emotional aftertaste.” Ever been burned once by a player and vowed to never own him again, despite the fact that his performance has done a complete 180. Yeah, me too. Our emotion to that player is anchored to a particular point of ownership.

Francisco Liriano is actually an excellent example of this. In 2006 he had an excellent half-season. That performance was anchored in many owner’s brains and they subsequently gave him much too long a leash for 6 more seasons, despite inning after inning of mediocre results. A few solid starts with the Pirates and owners are thinking that there is chance he can repeat 2006. They’d be better off buying a lottery ticket.

So anchoring can cause fantasy baseball to often be a fickle game. What do we as owners do?

1. When it comes to avoiding anchoring, there’s no substitute for rigorous critical thinking. Be especially careful about which numbers you use to evaluate a player. Successful fantasy owners can’t just base their decisions on one cherry-picked stat. Evaluate from a variety of angles.
2. Play the devil’s advocate with your own player evaluations. Get a second fantasy expert’s opinion. Search your feelings, Luke, if it seems like a player might be having a particular emotional aftertaste that is cause you to over or under-value him.

Don’t let your decisions on a player be the result of a bad anchor. But most of all, don’t roster Francisco Liriano. 2006 was a long time ago.