Fantasy Baseball Mind Games: Confirmation and Hindsight Bias

The image locked into most fantasy owner’s minds will be this man’s incredible hot streak.

It’s often said that “seeing is believing.” While this is often the case, in certain situations, what you think you see isn’t necessarily reality. This isn’t to imply that your eyeballs are fried, but rather that our minds can play little games on us, introducing biases as we process certain kinds of information and events.

We’re going to look at one of these mind games and how it applies to fantasy baseball. This is the third part of our “Mind Games” series (Part 1: Anchoring; Part 2: Mental Accounting) and we’ll be discussing how confirmation and hindsight biases affect our perception and subsequent roster decisions.

Not only could this make you a better fantasy baseball player but you’ll sound intelligent at dinner parties and pick up some valuable heckle content for your fantasy baseball draft. As a frito flies from your mouth, “Ha! You drafted that clown?!? Clearly you have succumbed to a confirmation bias! Sucker.” He’ll have no idea what you are talking about but, from that point in the draft forward, you are in his head.

Confirmation Bias

You’ll have better luck finding a perfect pink unicorn than you would to find someone that encounters situations without having a preconceived opinion. This first impression is incredibly hard to shake because people also select and pay attention to stuff that supports their opinions, while ignoring anything that could run counter to their preconceived notion. This type of selective thinking is often referred to as confirmation bias.

In fantasy baseball, this confirmation bias comes suggests that an owner would be more likely to look at information regarding a player that already supports their original idea of the player, rather than seek out information that contradicts it. As a result, this bias can often result in faulty decision making because one-sided information is skewing their frame of reference.

For example, your first impression of a player may be when he is in a hot streak. Take Yasiel Puig, for example. Some will look at his 5 homers and .474 AVG through his first 15 Major League games, while glossing over huge red flags like a .537 BABIP and 1.7% walk rate. It’s important to remain objective when projecting what his true value will be going forward.

Hindsight Bias

Another common perception bias is hindsight bias, which tends to occur in situations where a person believes (after the fact, mind you) that the onset of some last event was predictable and completely obvious. Hindsight is 20/20, they say.

Many events seem obvious in hindsight. psychologists attribute hindsight bias to our innate need to find order in the world by creating explanations that allow us to believe that events are predictable. This sense of curiosity is extremely useful in many cases – *cough* Sabermetrics *cough* – finding erroneous links between cause and effect of an event isn’t helpful.

Mike Trout was an example of this for me. After Trout’s incredible rookie season, I was telling Nash the story bout the first time I say Trout play left field. Somebody hit a screamer into the corner that had no chance of being caught, but Trout with his athleticism closed the gap, and took a dive at it. He still came up short but it was the most athletic miss of a ball I’ve ever seen. I was telling Nash that it was at that point that I realized that Trout would be a special player.

Well, the truth is that no one could’ve predicted we’d see the best rookie season of all time. While in hindsight I like to talk like I called the shot, I was just as shocked as everyone else in his numbers. In fact, I traded high on him last season, pulling David Price in a one-for-one. Without the gift of hindsight, I thought he’d fall back to earth and I’d be left holding Price in a steal.

It also wrecks Havok (Alex Summers, X-Men, brother of Cyclops) on how people remember trades. At the time of a trade, two teams are taking a risk, but in hindsight it always appears that one owner “ripped off” the other. Who was to say in the moment of the trade? No one has Uncanny future predicting abilities

Avoiding Perception Bias

Confirmation and hindsight bias represents a tendency for us to focus on information that confirms some pre-existing thought or to believe obviousness after the fact. part of the problem with these biases is that being aware of it isn’t good enough to prevent you from doing it. Trust me, I know.

1. One solution to overcoming these biases would be finding someone to act as a “dissenting voice of reason.” That way you’ll confronted with a contrary viewpoint to examine. A buddy as a co-manager maybe? 
2. A second solution is to intentionally dig into some numbers that may not be rosy. You don’t want to paralyze every decision, but looking for something that will challenge your bias helps you see things at face value.

Challenging our biases to come up with more informed opinions and thoughts is good for us as human beings, and it also is good for us as fantasy baseball players. So toss out those old biases, dig in to do your homework, and precede forward with fresh eyes on your roster.