Fantasy Baseball Trading: Know Your Rivals Loyalty
How does Buster Posey relate to fantasy baseball trading? Ask any Giants fans in your league.
Photo Credit: Ed Szczepanski-USA TODAY Sports
If you’re on the brink of contention in your fantasy league, it’s now or never. If you are at the top and want some separation from a few of the other best teams in the league, now is the time to make a move. Yup, no matter where you stand in your league, it’s fantasy baseball trading season.
With that in mind, we’re going to run a few different pieces that will hopefully help you get the better end of the fantasy baseball trading season.
We start here with the real life loyalties of your league rivals — and even yourself.
Know Their Favorite Teams
In a fantasy league most of us are in, we have a guy that’s basically taking a fantasy baseball sabbatical this year because he made some far more important life commitments. Fortunately, he is having a buddy run the team but before he left, made this simple note on his Trading Block.
"I told him (his friend) he can accept trades and such, but please don’t try and take Joey Votto. Thats all I ask!"
When this guy comes back next year, do think he might be a little likely to accept trades for guys like Jay Bruce, Brandon Phillips, or Johnny Cueto?
We’re all fans first. I think to think of myself as a pretty shrewd trader, but I’d probably give a little more than market value for a guy like Buster Posey. What can I say? I’m a Giants fan with a terrible catching situation.
Know Their Least Favorite Teams
Real trading can absolutely impact fantasy baseball trading. You need a perfect storm, so these issues don’t always come up. But when they do, it’s a powder-keg 100 percent of the time.
Let’s say that you have a big-time Red Sox fan in your league who has Mike Trout as one of the outfielders. This will never happen, so I don’t have much of a problem using it as a hypothetical example, but let’s say Brian Cashman beats Jerry DiPoto in some bet between now and July 31 and the Yankees end up with Trout.
I’ve known my share of Red Sox fans in my life and I know one thing about them. They treat Yankees players like radioactive waste. If there’s ever going to be a buy low time for Trout (again, purely hypothetical), it would be right after he ends up in Pinstripes.
Granted, that’s a silly example, but you don’t need to be Mike Trout to be a serious impact player in the fantasy baseball world. Guys like James Shields, Jeff Samardzija, Chase Utley, and Daniel Murphy are all fantasy relevant players that can very well be on the move this year. If they end up on the rivals of the fantasy owner’s favorite real team, don’t be surprised if they’re sold low. If they’re sold low, wouldn’t you want to be on the other end of that trade?
Incidentally, anyone ending up on the Yankees may qualify. Nash is no Red Sox fan and an incredibly detail-oriented trader but if you were ever going to catch him, it’d be right after one of his best players became a Yankee.
Conversely, watch out for these yourself. I just basically told the owner of Buster Posey in my leagues that I’d likely make a bad trade to get him. So, if I get a trade offer that would land me Posey, I should probably look at it a little closer, maybe ask for the advice of a few guys that aren’t Giants fans.
It seems as though at least one bad trade is made every year because a player changes teams. If that happens, you want to be on the right end of it with people texting you asking “How did you manage to pull that off?” instead of “What could you have possibly been thinking?”.