Fantasy Baseball: You Have To Cut Guys Sometimes

You have to cut guys sometimes.

I have always loved baseball. However, it was only a few years ago that I got back into baseball as a regular fan. Since then I have had a pretty solid amount of fantasy baseball success. One of the biggest contributors to that success is that I had what others considered to be a mild handicap. I didn’t always know what a player was capable of. With that in mind, if I had a great player on my team who was not producing, it was nothing for me to cut him or sometimes even accept a trade that no one else would make.

More from Fantasy Baseball

That lack of knowledge allowed me to be cunning and make decisions based on the here and now and has led me to win a very competitive league several times and never finish lower than third with guys who have been playing and following baseball all of their lives. It was very intimidating at first, but this was an active league where we all caught up on a league chat and talked about players and so I would sit back and act like I knew all about these players and find out who they valued the most.

I was able to use the information that I gathered about what other players think in order to add quality depth and stats from guys most would never have considered using on their teams. So to sum up, what I am saying to you is that what most long-term fantasy baseball players viewed in me as a weakness I was able to use it as a strength and it has continued to serve me well as now I have a very wealthy knowledge of players and parks and so forth.

Here are a few things I try to recommend guys to forget. Try to forget a player’s injury history. Sometimes we write guys off as injury plagued and the truth is that some guys are just unlucky. Try to forget when a player has failed you in the past. Sometimes a guy just lets us down in a clutch week and we tend to write him off and never want to use him again. This is just nonsense. You never want to try to exclude players from the realm of ownership for your fantasy team. I mean we all have a few guys we don’t like to own, but in doing so we narrow down our chances of winning the league.

Often times the biggest problem is not that we are afraid of a said player failing, but often times we are too concerned with what value we assign to a player with where we drafted him. So we just hang on and on and keep telling ourselves that player X is going to have to come around sooner or later. The sooner we embrace the facts and realize that sometimes we just have to drop a guy, the better off we will be. Often times we can act like it is such a big deal about dropping a player that we drafted early that we will miss out on a player that could change the whole trajectory of our team. Embrace the facts and realize it is okay drop players. That is why it is an option for your team. Take a little lesson from Billy Beane and just make it quick and easy and move on down the road.

Next: 5 Sleepers For Your Fantasy Baseball Team

More from FanSided

Home/Fantasy Baseball