How to approach fantasy trade deadline,
Strategy for late-season deals differs from moves made earlier in year
The major league general managers have had their trade deadline. Now it’s your turn.
What should fantasy owners be trying to accomplish as their league approaches its trade deadline?
Some thoughts:
1. Make a realistic assessment of your team.
This assessment, with an emphasis on the word “realistic,” has a few facets. For one, how tightly packed are the scoring categories? Different owners will have varying amounts of time and patience for projecting the statistics their team, and their opponent’s teams, will accumulate over the rest of the season. But all owners should at least know what type of gain is reasonable to hope for in each category.
In the counting-stat categories, the calculation is fairly straightforward. But for rate stats, it can be difficult to eyeball and determine, “How high can I climb?”
By now, about two-thirds of the season is behind us. Based on that benchmark, here are a couple of guidelines to apply to your league:
A team with a current .260 batting average, with approximately 4,500 at-bats accumulated, can raise its average to about .267 by hitting .280 the rest of the way.
A team with a current 4.00 ERA through 900 innings, which posts a 3.50 ERA from now until the end of the season, will see its mark drop to 3.83, as long as the innings pace is maintained.
With the same caveat, a team with a 1.30 WHIP can drop its season total to 1.23 by posting a 1.10 WHIP over the balance of the season.
In addition, the other major part of this assessment task is to determine the degree to which your roster can accomplish your targets. You can aspire to raise your team batting average by .007, but if your roster includes Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles or Chris Carter of the Milwaukee Brewers, you might want to get a better grip on reality.
2. Put yourself in the other owners’ shoes.
It’s all well and good to develop your own category targets and wish lists of players. But your trade feelers will be far more welcome if the recipient can see that you’ve at least tried to discern their needs and made an effort to address them.
This assessment involves more than just the stat categories. A keeper-league owner might be looking to retool for next season. Thus, he might have no interest in your expiring contracts, no matter how talented the player.
A contender might be trying to create room under an in-season salary cap, either for a player coming off the disabled list or just to have additional flexibility for other deals. Such an owner might sacrifice statistics to gain flexibility.
Speaking of injured players, one of your adversaries might have just lost a starter and have a hole to fill or, conversely, might have a glut at a position, thanks to a returnee. Given that everyone has access to projections that place a player’s value “in a vacuum” in the same general range, it’s with these “non-vacuum” considerations where the zone of agreement on a trade can often be found.
If you are not in a keeper league, some of the teams in the lower half of the standings might be more concerned about NFL training camps than your fantasy league by this point. By all means, check in with such teams; they still might be playing for pride and trying to finish as high in the standings as possible, especially if your league provides incentive for doing so. And there’s nothing worse than assuming such a team has packed it in, only to have them help one of your competitors via trade.
But if owners of such teams politely decline to engage, by all means respect that decision and do not pester them, no matter how perfectly someone on one of their rosters might address your needs. The good will you engender could pay dividends in future seasons.
3. Trade tactically, not to accumulate value.
While there are different schools of thought on the subject, “Buy low, sell high” is generally a good guiding principle for early-season trades. Unless you have an obvious need — you didn’t draft a closer, for example — the first half is mostly a time to try to make trades that add value to your roster and accrue surpluses that later might provide opportunities to trade from strength.
Now that the standings have hardened, it’s time to eschew the need to be on the winning side of every deal and make the primary consideration how a trade will impact the standings.
Every once in a while, that will even mean letting a trade partner “win” a deal, if in the process you are dealing a blow to a main rival.
Did you just welcome Dee Gordon of the Miami Marlins back to a team that already has Billy Hamilton of the Cincinnati Reds? There’s no sense in winning the category by 50 steals. But you might want to resist the temptation to auction him off to the highest bidder. Instead, it might be more beneficial to identify Gordon’s ideal new home (a team that won’t catch you but might pass several others) and approach that owner with what he will see as a sweetheart deal, which again might have the added bonus of engendering goodwill for subsequent seasons. Your competitor doesn’t need to know that you were mainly looking out for yourself.
4. Consider saving for a rainy day.
The major league trade deadline routinely spawns a frenzy of bidding on players changing leagues. But August can bring the influx of talent into free agent pools to a near standstill, as teams wait until rosters expand in September to call up top prospects. Recent years have seen the occasional impact waiver deal, but that’s nothing to count on.
If your league has reserve lists of a decent size, one idea to keep in mind is inquiring about a player on the disabled list with a potential trade partner. Sometimes, owners will just throw in such players to get a deal done, not fully realizing that they can be a godsend when an injury strikes, and the free agent pool is barren.
Players to consider grabbing now include J.D. Martinez of the Detroit Tigers, and Matt Carpenter of the St. Louis Cardinals. Or, further down the food chain, even C.J. Cron of the Los Angeles Angels could have value in deeper leagues.
There are other players — such as the New York Mets’ Lucas Duda and the Arizona Diamondbacks’ A.J. Pollock — whose returns are less certain. But if you can get them for less than nothing and stash them on a reserve list, why not?