Fantasy Baseball Tools

by Todd Lammi

With almost three months into the baseball season, you should have a clear idea whether your fantasy baseball team is a contender or a pretender in the standings. If you are a contender, you should be looking to make trades to improve your team in the standings. If your team is at the bottom of the pack, now is the time to be focusing on rebuilding your team if you have not done so already.

For some fantasy baseball owners that are unfamiliar with being at the top of the standings and not used to trading, here are some basic guidelines to help get you through the process.

1) Communication skills count – the trade landscape has changed in fantasy baseball over the last 10 years from phone based trading when fantasy baseball was not as prevalent on the web to now where the majority of trades are made online or through email. When communicating through email, be sure to spell out all of the particulars of the trade, including the player’s full name, position and team. For example, there are multiple players with the last name Davis in baseball. You want to make sure the other fantasy baseball owner knows you are trading Doug Davis and not Chris Davis to him. If you are using a trading tool to offer a trade through a website, if there is a place for a comment, it helps to put a note of why you are offering a trade or rejecting a trade so the other owner has some idea of what you are looking to do.

2) Determine the needs of the other owners – the easiest way to get trades made are by making trades that help both teams. If you see an owner is low in saves and you have an extra closer, offering a closer may make sense. Offering a first basemen to a team that has two already plus one sitting on his bench, unless you are offering Albert Pujols, is going get you a quick rejection or worst of all no response.

3) Win the league, not the trade – far too often fantasy baseball owners get caught up in trying to win a trade or getting the most value for their players. Which is fine, but at the end of the season, the most important stat is now how many trades you win, but if you won your league. At some point during the year, you might be low in one category like steals, and you might have to give up a guy like Carlos Lee for Michael Bourn. Lee might be worth more than Bourn in terms of value, but if you have excess power and can win your league by gaining three points in steals which Bourn gives you, then it is a trade that has to be made.

4) Never burn your bridges - there will always be one or two owners in every league that will value players much much differently than you do. So much so that their trade offers to you will make it seem like they have either never played fantasy baseball before, or else they are trying to rob you. It is always best to respond in the the nicest way possible, as eventually down the road, one of their trade offers might eventually make sense. There was one five year league I played in, I never traded with the owner for four years because I could not see eye to eye with him on any offers. Then it my last year we ended up making a trade that helped me with the league, so you just never know.

5) Play for the win whenever possible - anytime you have a chance to win a league, I think a fantasy baseball owner needs to take that chance. It boggles my mind how many owners will not make a trade and their response is, I cannot trade him because he is one of my keepers. Don’t let a possible keeper stand in the way of you losing out on winning. There is some much turnover in the off season with trades, free agent signings, manager changes, injuries, etc. that there are always new keepers that pop up that you did not envision when in season.