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HEAD-TO-HEAD GAMING: What I learned in 2009
Kris Olson - February 5, 2010
No matter how long one has played fantasy baseball, each season supplies new hypotheses to be tested over time. That is perhaps even truer for the player weaned on traditional Rotisserie baseball trying to adapt to head-to-head leagues.
Just as with the grizzled newspaper veteran who must now work in the Internet age, the “old-school” Rotisserie player will find that, while some of his skills and methods may have universal application, others will have to be tailored to address their shortcomings to play the new game, and a few may have to be abandoned altogether.
With apologies to those who have never known a game other than head-to-head, here are lessons one longtime Rotisserie player at least thinks he may have learned about head-to-head in 2009:
1. Be like Belichick. One shortcoming traditional Rotisserie players have is that the “old-fashioned” game trained them to be self-absorbed. Hours are spent poring over your team’s stats, determining where you had surplus from which to deal to address your team’s needs. Sure, you would study the overall standings and do a bit of analysis of a potential trading partner’s roster. But, for the most part, it was all about maximizing your own team’s output.
In head-to-head, perhaps more attention should be paid to doing whatever it takes to get the “W” each week. In a sense, head-to-head leaguers are playing two dozen or so mini-seasons in “two-team leagues” over the course of the year, and what it will take to win those leagues will depend on the competition, just as it does in the larger, longer Rotisserie season.
Just as the good football coach uses a different mix of passes and runs, blitzes and coverage from week to week, so too should a savvy head-to-head owner.
Baseball HQ, in its Weekly Planner feature, does a great job in alerting subscribers to two-start starting pitchers and analyzing those pitchers’ chances for success. But ultimately only the individual owner can tell whether it is wise to deploy a risky two-start pitcher, and the answer may depend less on his own team and more on his opponent. The same is true with trying to catch lightning in a bottle with a streaky right-handed hitter set to face a series of southpaws. How badly do you think you’ll need those few extra RBI?
Of course, it can sometimes be hard to tell at a glance how your team stacks up with your opponent. If only there were a way to quantify, without too much heavy lifting, the relative strength of your team’s skills and your opponent’s. Oh wait, maybe there is…
2. Exercise excruciating… ah, to heck with it. For traditional Rotisserie players, patience is a virtue. Leagues are often won by the best speculator who plucks underachieving talent off the rosters of nervous league mates. In head-to-head, it is still true that you don’t want to give up on a star too soon, to be sure, lest he come back to haunt you in the playoffs.
However, head-to-head leagues tend to come part and parcel with features like larger reserve lists and daily transactions. Rotisserie purists may prefer chess to pinball, but when in the arcade, perhaps it’s best to do as the pinball wizards do.
Traditional Rotisserie players are hampered by the mindset that it is silly to cut the $15 player for the $5 player, even if the $15 player has “earned” $0 thus far, while the less classically trained player has no such reservation. But, at least in some cases, we purists may have it wrong.
By being unduly influenced by that dollar value, we may be overlooking that the main quality that $5 player is lacking is not skill but opportunity. And, in a head-to-head league, if our roster size is big enough, we can seize the skilled player given even a fleeting, fill-in opportunity, knowing that another will come along before too long.
If only there were a way to separate, at a glance, the fool’s gold from the players who might be particularly equipped to take a job and run (or rake) with it. Oh wait, maybe there is…
3. Speed is a skill of the young – the really young. One of the main differences between traditional Rotisserie and head-to-head play is that, while Rotisserie leagues reward season-long excellence, head-to-head leagues celebrate teams that are a) good enough to qualify for the playoffs and b) are the best in the final weeks of the season. As a result, mid- or even late-season acquisitions can have a significant impact on the ultimate outcome in head-to-head leagues, much more than in traditional Rotisserie leagues.
While there are exceptions, the general rule is that power tends to grow between ages 24 and 29, peaking at 30 or 31. By contrast, there are many minor-leaguers who, by the time they are called up, have displayed speed skills that they “own.” While they may have to adjust to reading big-league pitchers and, perhaps more importantly, getting on base in the majors, it stands to reason that fantasy-relevant speed would come into the league far more frequently than equivalent power.
The 2009 season, at least, seemed to validate that hypothesis, what with players like Andrew McCutchen (OF, PIT), Everth Cabrera (SS, SD) and Julio Borbon (OF, TEX) providing in-season boosts, and others like Alcides Escobar (SS, MIL) and Michael Brantley (OF, CLE), at least having had the potential to help an owner pull a September surprise.
Do you want to bank on another Rajai Davis (OF, OAK) riding to your rescue in 2010? Perhaps not. But if forced to decide whether to go into the year deficient in power or speed, the percentage play may well be to do without the speed.
These are just a few of the new tricks one old dog learned in 2009. Only time will tell what wisdom 2010 will bring.
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