Gaming Strategy
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Sample Column
To Go or Not to Go
Patrick Davitt -- July 7, 2006
The coming All-Star break is the traditional time to assess our chances and decide whether to go for the top prize. In non-keeper leagues, it doesn’t much matter, since we all throw in our hands at year-end, although there can be financial impacts from incurring transaction fees in pursuit of a lost cause (an excellent reason for a well-run league to eliminate per-transaction fees, by the way).
In keeper leagues, however, a bad decision to pursue a longshot could cause roster damage that lasts for years.
At its heart, the decision of whether to go for the gold this season is a cost-benefit analysis. The benefit is that you win your league and capture whatever glory and cash accrues to the titleholder. Some leagues make it worthwhile to just make the money spots.
The cost, of course, is that you give up the young bargain stars on your roster in dump trades that bring in large temporary profits in the form of enhanced production, thereby undermining your roster in the next and subsequent years. If you don’t succeed this year, by winning or placing highly, you really crap out.
ANALYZING YOUR POSITION
Deciding whether you should get into the dumping market requires you to make a dispassionate—even coldhearted—assessment of your chances. Any Roto team’s projected finish is a complex interplay of factors:
- How many total points you are behind where you want to be;
- How many net total points you can reasonably expect to gain;
- How many competitors are between you and where you want to be;
- How those competitors are dispersed relative to you in individual categories.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
The most obvious question is: “How far back am I?” At this point in the season, you need to be no worse than about 12 points short of your goal. That is, if you aspire to finish fourth or better, and you are 10 points out of fourth spot, it’s probably still doable. If you aspire to finish first, and you’re 24 points short, it’s very hard to see how you can pull it off, for reasons we will come to in a moment.
The basic accounting of your points deficit needs to be considered in light of your standings within the categories. This is where you need to be brutally honest and candid with yourself. If you are adept with spreadsheets, enter your league’s current stats, total up the HQ projections for each team in your league, add the two and get a gander at the final projected standings.
However you do it, decide your “MAX”, “MIN” and “Likeliest” score in each category. Add them up separately, so you have an optimistic, pessimistic and realistic set of outcomes:
Team RBI Pts ======= === === Team A 570 12 Team B 555 11 YOU 528 10 Team C 519 9 Team D 476 8 Team E 470 7 Team F 455 6
In this RBI race, you might look at Team A’s sluggers and say your MAX is 11 points, your MIN is 9 (only Team C can get by you), and your Likeliest is either 10 or 11, depending on how Team B’s sluggers stack up against yours, which team has RBI help coming back form the DL, etc.
After repeating this for all the categories, you will have an aggregate MAX, MIN, and Likely outcome for the year. If the only way to get the points you need to succeed is to hit the highly optimistic MAX outcome, chances are you can’t go all-in. It is just not a sound bet to assume that everything will fall exactly right in all eight or 10 categories for you to max out.
If, however, your goal is within range of the “Likely” outcome, and especially if it is between “Likely” and “MIN,” then you have a legitimate shot and need to think about making it happen.
But you also need to make a second set of considerations, having to do with how many competitors are ahead of you, overall and in the categories.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule about this, but even if you think of it as a coin-flip that you can beat any team, the probabilities pile up against you pretty fast. You have a 50% chance of getting past one team, a 25% chance of besting two teams, just 12.5% of getting by three teams and so on.
CONSIDER THE CATEGORIES!
A part of your ultimate success depends on these competitors falling backwards toward you—and the more of them there are, the less likely that all of them will be so co-operative. Also, if one competitor falls backward in a category, it might benefit another competitor—they will swap spots and points, but you won’t gain relative to both of them.
This intra-category dynamic, however, does offer a powerful opportunity for you to create indirect gains. When you do the category-by-category assessment of your potential gains and losses, you will notice that some of your gains are caused by going past your immediate competitors in the categories, while others are caused by going past also-rans.
Now, suppose you’ve decided you want to make a run. You need to focus your attention on making points gains not in general, but specifically in categories where your gains will create competitor’s losses.
Imagine you’ve decided to dump your $8 David Wright for a big return from eager also-rans. One team offers you a package of power guys while the other offers you an ace starter and closer. You calculate that both packages present you with six net extra points, once you allow for the loss of Wright’s stats.
Which offer do you take?
You have to look at the categories. Here’s an example:
Team RBI Pts ======= === === Competitor 560 12 Also-ran 545 11 YOU 538 10 Also-ran 529 9 Competitor 476 8
Team HR Pts ======= === === Competitor 108 12 Also-ran 103 11 Competitor 99 10 Also-ran 97 9 YOU 89 8
Team W Pts ======= === === Competitor 42 12 Competitor 41 11 Competitor 39 10 YOU 37 9 Also-ran 35 8
Team Sv Pts ======= === === Competitor 39 12 Competitor 33 11 Also-ran 27 10 YOU 24 9 Competitor 22 8
Assuming your trade result is 12s in the impacted categories, you net six points from both trades (you currently have 18 in the combined categories). But in this instance, you are far better off to take the starter and closer package because five of your six points come at the expense of competitors. In the hitting categories, you gain only three points from competitors and the rest from also-rans.
Of course this simplified example ignores the impacts on other categories (ERA/WHIP, BA, etc.), and you need to extend the analysis through all the categories. But the thesis is unchanged—you have to think not just about total points you are gaining, but at whose expense.
Remember earlier we said that you need the teams between you and your goal to co-operate by losing points while you’re gaining, and that the more of them there are, the tougher your challenge. Well, this is a way to oblige your competitors to move backwards and help you out.
(It’s worth noting that you can apply this thinking even if you are the dumper rather than the dumpee—by sending your studs tactically to teams who can hurt you competitors, you can have your cake and eat it too, to a limited extent, by helping teams to go by your competitors even for eighth or ninth place. Or, if you play in an league whose antiquated rules encourage last-place finishes, you can trade your studs away to teams who will go by you and cost you points!)
Finally, be absolutely sure that you need to deal at all. Our Baseball HQ Subscriber Forums sometimes have requests for comments on potential trades in which the trader is a team already in first place. Contrary to what you often read, there is no need to “cement your position” unless you have real concerns that you have validated through analysis.
If you’re already leading or battling in a tight race, chances are your current roster is pretty good, and includes young bargain players who are delivering big profits. There’s absolutely no point trading them away to finish first by eight points instead of first by three.
CONCLUSION
Keeper-league Roto is, as one Roto guru once accurately put it, “Two horse races being run on one track.” You’ll often have to decide where to put your money—this year’s race or future years’.
Starting that decision process with a reasoned analysis can help you make a wise choice. And continuing the process with tactical thinking will help you maximize your returns.
