The Trade Counsel: Trust the Process & Recognizing Players To Avoid (Arrieta & More)

By Simon Jones

One of the obvious by-products of writing a trade column is that I do spend an inordinate amount of time discussing fantasy baseball trades. It’s rare that an evening passes where my inbox doesn’t have an offer or a response or two, or that I’m not on some sort of IM chatting about baseball and trades. To be fair, this happened a lot before I started writing too, but it has probably reached a new high point this year.

I was involved in one such conversation a few days back. My friend was bemoaning an early season trade where he swapped Ryan Zimmerman for Greg Bird, and how horrible that trade was looking back. It got me to thinking about how we judge trades and what constitutes a good or bad deal. It’s very easy (and only natural), with the benefit of hindsight, to look back at the trades any of us have made and isolate whether we made a clever or stupid decision.

It’s important to remember that when we make trades in fantasy baseball we’re dealing with odds and probable outcomes. I like to use an analogy to poker. In poker there is some psychology or reading people and what they might be holding, but the essential aim is to maneuver yourself into the position where you have the best odds of winning the hand. You have no control over how the last card will turn, but you put yourself into the best position to benefit from that. Sometimes you play the hand well and the outcome turns bad, sometimes a complete novice can strike it lucky.

The same principle applies in fantasy baseball. If you traded for Ryan Zimmerman, Aaron Judge and Mark Reynolds in the first week, then you are either clairvoyant, privy to some specialist inside information or extremely lucky. You might have had a feeling one may have outperformed his ADP but not by this extent. I will also argue that anyone who traded a high draft pick for one of those guys in the first fortnight made a bad trade that has turned out very well.

So, when looking at that early trade of Ryan Zimmerman for Greg Bird it’s important to understand what we could have known at that point in the season – preseason there was a lot of hype for a fully fit Greg Bird where as Zimmerman has been injury riddled and hasn’t been fantasy relevant since at least 2013. In my pre-draft rankings I had Bird a good 100 spots above Zimmerman. Zimmerman had hit three early home runs, but I think the odds were still in Bird’s favor.

Now, of course, there shouldn’t be a fantasy owner out there who is willing to do that trade 1-1. Zimmerman has had a ridiculous opening six weeks. Pick any stat you like and Zimmerman has blown Bird out of the water. Given what we knew after a week and a half I’d still argue that the thinking was right, and there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to believe this outcome was plausible.

It is so easy to second guess yourself. I’ve already recounted similar thoughts on trading away Joey Votto last year after 2 months of pure trash. The key is not to look at the outcome as the only judge – either good or bad. In the end you have to trust the process and back yourself. The occasional trade will go bad, but hopefully they get outweighed by the good trades if you do your homework properly.

Last week I gave my thoughts on the 2017 fast starters. This week I’ll cover three guys who have struggled out of the block and I have real concerns over:

Jake Arrieta
Thankfull, I don’t own Arrieta in any leagues, and I hadn’t really monitored his struggles beyond the headline numbers. When I saw the terrible ERA I delved a bit deeper to see if there was a decent case of a buy-low in the underlying numbers. If you don’t look too closely you see the increased K/9, the much higher BABIP and the FIP sitting more than 1.5 beneath his ERA and it screams out buy-low. However the K/9 is inflated by the huge number of base runners, meaning the K% is actually broadly in line. However, look at the batted ball profile and batters are making more hard contact this year. Also, his pitch speeds seem way down. I’m concerned there is an injury or something else lurking there, and I’m steering well clear.

Jose Bautista
I saw the warning signs last year but was foolishly swayed by the strong spring numbers. If 2016 was a disappointment then in 2017 he has fallen off a cliff. There isn’t a number in the peripherals that give me hope. Horrific K%, big jump in swinging strikes, no power and poor contact when he does hit the ball. If I could get Top 150 value, I’d grab it gratefully.

Edwin Encarnacion
I have to admit I didn’t see this coming and had him ranked comfortably inside the Top 30 to open the season. A lot of Encarnacion’s stats are like Bautista’s, only not quite as brutal. Also he has only been this bad for six weeks. I think there is some bounce back potential, but I really can’t see him returning close to draft value for the rest of the season. If I was drafting today there is no way I’d take him in the Top 50, and he is dropping by the day.

The Trade Counsel is a weekly trade column – please leave feedback or any trade questions below.

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