(*) MASTER NOTES: Strategies

At this time of year, we’re going to start seeing a lot of website articles, SiriusXM discussions and podcast comments about the best strategies for our drafts and auctions. Just in the last few days, I’ve seen web articles headlined “When to Start the Closer Run” (more a tactic than a strategy) and “The Over-30 All-Stars Strategy.”

And we can add those to the pile. If you’ve been around fantasy baseball for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with lots of strategies. “Stars and Scrubs” is a strategy. “Spread the Risk” is a strategy. “All lefthanders” is a strategy. “Punting” a category is a strategy. “No player over $29” is a strategy. “No player Under $10” is a strategy. “Labadini” (the $9 pitching staff) is a strategy. Fantasy baseball has more strategies than Kanye West has IOUs.

And all the strategies have something in common: They don’t work. Or, to be more accurate, they only work if all your opponents at the table cooperate to benefit you, which is kind of like having a defense strategy for the Korean peninsula that only works if Kim-Jong Un cooperates.

The Tyson Philosophy

There’s a famous Mike Tyson line about boxing. It usually gets quoted as, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” This is a pretty good summary of the problem with fantasy baseball strategies: Your opponents will, and let's emphasize will, punch you in the face. Sometimes they’ll do it on purpose—if they see your strategic goals, they’ll try to mess you up by drafting the players you need. More often, they’ll mess up your strategy just because they want the same players you do for their own reasons, and they can outdraft you or outbid you for those players.

Think about “Stars and Scrubs.” It’s a great strategy—if all the other teams in your league aren’t doing it. If other teams are also Stars and Scrubsing it, then the market laws of supply and demand say prices go up on the stars and the scrubs. The bargains then theoretically fall to the middle, for the Spread The Riskers. But if there’s also a bunch of them, they bid up the middle-tier players! It’s a mug’s game.

Take for another example “The Over-30 All-Stars Strategy” mentioned earlier. The article implies targeting these players:

• Brian McCann at catcher
• Miguel Cabrera at 1B
• Robinson Canó at 2B
• Josh Donaldson at 3B
• Troy Tulowitzki at SS
• José Bautista, Chris Davis and Nelson Cruz in the OF
• Max Scherzer atop the rotation
• And Frankie Rodriguez as the closer

Easy, right? All you have to do is roster eight players, five of whom went in the first two rounds of the LABR Mixed Draft. Your bidding tactic has to be to nominate one and then fake a heart attack or call in a false fire alarm before anyone else can bid. Even if you could get all these players at value, their BHQ 5x5 projections add up to $207, leaving you the grand sum of $53 to get 15 additional players, including five or six more starters and another closer or two. And even all of that depends on all your opponents tacitly, even subconsciously, agreeing not to punch you in the face by bidding past HQ values on any of these players, or jumping in early on their ADPs. Will Josh Donaldson go for $29 in your leagues? Will $25 land Cano? Nor in mine, either.

In fact, even though the “Over-30 players” article has the word “strategy” in the title, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intended to be an actual strategy. It’s more like “these older guys might be undervalued in some leagues.”

There was one genuine strategic breakthrough in fantasy baseball. Many years ago, Ron Shandler noticed a market-valuation inefficiency in 4x4 with non-closer relief pitchers. Out of that observation, Shandler created the “LIMA Plan,” a strategy designed to exploit the fact that he could buy a few $1 high-skill relievers to shore up ERA and WHIP, then spend the savings on outspending everyone in hitting, with enough decent pitchers to get by.

It actually worked, for a while. But again, other owners started using it, punching each other in the face over those LIMA relievers,  and the advantage evaporated. We haven’t seen its like again since. And I’ll bet we never will.

Conclusion

So is there an applicable strategy for fantasy baseball now? Yes, there is. But it’s not so much a strategy as accepting and applying common sense:

• Know what players are available, right to the bottom of the pool.
• Know what every player is worth (although even here you’ll see profound disagreements about precision—very successful fantasy champions Larry Schechter and Tristan Cockroft advocate valuing to players to the penny, while Ron Shandler, Todd Zola and others say such granularity is pointless given the variabilities of the game and human performance.
• Know why each player is worth what he's worth, and his risks.
• Know your opponents.
• For sure, know the league rules and its history, and what it takes to win.

When many fantasy owners say they’re looking for “a strategy,” they mean something more like “a shortcut” or “a gimmick.” But there are no shortcuts, and gimmicks only work by fluke.

That Mike Tyson quote from earlier is actually not quite accurate, and not quite complete. A few years ago, Tyson gave a fuller telling to the fine columnist Mike Berardino, then of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Iron Mike said, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.” And he went on, saying, “If you’re good, and your plan is working, somewhere during the duration of that, the outcome of that event you're involved in, you're going to get the wrath, the bad end of the stick. Let's see how you deal with it. Normally, people don’t deal with it that well” (emphasis added).

There’s your winning strategy. Know your stuff, take what the table gives you. Have a strategy, even. But be ready to get punched in the face, and when it happens, deal with it well.

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