When Fantasy Teams Disappoint
At this time of year, I'm hearing from readers who have everything going their way in their fantasy league and I'm also getting my share of notes from readers who have been disappointed in their fantasy team for whatever reason. This is nothing new. Interestingly, at least a few of the ones who thank me at this time of year are names I recognize from previous years, readers who seem to be perennially successful in their leagues and who are kind enough to drop a note at this time each year to tell us that things are going well. Let me just say, if we haven't directly responded, for those of you who are apparently en route to a victory, I'm glad for you and I hope you finish out strong. Make sure to apply my recent tips on closing out the season strong (see the blog entries related to "Disregarding Categories" in our blog index for additional details) as the season wraps up.
For those who are having a bad fantasy season or at least one disappointing fantasy team, sometimes there's a question in there but just as often, readers will write to say something like "I thought this team would be better, didn't you?" and there really isn't a question there I can help them with. It's not so much they're asking why they haven't been doing well as much as they want me to affirm the confidence they had in their team back in April, something I really can't do at this stage. My projections were already on record and what I would retroactively think about a team's chances are completely unimportant by now. How the players have performed should make it fairly self-evident about why a team hasn't done well.
Winning often comes down to a few roster spots and at least a share of good luck. Winning is never guaranteed and you can do everything right in all of your leagues and not win them all. I've had years where more than half of my teams have finished first or second with other teams finishing near the bottom. It's not that I was a worse or bad fantasy GM for those disappointing teams compared to how I managed the successful ones... it's the nature of this game and a lot has to go right for you to win your league. Sure, if you're in a keeper league and can absolutely build a monster roster, you can have a pretty high percentage chance of winning your league but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Generally, you need a lot of skill and some luck to even finish in the upper half of a fantasy league in this era of highly-informed fantasy players.
One thing, though, that I have occasionally noticed, is that there at least a few readers who don't have the necessary perspective to win. That is, they often quote me numbers in an email to demonstrate their seemingly justified confidence in their team but they don't seem to realize that what they're saying isn't that unusual.
Let me give you an example - What if I could tell you that your hitting staff would average the following totals per roster spot over 550 at bats?
.270 Average, 16 HR, 77 R, 73 RBI, 10 SB
Would you feel pretty good about this hitting staff? It's not that far off the mark in terms of what one reader was suggesting he expected from his hitting staff and he couldn't figure out why such apparently such well-balanced numbers weren't dominating the hitting side of his league.
By now, you probably guessed it - The numbers I quoted above are actually what the average non-pitcher in the majors has produced this year per 550 at bats. Really. There was a time when the batting line above would look like a semi-star but those days are gone and you need to recognize that typical performances aren't what they once were.
Moreover, you can't just be average by baseball standards in this era and expect to have an average fantasy team. Fantasy leagues are selecting players for fewer fantasy teams than there are real big league teams and so the average performance should be higher as the worst players go undrafted.
Just as some readers give people like me too much credit for their own success (if you win, then you won your league), other readers will often send me their roster and openly wonder why it did poorly but will include specific players I discouraged picking up back on Opening Day. To those readers, there's not a lot I can say. Some readers have succeeded by inserting their own projections in place of mine - Oliver Perez being an obvious example from this year - but I can't tell you how many rosters I get for review that include players who were projected to have plus-6.00 ERAs or sub .220 averages. It's not that such players have no value. Such rosters are difficult for me to comment on because it's hard to look back and tell a reader that while I wouldn't have drafted this or that player, that it has nothing to do with why they're doing poorly. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't and it's tough to separate those out, even with the benefit of perfect hindsight.
Admittedly, sometimes a team's failure is not even bad luck. It can be simply a case of having drafted the wrong players, whether it was because of a forecast you read here or somewhere else or a projection of your own. Take Clay Hensley. He was among the high projected pitchers in our Opening Day projection sheets and he promptly went out and got blasted around for just over a month before getting hurt and spending most of the year off the active roster. If you had the bad fortune of having him but no other highly-ranked players, well then that would speak to your season.
However, luck washes itself out in the long run and while it might be easy for us to blame a bad fantasy team on bad luck, we really need to look back at our original strategy to see how much has been bad luck and how much has been bad decisions. For example, continuing with the Hensley theme, let's look back to our NL only Opening Day ranking sheets. The top ten ranked pitchers in a standard 10-team NL only leage in our Opening Day set were, in order: Jake Peavy, Chris Carpenter, John Smoltz, Carlos Zambrano, Chris Young, Roy Oswalt, Ben Sheets, Brandon Webb, Hensley and Rich Hill. I'm pleased with many of the names on that list and many of the teams who ended up with Hensley should also have ended up with at least one of Peavy, Young or Hill.
Anyway, today's entry really doesn't give an explanation as much as I wanted to offer a general response to the many questions that come up related to why a fantasy team might not do well. With as many readers as we have, we're definitely going to get our share of readers wondering what they could have done differently and I do try to help as much as I can directly.
The most common error I see is category fixation, readers who followed ranking sheets pretty closely but then deviated from a plan to be sure that they get one or two projected closers or a big-time base stealer, just for the sake of having one. Such teams often disappoint because the ranking sheets try to push for maximum value but can be easily negated by a fantasy GM's efforts to plug what he/she perceives to be holes in specific categories. At least two leagues I'm leading right now by a wide margin are teams for which I failed to draft a single closer or base-stealer. In fact, I wrote an article about this called Closer Obsession back in late May so if you missed that one, you may want to check it out.
I know today's entry isn't going to make everyone happy because there are readers who simply believe that once they draft a team of specific X amount of projected value, that it should be relatively automatic that they should win. Unfortunately, fantasy baseball doesn't work that way. You play the percentages and if it doesn't work out, the best thing you can do is look back to times you deviated from your plan. Were they calculated decisions? Did you fall into the trap of drafting closers with no projected value for the sake of having a closer? Did you constantly shuffle slumping players off the roster such as David Wright back before he got hot? Learn from your errors every year and you'll be a stronger player.
One last note then on this topic is that I draw readers to one of our archived essays called "This Six Losing Sins" which was published several years ago. A variation of this article was also published by Rotoworld magazine back in 2005 and it remains the most complete summary I can offer about why I think readers' teams can go wrong. If you haven't committed any of these sins, then you should be just fine in the long run.
For those who are having a bad fantasy season or at least one disappointing fantasy team, sometimes there's a question in there but just as often, readers will write to say something like "I thought this team would be better, didn't you?" and there really isn't a question there I can help them with. It's not so much they're asking why they haven't been doing well as much as they want me to affirm the confidence they had in their team back in April, something I really can't do at this stage. My projections were already on record and what I would retroactively think about a team's chances are completely unimportant by now. How the players have performed should make it fairly self-evident about why a team hasn't done well.
Winning often comes down to a few roster spots and at least a share of good luck. Winning is never guaranteed and you can do everything right in all of your leagues and not win them all. I've had years where more than half of my teams have finished first or second with other teams finishing near the bottom. It's not that I was a worse or bad fantasy GM for those disappointing teams compared to how I managed the successful ones... it's the nature of this game and a lot has to go right for you to win your league. Sure, if you're in a keeper league and can absolutely build a monster roster, you can have a pretty high percentage chance of winning your league but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Generally, you need a lot of skill and some luck to even finish in the upper half of a fantasy league in this era of highly-informed fantasy players.
One thing, though, that I have occasionally noticed, is that there at least a few readers who don't have the necessary perspective to win. That is, they often quote me numbers in an email to demonstrate their seemingly justified confidence in their team but they don't seem to realize that what they're saying isn't that unusual.
Let me give you an example - What if I could tell you that your hitting staff would average the following totals per roster spot over 550 at bats?
.270 Average, 16 HR, 77 R, 73 RBI, 10 SB
Would you feel pretty good about this hitting staff? It's not that far off the mark in terms of what one reader was suggesting he expected from his hitting staff and he couldn't figure out why such apparently such well-balanced numbers weren't dominating the hitting side of his league.
By now, you probably guessed it - The numbers I quoted above are actually what the average non-pitcher in the majors has produced this year per 550 at bats. Really. There was a time when the batting line above would look like a semi-star but those days are gone and you need to recognize that typical performances aren't what they once were.
Moreover, you can't just be average by baseball standards in this era and expect to have an average fantasy team. Fantasy leagues are selecting players for fewer fantasy teams than there are real big league teams and so the average performance should be higher as the worst players go undrafted.
Just as some readers give people like me too much credit for their own success (if you win, then you won your league), other readers will often send me their roster and openly wonder why it did poorly but will include specific players I discouraged picking up back on Opening Day. To those readers, there's not a lot I can say. Some readers have succeeded by inserting their own projections in place of mine - Oliver Perez being an obvious example from this year - but I can't tell you how many rosters I get for review that include players who were projected to have plus-6.00 ERAs or sub .220 averages. It's not that such players have no value. Such rosters are difficult for me to comment on because it's hard to look back and tell a reader that while I wouldn't have drafted this or that player, that it has nothing to do with why they're doing poorly. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't and it's tough to separate those out, even with the benefit of perfect hindsight.
Admittedly, sometimes a team's failure is not even bad luck. It can be simply a case of having drafted the wrong players, whether it was because of a forecast you read here or somewhere else or a projection of your own. Take Clay Hensley. He was among the high projected pitchers in our Opening Day projection sheets and he promptly went out and got blasted around for just over a month before getting hurt and spending most of the year off the active roster. If you had the bad fortune of having him but no other highly-ranked players, well then that would speak to your season.
However, luck washes itself out in the long run and while it might be easy for us to blame a bad fantasy team on bad luck, we really need to look back at our original strategy to see how much has been bad luck and how much has been bad decisions. For example, continuing with the Hensley theme, let's look back to our NL only Opening Day ranking sheets. The top ten ranked pitchers in a standard 10-team NL only leage in our Opening Day set were, in order: Jake Peavy, Chris Carpenter, John Smoltz, Carlos Zambrano, Chris Young, Roy Oswalt, Ben Sheets, Brandon Webb, Hensley and Rich Hill. I'm pleased with many of the names on that list and many of the teams who ended up with Hensley should also have ended up with at least one of Peavy, Young or Hill.
Anyway, today's entry really doesn't give an explanation as much as I wanted to offer a general response to the many questions that come up related to why a fantasy team might not do well. With as many readers as we have, we're definitely going to get our share of readers wondering what they could have done differently and I do try to help as much as I can directly.
The most common error I see is category fixation, readers who followed ranking sheets pretty closely but then deviated from a plan to be sure that they get one or two projected closers or a big-time base stealer, just for the sake of having one. Such teams often disappoint because the ranking sheets try to push for maximum value but can be easily negated by a fantasy GM's efforts to plug what he/she perceives to be holes in specific categories. At least two leagues I'm leading right now by a wide margin are teams for which I failed to draft a single closer or base-stealer. In fact, I wrote an article about this called Closer Obsession back in late May so if you missed that one, you may want to check it out.
I know today's entry isn't going to make everyone happy because there are readers who simply believe that once they draft a team of specific X amount of projected value, that it should be relatively automatic that they should win. Unfortunately, fantasy baseball doesn't work that way. You play the percentages and if it doesn't work out, the best thing you can do is look back to times you deviated from your plan. Were they calculated decisions? Did you fall into the trap of drafting closers with no projected value for the sake of having a closer? Did you constantly shuffle slumping players off the roster such as David Wright back before he got hot? Learn from your errors every year and you'll be a stronger player.
One last note then on this topic is that I draw readers to one of our archived essays called "This Six Losing Sins" which was published several years ago. A variation of this article was also published by Rotoworld magazine back in 2005 and it remains the most complete summary I can offer about why I think readers' teams can go wrong. If you haven't committed any of these sins, then you should be just fine in the long run.
posted by David Luciani at
3:05 PM
