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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Let’s look at some more tips for better trading and ways to evaluate potential trades.

In last week’s column I suggested these two things to put at the top of your list to be able to make better trades:

1 – COMMUNICATION – preferably by phone or in person. You not only want to be able to judge a person’s reaction but don’t want to be lost in a spam filter or have someone misread your email. A casual, direct conversation also lets you get more information without making your objective clear cut.

2 – If possible, get the other party to make the first offer. Like the discussion this also tells you so much about how the other person evaluates players.

Number three could well be number one or two, because if you DON’T look at another team’s roster before you make a specific trade offer you could be proposing something the other owner would never do for whatever reason and derail your trade scenario(s) before you even start. For instance if your trade partner just dealt for a stud keeper, that is not a good trade target for you (unless a conversation revealed some doubt or misgiving on his part). If he lives in any major league city or nearby suburb and/or you know he loves that team (or any MLB team for that matter) then he may not be keen on trading his hometown guy (again knowing the person well or the conversation may confirm or deny this).

In most cases you also should not offer another team a player where they are exceptionally strong. If you have an extra catcher of value that may be interesting to many teams but if your potential trade partner owns VMart and Wieters they are not going to be interested in Joe Mauer no matter how healthy or how cheap he might be. You may laugh at that but I have seen similar offers presented. Note that if he has an expiring VMart and you were offering a much younger/cheaper catcher – say a $4 Alex Avila then you might be able to make a trade but make sure you are offering more than one of your competitors would be in total value.

Now before we look at how to evaluate trades we have to insert one other very important parameter – Be mindful of your league’s rules – and really I specifically mean keeper rules. If you are going to try and sell your good, cheap player and/or top minor leaguer(s) for a Stud player you need to be very aware of your trading partner’s roster. For instance, in a league with a restriction on the number of keepers you would be well advised to very carefully look at his roster and see how many clear keepers he already owns. If your trade offer means he can’t keep all his current players and the ones you are offering, your trade doesn’t have much value – even if you were giving up the best player in the proposed deal. The same goes for leagues where you can only keep so many minor leaguers – even worse if your ability to make a minor league draft pick next spring is contingent on your having an open minor league spot. Again don’t discount this – it could be very important to your potential trade partner (and of course I am going to again tell you that introductory conversation(s) would likely have warned you of his thoughts on these considerations).

Let’s evaluate this trade – you give up Dustin Ackley and get James Shield.  Is this a good trade for you OR your partner? Doesn’t that depend on who you have to move out of your active pitcher slots to play Shields? For him doesn’t that depend on who he already has at second base? Or on his minor league farm?

Let’s look at a more typical trade, one I saw a question on:

“Team A trades Troy Tulowitzki to Team B for Melky Cabrera and Jay Bruce?

Well that may well be the trade that is reported between the two teams, but the way to evaluate these trades is by how much it helps your lineup, so for Team A this trade is really

Tulowitzki and the two outfielders you are replacing, for:

Your new shortstop/MI and Melky and Bruce

Without the missing names it is impossible to evaluate this trade. I know the first reaction would be to say that Team B wins the trade because they get the best player in the trade – Tulowitzki. But if you insert the pieces that may not be the case…….Let’s say that Team A had Dustin Ackley on his minor league farm and his 4th and 5th outfielders were David DeJesus, now a part time player for Oakland, and Josh Willingham, now on the DL. His trade is now Tulowitzki, DeJesus, and DLed outfielder for Ackley, Melky and Bruce. THAT is a pretty good short term improvement for his team and if he was actually contending with DeJesus and Willingham, the rest of his roster is pretty good and Ackley, Cabrera, and Bruce should really help for the balance of the year. Conversely if Team A had a really strong outfield if would be hard to see how this team would help him (unless he had a prior trade in place to trade an outfielder or two for say pitching help)

ALWAYS look at the actual changes in your lineup to see how the trade will affect you.

So to recap the first two columns on trading:

1 – Personal Communication

2 – Get the other team to make the first offer

3 – Evaluate the other team’s roster before making an offer

4 – Make sure you know your league’s trade/keeper rules

5 – Evaluate ALL the changes to your lineup

Next time we will look at some additional ways to make your trade impactful.

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