The Quinton: Improving Trade Routes

Following last week’s in-season trade primer “Trade Season: What Matters,” commenter DanDaMan asked:

“the problem I always have is other owners who either don't respond at all to requests or flat out reject a trade without any comment. [It is tough] to get any dialogue going in either case. How do you counteract that?”

This is a good, specific question, but it also fits into a broader set of questions surrounding trade, that set being, “How do we get obvious (based on players and competitive situation) trade partners to trade with us?” Some owners will just flat-out not trade with anyone; the anxiety or effort involved is not worth it to them. This is completely fine (unless your league decides it is not and wants more active owners, which is a discussion separate from this article), but we need to know that using our resources on trading with these teams is probably a waste of time. Rather, the area on which we need to be using our resources is opening up trade routes with owners that are trading with other teams, but not with us. While we have discussed the importance of effort in improving our ability to make trades, improving our trade routes is far more than looking at a team’s roster and bombarding the owner with trade offers. I think I know this because (i) I have made this mistake myself and (ii) we often see those who employ this tactic to be less successful at trading than those with more tact and nuance. We will take a look at how to utilize this tact and nuance via the words written below these words.

Implement process before results

This tiny section is really more of a general warning. That general warning being that improving our process is not something we should do only after our current process fails. Put differently, we should not bombard our leaguemates with offers and then change our behavior if we are unsuccessful. This method could certainly yield positive results; however, we are more likely to get better results (read: we can improve our odds) if we change our process with the recommendations below from the get go.

Examining their tendencies

“Know your leaguemates’ tendencies” is not new advice. While it is good advice, it is probably more helpful if we look at this at a more granular level. Specifically we should look at more specific groupings of tendencies. We do so below:

Note: we are going to be discussing a lot of preferences in the below sections. We are not here today to determine which is best; rather, we are here to figure out how to best interact with the different tendencies of our leaguemates, regardless of their optimal-ness.

Trade Timing: It is important to know when teams are most comfortable making trades. Some owners are comfortable deciding early in the season if their team is in our out of the race while some owners want to see how the next couple weeks or months play out. Some owners will engage in trades to fill holes early in the season, while others prefer to find replacements in free agency. It is easy to think that a specific owner’s trading history is simply a result of circumstance, that trades are made or not made because of the offers they have received or not received, but each owner’s strategic decisions may be just as affected by their own preferences as they are by external influences. The key here and with any of these tendencies is that we are likely going to be most successful by asking people to do what they are comfortable doing. Again, this is the opposite of groundbreaking stuff, but it is often here—the point at which becoming engrossed in the analysis causes us to overlook the people involved—that we get frustrated with unresponsive or unhelpful leaguemates.

Trade Types: Just as knowing the timing our leaguemates are comfortable with regarding making trades can improve our chances to execute trades, so too can knowing the trade types they are comfortable making. This can be position specific, but I have generally found that this is more structure specific, which kind of sounds like some words thrown together. Put differently then, most owners—if they do have a preference—tend to be averse to certain kinds of trade, whether it be very large trades, trades involving blue chip players, trading for minor leaguers or minor leaguers years off from the major leagues, or something else. The likely outcomes for asking an owner to deviate from their normal trade types generally range from unproductive trade talk to overpaying to get the owner to change their behavior, neither of which is desirable. (Note: It should be reiterated that many owners are open to all kinds of trades and that tendencies matter less when trading with these owners.)

Trade Scenarios: Just as we know that people’s risk appetite can change depending on their expectations and options, it is not surprising that people’s trading behavior can change greatly depending on their competitive situation. For example, the owner that makes lots of trades when playing for right now might be the same owner being very conservative when rebuilding.

The underlying point with all of this is just as we should be researching the history of the players we are targeting in trade, we should be doing the same with the owner with which we are going to be trading. People change, so we want to make sure to check our assumptions, but knowing our leaguemates tendencies can allow us to have more effective negotiations and better utilize time—one of our most important resources—when trading.

Learning their valuation style

Separate from the types of trades our leaguemates tend to make are the way they value different players. The key is to figure out which owners value certain players or production differently than we do. The thing we often do (and I have often done) when we do come across an owner with a different valuation style is to clash with them in negotiation, get frustrated, and walk away without making a trade. The problem with this is that these are the owners we should be most likely to trade with because of these differences in valuation (unless the difference is one party devaluing all of another party’s assets in an attempt to rip them off). It is tempting to get caught up in right and wrong, in even trying to explain why our line of though is correct (it makes us feel good), but the profit and fantasy success lies in being okay with someone thinking your valuation is wrong and trading based on those differences.

We are never just swapping fantasy baseball assets when making a trade; we are interacting with a very complex organism (leaguemate) in order to do so. Consequently, the better we can understand our leaguemates, the better we will be at trading with them.