Fantasy Reflections: The Courage of Your Convictions

As is frequently the case on Thursday evenings, I found myself scrolling through Reddit, Twitter, and a few fantasy sites in what I’ve dubbed “productive procrastination” mode. I’m searching for an idea for this vaguely-defined, quasi-behavioral, somewhat self-indulgent feature while also granting myself the freedom to sample the occasional meme. Gotta go with the tide or drown, as they say.

Eventually, Alex Chamberlain unwittingly gifted me with the backbone of today’s piece when he resurrected a Twitter thread from February. The said thread took place in the immediate aftermath of the RotoBaller Friends and Family mock draft. In this draft, Lawr Michaels caused a bit of a stir with the commentariat by taking Khris Davis at pick 25, a good 40 spots higher than his average draft position.

I defended the pick by pointing out that Davis had finished as a top 25 player in standard leagues in 2017 and 36^th the prior season. A few days before that mock, I had published a column that identified Davis as the fourth-most profitable hitter of the past five years. Even after that (and a growing belief that the Athletics had a sneaky-good lineup on their hands) convinced me to subsequently bump Davis up a bit in my next round of preseason rankings, I still didn’t have him cracking the top 40. Why the discrepancy?

Anchors Aren't Aweigh

At the risk of becoming a broken record, 2018 has been a lousy year for me as a fantasy owner. Learning from your mistakes is important, and I’m playing out the string in almost all my leagues anyway, so I have plenty of time to marinate over and attempt to glean lessons from this season’s failings. A pet theory right now is that I got bogged down too much in ordinal rankings. Brad Johnson has covered this topic over at RotoGraphs before, and I want to focus on this sentence: “I find if I’m too married to my draft plan, I’m not ready to adapt to challenges.” Rankings are useful to a point, but there’s a real risk in becoming a slave to them.

There’s a strong argument to be made that I fell into this trap in 2018 drafts. When you spend a lot of time poring over rankings and ADP data, whether you realize it or not, you’re vulnerable to anchoring bias. In short, values become psychologically sticky. I had gotten stuck on a valuation of Davis that simply didn’t jibe with the data and, instead of going against that ingrained idea, I justified it to myself. “Power isn’t that hard to find these days, particularly not when it comes packaged with a middling batting average and no speed,” I remember thinking.

Well, Davis is currently ranked 18th overall on Yahoo and 35th on ESPN’s Player Rater. He now leads the league with 39 home runs this season, and 123 since 2016. His next bomb will make him the only player to hit 40 in each of the last three years. Incredibly, given the current environment, Joey Gallo and Nolan Arenado are the only guys who even have a shot of doing it twice in those three seasons. Even though he’s in good shape to break the streak this year, it’s fitting that a player so consistent would bat .247.

Davis wasn’t the only player I should have rostered in more leagues. After touting Eugenio Suarez all spring, he landed on only two of the eight rosters I fielded this year. (Yes, “too many leagues” is another theory for my middling performance.) Matt Chapman, Aaron Hicks, and Shin-Soo Choo were also players who screamed value as I willfully plugged my ears in most drafts. I was at least smart enough to back up my valuations on Ozzie Albies and Aaron Nola in a handful of leagues, though it mostly didn’t help.

There was solid data backing up Lawr’s decision to draft Davis, and although taking Jose Altuve over Mike Trout turned out to be less optimal, the pairing of the two players made a lot of sense from a roster construction perspective. In hindsight, though, what I admire most about the pick was his willingness to aggressively pursue an action most people wouldn’t have. Of course, the stakes of a mock are low – we’re talking about a fake fake baseball draft, after all – but this is the internet, and caught flak is caught flak.

The moral of 2018 for me – with apologies to “Bradley Zimmer should not have been on so many of your rosters” is to have more courage in my convictions. I let too many external variables influence my decision-making this year. Next season, I’m putting more trust in my instincts. Hopefully next August, I’m not writing a column about how going with your gut is the highway to fantasy ruin.

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