Keep Calm and Play On

I spend an inordinate amount of time preaching patience to restless fantasy owners in the early weeks of every fantasy baseball season. This is borne out of a genuine belief that more often than not, resisting the urge to make drastic decisions in April will play out to your benefit. Rising above the roil of doubt and apprehension is the percentage play.

That doesn't mean I don't understand the impulse - or that staying the course doesn't sometimes lead to a crash. Like life, fantasy baseball is often cruel, unyielding, and/or incomprehensible. As human beings, naturally, we frequently exacerbate these tendencies of the universe by making terrible choices on the regular, some of which are the result of acting rashly. Yet it usually feels worse - both in the moment and after the fact - to have chosen to do nothing and have seen Rome burn while we fiddled. Also, you may have noticed that it is no longer April. We cannot say we were not warned.

A crisis isn't the optimal time to be making choices, but it's also when the choices that are made often have the most outsize impact. The history books are littered with decisive action winning the day in one situation or another, and we've all heard that victory goes to the bold. Leaving aside the veracity of those claims, it's important to know if you actually are in crisis, or it just seems that way.

Pushing the Panic Button

Emotion is powerful. It's visceral, immediate, and seemingly designed to perfection for the purpose of overwhelming one's rational faculties. Every decision we make is a push and pull between emotion and reason.

When things don't go according to plan, we get upset. The depth of that reaction may vary, of course, but it is the most base response. The baseball season is long, and it's insane to expect nothing to go wrong over six months and 162 games. Yet a few bad weeks for a player on your roster that happen to come at the start of the year can inspire dread in even a battle-tested fantasy owner. You still end up wondering if this is just a slump or the harbinger of doom - for a season, or perhaps even a career. Nobody is excited to own Joey Votto right now, for instance.

But let's say you do own Votto. Let's say you also own Jose Ramirez. And Corey Kluber. And Giancarlo Stanton, and Corey Seager, and Walker Buehler. What would you do next? What could you do next, apart from curling into a ball and sobbing? Nobody reading this would have been upset to enter 2019 with that group as the core of their roster, but if you did, you're in a world of hurt. "Stiff upper lip" may not be the counsel you wish to hear at the moment, and it also wouldn't be the right advice. When catastrophe has well and truly struck, all bets are off.

That's an extreme example of course, but even owning just a couple of those players might be plenty of rain on your parade. And depending on how competitive your league is, its settings, and countless other specific factors, it could wind up being enough to waylay your championship drive, which means the time for a major move may well be at hand. The answer, as always, lies in the context. You need to tailor your thinking around the specific circumstances in which you find yourself. Is this just bad luck, or bad process? Are you really falling behind, or are you mostly overreacting to a couple of your studs failing to meet expectations? Were your expectations realistic? How much longer can you afford to wait? All valid lines of inquiry.

As we're previously addressed, there's no single right way to play fantasy baseball. A hallmark of the successful player, however, is knowing one's own tendencies and letting them inform overall strategy. In practice, what this means is knowing where you most often fall on that emotion versus reason spectrum. Probably you have an idea of that place in your head, but how we imagine ourselves to be and the reality of who we are sometimes aren't compatible. Take a look at your transactions last season as a starting point. Everyone will have their share of regrets, but if yours indicate a common thread, it's important to bear that in mind as you move forward. Mistakes are part and parcel of the human experience, but there's little value in repeating the same ones over and over.

The Friday Meta is Kyle Bishop's attempt to go beyond the fantasy box score or simple strategic pointers and get at the philosophical and/or behavioral side of the game. It is hopefully not as absurd, pretentious, or absurdly pretentious as that sounds.

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