FAABulous - How To Spend Your Waiver Budget Early

It's funny. We spend the entire offseason developing our strategies for the upcoming year, carefully evaluating prior results, transactions, and countless other bits of data. We identify and lock down our targets, full of optimism for their outlooks. Then the action starts, and almost immediately we flock to the waiver wire. Truly, the grass is always greener.

RotoBaller's writing staff, myself included, will devote a lot of virtual ink in these opening weeks to parsing tiny samples for actionable information. By the time you read this, in fact, I'll be making this week's update to our Waiver Wire rankings. Not every recommendation will be a winner, but the idea is that enough of them will be to aid you in your pursuit of a championship.

What we're about at this moment, however, is taking a 30,000-foot view of the ways in which fantasy owners choose to approach using the waiver wire early in the year. Should you prioritize trying to snap up the newest breakout starter? Maybe you're more into the idea of riding a hot bat that might just turn into a season-long stud. Quite possibly you're trying to read the tea leaves and suss out future saves. Or what if you opt to sit out the early gold rush entirely, saving your precious FAAB (free agent acquisition budget) dollars for a later date?

FAAB Strategies: Pros and Cons

Over 300 people responded to my recent Twitter poll on the subject. The results were somewhat unexpected:

Save speculation finishing a relatively distant third didn't jibe with my own anecdotal evidence, but this might be another area in which playing primarily with industry folk in 12+ team roto leagues has colored my perspective a bit. But the real surprise was how few of the respondents were jumping on hitters with their early-season waiver claims, and how many were exercising restraint. It would have been less of a shock to see those numbers flipped, honestly.

Which isn't to say that they're wrong! First of all because there really is no one right answer, and secondly because they're agreeing with me. More than anything else, I spend the opening weeks preaching patience. Sometimes a handful of plate appearances or a couple of starts really are meaningful, presaging the breakout or bust to come.

You will always remember beating everyone else in your league to the punch on a guy like Juan Soto, or trading someone like Miguel Cabrera before the bottom falls out. But you will also be haunted by all the times you cut bait on a struggling player too early, and you likely won't recall most of the fruitless flyers taken on April darlings who turned back into pumpkins -precisely because those are usually the rule rather than the exception.

Save speculation is always a tricky proposition, and it hasn't gotten any easier with the emerging popularity of closer committees. Real-life managers are increasingly taking a more fluid, matchup-based approach to the late innings, which makes complete sense in strategic terms but causes fantasy owners no small amount of consternation. Mike Scioscia may be gone from our lives, but his spirit endures. Relief pitching being volatile by nature, gambling on saves can take a big bite out of your budget. If you hit on any of those lotto tickets, though, the world becomes your oyster. There's always at least one rival out there desperately in search of saves, and you can often leverage that into reinforcements elsewhere on your roster.

We can't pretend that relievers have the volatility market cornered, though, at least in the early going. Matt Shoemaker has looked magnificent thus far, but he's also enjoying unsustainable batted ball luck. In many respects, he's been the same pitcher over his 20 innings of work this season as he was in his previous, much less exciting 500 frames. By the same token, does anyone really expect Aaron Nola to finish the season with a six as the first digit of his ERA?

And hitters don't exactly get a pass here, either. There are plenty of flashes in the pan every season. I have for years maintained a healthy skepticism toward Dan Vogelbach, playing Debbie Downer to the wild-eyed hope of fantasy owners. I may end up eating some crow in 2019, or this could just be a monster week before the book is out on him. There's no way to know at this point, and that's what makes this silly game so much fun. With that in mind, waiting until we have a better picture of the situation can often be the best approach. The risk, of course, is that another owner will act more quickly and steal the newest stud out from under your nose.

Context is King

There isn't exactly a ton of overlap between my day job and my role as a fantasy analyst, but one of the first things they teach you in research administration is that the most common answer to any question is, "It depends." General advice is only helpful up to a point; it's up to you to incorporate it into your specific situation. Your roster construction, your league settings, your rivals' tendencies, the state of your waiver wire - all of this and more provides crucial context on what the best way forward may be for your squad.

You'll notice that we haven't really touched on injuries, which may be the single most important factor in your early waiver transactions. They're unpredictable and universal, which makes them less interesting for purposes of this discussion. It's simply an occupational hazard; we all have to react to injuries and the way they impact our rosters. Here again, though, specific individual circumstances hold considerable sway over decisions.

However you choose to allocate your FAAB, spend it in good health.

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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