Managing For The Stretch Run

If you've gotten this far into the season and remain firmly in contention, congratulations! The fantasy baseball season is a grind, and maintaining a competitive squad for four and a half months presents a challenge to which many owners can't measure up.

Still, as we approach the playoffs for those of you in head-to-head leagues or the mad dash of the final weeks in rotisserie formats, it's important to note that the endgame often requires a different approach. What makes sense in April doesn't always work in August or September, and failure to adjust could lead to the death of your championship dreams.

How can you avoid such a fate? Let us discuss.

Crunch Time

As an active owner, you likely feel quite aware of your team's strengths and weaknesses - but even the most involved fantasy players can miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes you're simply too close to the situation to notice certain details. That's what makes team logs and splits one of the most useful tools in the discerning owner's arsenal. It's easy to look at the season-long stats for players on your roster - most platforms default either to this view, or the current day's performances - but what that simple glance won't tell you is how much your squad has actually benefited from those numbers, or when they were accumulated. Say you own one of the dozen players who has already hit 30 or more home runs. You'd feel pretty good about that, right? But if that player has only gone deep twice in the last month - coincidentally, right around when you traded for him - those warm and fuzzies quickly dissipate. His season-long production doesn't reflect the value, or lack thereof, provided to your squad. In this scenario, looking at either your team log or the "last 30 days" split gives you the real story. It may or may not be time to make a move in this hypothetical scenario, but at least the scales have fallen from your eyes.

Another common mistake fantasy owners make is making decisions - whether they be trades or waiver transactions - without considering their team's specific situation. Say you receive a trade offer from a rival who wants to send you Mallex Smith for Patrick Corbin. Sounds ridiculous in a vacuum, right? The kind of deal you'd immediately reject and then snark about to fellow players. But no trade exists in a vacuum, especially not this late in the year. There are plenty of scenarios in which this deal would make sense for you to accept, the most obvious being that you could gain several points in the standings by adding the handful of stolen bases Smith will contribute. Perhaps you're also on pace to exceed your league's inning limit by early September, making Corbin significantly less valuable to you moving forward. The other owner has done what you haven't - he's checked the standings and put together a proposal that reflects them.

By the same token, you shouldn't be afraid to make a move that appears like an obvious loss on the surface if it helps you. The closer we get to the finish line, the more it makes sense to prioritize immediate returns on investment. In a head-to-head league where you're fighting to make the playoffs, your best play could well be to trade or cut an injured player you'd normally hold onto for someone who can help now. Sure, they'll be back in a few weeks if their rehab goes well. But there's no guarantee that the player you're waiting on returns at full strength - and if you don't make the playoffs, it doesn't matter anyway.

Lastly, this is the time of the season for loving to embrace churning the bottom of your roster. Early on, it makes sense to use your bench as more of a stashing ground as we wait to see how things develop. At this point, though, it's all hands on deck. Any player not actively helping your cause is hurting you, and unless you're in a keeper or dynasty league, there's a much lower risk of regret if you toss someone back onto the waiver wire because you're only missing out on a few weeks' worth of production instead of a few months. Whereas I spend much of the year preaching patience and encouraging the long view, the last six weeks or so demands a certain degree of impetuousness. The bottom line is that time is running out, and every day that passes is one fewer day you have to recover from the mistakes that inevitably pile up over a period of several months. And as we draw closer to the season's end, the more drastic these kind of decisions may need to be.

Keep trusting your instincts - just be ready to take decisive action when the moment requires it.

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.

More Fantasy Baseball Analysis