The Unkindest Cut (or Trade) of All

Every season presents plenty of dilemmas for fantasy baseball owners, perhaps none more challenging than what to do about a player's early-season struggles. We're still in the first third of the year, after all. A lot can and will change between now and October, and while reliability may have already been achieved for some metrics, the 2019 sample remains too small to draw meaningful conclusions on many others.

Yet draw conclusions and make decisions we must. Regardless of whether or not full-blown panic mode is merited, your situation may call for urgent action. You can't win your league in the first two months, but you can certainly lose it.

The question then becomes, what should be done? How can we, in the immortal words of Kenny Rogers, know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em? (Walking or running away may have been options for The Gambler, but they are dismissed outright for our purposes. Nobody likes a quitter, a fact of which I will be reminding you in the dog days of summer when the siren songs of vacations, barbecues, and fantasy football threaten to lure you away from remaining an active participant in your league.)

When to Bite the Bullet?

As usual, context is crucial. There are a number of factors that need to be taken into account when you're deciding what to do about players on your roster who aren't pulling their weight.

First and foremost, consider the track record player you're evaluating. Are we talking about an established star? If so, they most likely deserve the benefit of the doubt, at least compared to a player without a history of success. It's difficult to watch a hitter go 0-for-4 seemingly every night or a pitcher get lit up every five days, but seven bad weeks do not erase or invalidate years of reliable, high-quality performance.

Perhaps you're getting antsy about a well-regarded prospect who might be having trouble adjusting to the big leagues. Again, here some patience is probably merited. Plenty of rookies have had some growing pains before becoming the beasts they were expected to be. You've heard this one before, of course, but Mike Trout kinda sucked in his first taste of MLB action. Alex Bregman went like 2-for-40 to start his career. Jose Berrios had an 8.02 ERA in his first year. Baseball is hard! We've been spoiled in recent years by the influx of youngsters who immediately dominated at the highest level, but some guys need time.

Of course, even stars eventually fade, and the history of the game is littered with can't-miss prospects who did just that. Track records matter until they don't. That's why you need to look for red flags in a player's profile. Age is an easy one that requires no real digging. You shouldn't immediately write a guy off because he's getting a little long in the tooth, but if underlying numbers are trending in the wrong direction or health has become a recurring problem, those might be clues that this former stud is closer to the pasture than we might have realized. For pitchers, declining velocity or movement could mean the rigors of a wholly unnatural motion are taking their toll; for hitters, significant increases in whiff rate or changes in batted ball distribution may imply deteriorating bat speed or visual acuity.

Okay, so you've pored over the data and come to the conclusion that this dude is cooked. How confident are you in that diagnosis? This could just be a rough patch, after all - one you might not have noticed, or at least placed such emphasis on, if it hadn't happened to occur right near the beginning of the season. There isn't a player alive who hasn't endured an extended slump at some point in his career.

You're sure? All right. Now you need to figure out what to do about this information. The calculus here involves the name value/recognition of the player, how dire his current performance is, the depth of your league, and the strategic tendencies of your rivals. This determines whether you can pull off a trade or will be forced to simply cut your losses and kick this guy to the curb.

In either case, you also need to consider your replacement options, and the likelihood of those players' success as compared to the one already on your roster. The grass always looks greener elsewhere, but is it really? Your season might depend on the answer - so tread carefully.

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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