What Does It Mean To Win A Trade?

I hold a pair of college degrees, one of which is in English, specifically the writing thereof. In addition to being a poor life choice, it reflects my interest in words and how we use them. That it also makes me more pedantic about this topic than your average bear is de rigueur, especially at our current juncture in human existence wherein a sufficient level of nihilism exists to render words’ meaning malleable, if not outright stripped of meaning altogether.

It also enables me to sound like I am very fun at parties, obviously.

What does this have to do with fantasy baseball? The game is, obviously, something I spend a good chunk of time playing, writing, and thinking about, so my close examination of its terminology is pretty much a given. I’ve talked before about my misgivings over the term “expert,” but in this column we’ll concern ourselves with a universal definition: When you think of winning a trade, what does it mean to you?

What's The Deal?

In the simplest possible terms, one can be said to have “won” a trade if they surrendered less value than they received in turn from their trade partner(s). Assuming I haven’t blown your mind with that paradigm shift, there’s obviously more to the process. For one thing, how are we measuring value? If I were to offer you a top-tier closer for a merely solid outfielder, that would almost certainly be a win for you in terms of absolute value, in a vacuum. (We’re also presuming here that you and I share roughly the same valuations on the players involved, which we’ll address in a moment.) But of course, it isn’t always that simple.

Continuing the hypothetical above, let’s also suppose that this is a standard roto league in which my roster includes several elite closers and an outfield in disarray thanks to injury and/or ineffectiveness. Furthermore, I’ve been trying for weeks to make deals with other teams and have found no one willing to pull the trigger. I’m way ahead of the pack in saves, but my lousy outfield is actively harming my standing in all five hitting categories. And finally, in this fake fake baseball league, you completely punted saves at the draft and are now so far behind that your likelihood of gaining more than a couple of standings points is low – unless you make subsequent trades that might detract from the categories in which I’m chasing you.

In another scenario, you might offer me a challenge trade in which we swap struggling stars, or early-season breakouts, or even a mix of the two. Determining who “won” can be even murkier in these deals, because we are more likely than in the first example to have wildly different ideas about these players’ valuation. If I expect the breakout I’m shipping out to fall off as the season progresses and the scuffling stud you’re sending my way to rebound to his former glory, but you feel the opposite, then we both walk away thinking we’ve gotten the better end.

And what if we’re talking about a keeper or dynasty instead of a standard redraft league? Then you’ve got to weigh present versus future value, which involves considering contention windows, draft budgets, and other variables. There’s also the specter of subsequent trades; if you wind up making multiple concurrent deals that interconnect, shouldn’t they be included in the calculus of identifying a winner?

Trades are also not always a binary thing or a zero-sum game. Win-win deals can and do happen with regularity, whether it’s because either or both of us missed the mark on our analysis, extenuating circumstances exerted influence ex post facto, or we simply found a deal that helped each of us address needs without creating concomitant problems.

The slippery nature of determining values is one of the reasons I view vetoing trades as a nuclear option reserved solely for instances of blatant collusion. It’s also why, when people ask for opinions on a trade they’re mulling over or have already made, or even just one that happened in their league, I usually wind up asking a bunch of questions before offering a response. The more you know about an owner’s situation and their thought process, the more helpful you can be in your feedback. Trades that sound like an obvious win for one side may be the exact opposite once the circumstances are properly considered.

Context always matters in fantasy baseball, but perhaps nowhere else does it carry greater weight than in analyzing a trade.

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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