Fantasy Baseball Strategy Tips (continued)

After the draft/auction

• Analyze your roster by scoring category to identify your team's strengths and weaknesses.  Also analyze as many of your competitors' rosters as time permits to determine their strengths and weaknesses.  This will give you a big head start in initiating and evaluating potential trades.

• While you should be concerned if you enter the season with only one bona fide Closer and your league uses cumulative roto scoring for the whole season, it's not as big a deal if your league uses head-to-head scoring or roto scoring for weekly periods. 

 

During the season

• Designate each player on your roster as either someone you will start all the time or someone you will start only in case of an injury or an extremely favorable match-up.  Generally, it makes much more sense to play favorable match-ups for pitchers than it does for hitters.

• If you find yourself in need of an additional Closer, don'’t panic and put yourself on the wrong side of a lopsided trade.  Once the inevitable game of Closer musical chairs begins during the season, additional Closers will emerge.  Some (but not all) will prove to be better than the man they replaced – it happens every season!  If you opted for a top-notch Middle Reliever instead of a mediocre to below-average Closer (see above), you may sacrifice some Saves initially, but in the meantime you will hopefully pick up a few vulture Wins and avoid the ERA and WHIP damage that often accompanies a sub-par Closer's Saves.

• When evaluating potential trades, make sure to include the deal's impact on your entire roster, not just the players directly involved.  You should include

• Players directly involved in the deal.

• Players remaining on your roster whose roles will change as a result of the deal (i.e. – starters moving to your bench and vice versa).

• Players remaining on your roster who will change positions in your starting line-up as a result of the trade.
  
  
• Players who will be added as free agents or cut as a result of the trade.  If time permits, perform a similar evaluation on the rosters of the other teams involved in the deal to gauge its probability of being accepted as currently proposed.

• Don't overreact to players who perform much better or worse than expected early in the season (particularly the latter)!  Consider what the player was expected to do before the season began, not just what he's done season-to-date.  The earlier in the season you are, the more weight you should give the expected results versus the season-to-date results in forecasting the player's results for the rest of the season.