You can’t win your league on draft day, but you can lose it. While the intent is clear, the real axiom should be that you can’t win or lose your league on draft day, but you can certainly set yourself up with a solid foundation.

Depending on league size, format and rules, between 60 and 90 percent of your season’s end stats are acquired during your draft or auction. If you leave your opening day lineup active all season with no transactions, the counting category totals will be anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of what you finish with for real. What follows are tips to maximize your results via in-season management.

THE GOLDEN RULE

It’s not value, it’s potential. Value is the most overused word in fantasy sports. Value is past tense. We don’t know a player’s value until after the season. A value pick doesn’t exist. Keeping or buying a player at low cost isn’t great value. Seriously, try this: every time you hear or read someone say or write value, substitute potential. You’ll be stunned how often it not only fits, but is actually better. Until something happens, it’s still potential. Thinking in terms of potential keeps you on your toes and in a proactive mindset. Assembling your roster with a bunch of great values means nothing. Assembling your roster with great potential is a reminder you haven’t won anything yet. You still have a ton of work to do. Just like ballplayers waste potential by not working hard enough, so do fantasy players.

POINTS ARE CURRENCY

Evaluation should be conducted with one objective: maximizing point potential. Once the season begins, that’s all that matters – how many points can the player produce? The round the player was drafted or the amount paid in an auction is moot. The ranking or (sigh) value given by a Player Rater is irrelevant. All decision should be based on the question, “How many points will the player potentially provide?” This is true for all transactions, be it a trade, free agent/waiver acquisition or movement from a reserve list.

ONE THIRD AT A TIME

Billy Beane does it; so should we. Break the season into three two-month intervals.

First Third

Don’t worry about balance or perceived team strength and weakness. Even if you’re falling behind in a category, don’t punt it or sacrifice from other spots to force an upgrade. Continue to play your best players, regardless.

Be patient but proactive. Not only is two months a convenient marker to display patience, there’s evidence it’s the right length based on research. That said, it’s imperative to be sharp and look for incremental means to improve your team’s point-scoring potential. Maybe another owner is panicking and looking to move a slow starter or perhaps even released them. If adding this player adds potential to your squad, make it happen.

Most teams are constructed assuming some fungible end-game players. Pay attention to the available players early in the season (especially those released) as often times, roles that weren’t defined in the spring clear-up, adding potential to an available player that can upgrade your roster. Many don’t scour the available player pool unless they have an injured player. You may not need that upstart outfielder now, but will eventually. If there’s someone available better than a reserve, make the switch, even if there’s no immediate need. 

Middle Third

Now’s the time to purge your roster of dead weight. This isn’t to say that underperformers won’t pick up their pace, but you should have a better handle on which players have the best chance. Trades are the best path, assuming they’re permitted.

Through the All-Star break continue to focus on bullying up stats. At the break, it’s time to study the categorical distribution and work from strength to improve weakness. The key here is strength isn’t necessarily a category where you’re near the top. What matters is distribution within each category. You want to deal from categories where you can lose the least points to improve those that can gain the most. Remember, the currency is points. Often you can enact a deal by swapping a player perceived to be more valuable but the alleged lesser player you acquire adds more intrinsic value—um, potential—to your roster. That is, after the deal, your roster has a greater points-scoring potential.

This is the time to consider punting categories if the net effect is positive. For example, eschewing pitcher ratios for wins and whiffs means you can deal away your better starters for help elsewhere while liberally using lesser two-start options.

Final Third

More often than not, trading leagues have a deadline somewhere in the final third, so the majority of in-season management is free agent/waiver acquisitions and sage use of reserves. This is where category management is paramount. Points aren’t awarded proportionately. If you’re significantly ahead of the closest team, shift your assets to try to make up ground in another. This could mean benching or even releasing a higher ranked player if the replacement increases roster potential.

Monitor the activity of your opponents, as many check out if they’re not competing. This affords a better chance at free agents/waiver along with making it easier to make up ground in counting stats if the dead team is ahead of you. This helps determine where you funnel your assets.

Don't give up on ratios! Yes, that’s yelling. This is perhaps the biggest in-season mistake. Not only is it possible to gain or lose points in batting average, ERA and WHIP, it’s actually easier to do so in many instances. Everything revolves around category distribution, but the top-to-bottom spread of the ratios is tighter, plus your opponents can see their ratios decline.

GENERAL TIPS

Strikeouts and Innings Pitched or Games Started Limits

If there is a very reachable innings or games started cap and strikeouts are a category, in essence the category is K/9. As such, pitchers that carry a low strikeout rate, regardless of the number of expected innings, are detrimental. That is, a pitcher projected for 160 whiffs in 160 frames is more useful than one projected for 160 punch outs in 200 stanzas.

Prorate Category Gaps

Let’s use mid-season to facilitate the math. Ten more homers and you’ll have three more points. You make a move designed to add ten more dingers to your roster. The problem is that if the second half plays out exactly like the first, that gap doubles to twenty. On paper, you won’t receive all three points. The move should have added twenty more long balls.

Dual Purpose Trades

More often than not, the goal of a trade is to add more potential to your roster. However, a sly way of improving your stead is to take away points from a competitor. If you note someone close to you in the overall standings has points in peril, look to construct a deal that assists your trade partner in passing your challenger. A point lost by a competitor counts the same as a point you gain.

Roster Before vs. Roster After

Keeping in mind potential points are the currency, all transactions should be evaluated considering roster construction before and after the move. Trades often involve balancing players or activation from your reserve to fill an active roster spot. Don’t simply measure the impact of the players directly involved in a deal. Look at the points-scoring potential of the entire active roster previous to and following the deal. If the net points are positive, the deal is advantageous. That’s the proper math. Ignore perceived value of original cost of acquisition. Unfortunately, not everyone in your league has this vision and instead will look at trades myopically. They see an imbalance of player value (arghhh) and often veto the deal. Hopefully, you’ll be afforded a platform to make your case and either reverse or prevent the veto. Of course this means divulging a trade secret that other may pick up on, but the league will be better for it.

Ratios as a Gauge

You need to wait until the middle trimester for this to be most relevant, but a decent manner to judge where you stand offensively is comparing batting average to your counting stats. More so than any other category, there’s variance in average. Since hits lead to production, if your team average is artificially low, chances are so are the counting stats. Once your average climbs, the other stuff will follow. However, if your average is high but your counting stats are low, either you have been unlucky or you need to tweak your roster construction, perhaps owning too many players on low-scoring teams or hitting too far down in the order.

WHIP is more stable than ERA. Unless your staff is either ground ball or fly ball heavy, placement within ERA and WHIP should be similar. Differences are usually a lucky or unlucky ERA. By season’s end, expect ERA to regress towards WHIP. This helps in deciding if your team will organically improve or decline.