SubscribeWhat would you do if someone in you noticed the following trade pending in one of your leagues:
The Flowering Barnacles trade Jimmy Rollins to the Anchorage Funnybones for Khalil Greene.
Let’s say your league requires a majority of owners to vote against a trade for it to be vetoed. Do you vote against this trade?
Obviously, it looks completely lopsided. A team is trading a clear top-tier player for a guy with five straight mediocre seasons under his belt. Both are SS, so there aren’t even any positional considerations (like one team trading from his surplus). It’s the most far-fetched example I can think of (that maintains at least a hint of plausibility), and yet I still don’t think I could bring myself to vote against it.
The reason is simple: I cannot be sure that Khalil Greene will be any worse than Jimmy Rollins in 2009. I know what they have done in the past, but, for next year, your guess is as good as mine. It is completely possible that Rollins will have an awful year, and Greene establishes himself as a first-round talent.
Every year there are early-round picks who end up being worth nothing at all, typically due to injury but not always. And every year there are undrafted players who launch themselves into the upper echelon. At this time last year, would you veto a trade of David Ortiz for Ryan Ludwick?
What if the guy who looks like he’s getting ripped off knows something I don’t? (It wouldn’t be the first time.) Maybe the guy who trades Rollins for Greene has a hunch that leaving Petco is just the change Greene needs to establish himself as an elite slugger. Maybe he has some inside info about Rollins’s ankle.
Right now everyone is caught up in the minutiae of ranking: “Should Rollins be ranked 9th or 10th?” In reality, either 9th or 10th could end up being way off; that’s just the nature of an unpredictable game.
If you vote against a trade because you think it is unfair, I think you are presuming to know much more than you really do.
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This is probably the stupidest thing I’ve heard since I heard Christopher Wallace speak about his rationale for trading Pau Gasol. I really hope it’s an inside joke, or satire, or something along those lines.
I’m sorry, that wasn’t constructive. I really don’t want to waste my breath going over why this post was so ridiculous, because boy will I feel stupid when you respond that it was a joke. Still… fighting every urge I have to not respond…
Of course you don’t know for SURE. No one knows anything for sure. But we have a pretty good idea. Inside info is one thing, and it would suck to be trying to trade Rollins for Greene if you knew Rollins’ leg was about to fall off, but your leaguemates kept vetoing it because they thought you were getting ripped off. That’s ironic, fine. But barring insider info, which no one has in 99% of trades, it’s just a blatantly uncompetitive trade. 9 times out of 10, it’s going to make one team unfairly better and one unfairly worse.
@Mike: Thanks for the clarification of your opinion.
Yes, this is a serious post. The example obviously takes things to the extreme, but I think it illustrates the point.
You say it is unfair 9/10 of the time, so what about a trade that favors one team 7 times out of 10? Would 6/10 be enough for you to veto?
Where ever you draw the line, you are making an arbitrary judgment about how close you think a trade needs to be.
I’m saying that we don’t know enough about how players will perform to draw the line anywhere.
One more thought: Ron Shandler points out that the best prediction systems are maybe accurate 70% of the time:
“In snake drafts, a projected 9th round player could produce anywhere between a 6th and 13th rounder and fall squarely within the range of 70% accuracy. Yes, 70% accuracy means that any player’s value can vary by as much as seven rounds. ”
Let’s assume that the wisdom of the masses (i.e. a typical fantasy league) is a little worse than that, which means two-thirds of the time they will be within 7-8 rounds of a player’s true value, and one-third of the time they will be wrong by more than that.
I think there is plenty enough unpredictability involved to withhold judgment on just about any trade.
I’ve got an even better solution. Don’t play in a league that vetoes trades. I quit a keeper league, because they vetoed a team punting his top flight talent to me for keepers.
My main league now uses an open market trading system, which is far and away the best system. My keeper football league will be experimenting with that next season.
For leagues with a veto system, the only legitimate reason to veto a trade is if it’s suspected collusion. If that’s the case, and a trade gets vetoed, there should be some other consequenses. The way it works in reality is, people veto every single trade for sellfish reasons. If your looking two teams getting better, that means yours just got worse.
I agree with rwperu34, try to stay away from veto leagues. In the leagues I run, I limit trade approval power to the Commissioner. And as commissioner, I think I’ve only vetoed one trade ever, and that was because of a mistaken acceptance (instead of hitting the reject button, the owner inadvertently clicked on accept). In those leagues that I play in with veto rights, I’ve never presumed to know enough to veto a trade. Most vetoes in my experience are done for purely selfish reasons, not to help the person allegedly getting the short end of the stick or to better the league.
Well, to take your side for a moment, a forecast can be off by 50 rounds – just ask Mike Piazza.
I don’t know what portion of the time it would need to be work in one guy’s favor for me to veto it. I probably think of it more along the lines of a normal curve of expected production out of each player, and if the difference between the mean production values is too great, I’d veto it.
By your logic, why would you ever make a trade? Or reject a trade proposal?
@Mike: I’ll make any trade that I think helps my team, and reject any that I think isn’t in my best interests.
I don’t think that is logically inconsistent with what I said above, though. My problem is not with making a prediction, it’s requiring my prediction to meet the approval of third-parties.
Would you still not veto the trade if it was between the 9th place and 2nd place team a bit after mid-season?
I veto if the deal smells like collusion.
“Would you still not veto the trade if it was between the 9th place and 2nd place team a bit after mid-season?”
Well, if I’m the first place team… :-)
Seriously though, is it impossible to come back from 9th place with half a season left? It can happen, especially if you make a couple of big impact trades.
I think collusion is a topic that gets brought up more often in discussions like these than in real life. I’d have to be pretty certain that that was what was going on before I vetoed.
Sure — it’s not impossible for that 9th place team to come back — but it’s a lot closer to impossible if the 9th place team was replacing Rollins with Greene in this scenario.
That’s only because you have certain assumptions about what Rollins and Greene are worth. There’s no reason why the 9th place team couldn’t have different assumptions, and there’s no reason why their assumptions couldn’t end up actually being the correct ones.