May 1, 2015

The Quinton

The In-Season Advocacy Effect and Managing Multiple Leagues

by Jeff Quinton

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Many of us play in multiple fantasy baseball leagues. I am sure some of you play in strange, interconnected leagues, but 99.9% of leagues are wholly independent of one another. Consequently, any decision made should be made without consideration of any other leagues. This is all fine and dandy in theory, but as we have seen time and time again, this does not hold in practice. Because we are more concerned with the latter (practice) than the former (theory), we will now take a look at the factors that can lead us astray when managing multiple leagues and then take a look at how we can guard against those factors. More specifically, we will look at why we often end up with the same players on multiple teams, why that is an issue, and what we can do to avoid that fate going forward.

Advocacy Effect

It is often not enough for us to make decisions; we often feel the need to explain why we made the decisions we made. The decisions we make in fantasy baseball are no different. The problem with explaining, reasoning, and justifying our decisions is that our opinions and values tend to become stronger and more extreme the more we advocate for something. This is why we tend to end up with the same players across multiple leagues. After talking ourselves into Player X in our first draft, we become more likely to pay that extra dollar for Player X in our upcoming auction. However, this not only happens in drafts and auctions, it happens in waiver pools and free agency too. Example:

You need to replace Dioner Navarro in AL-Only League X and AL-Only League Y. In League X, the two best catchers available are Carlos Corporan and Geovany Soto. You run the analysis and decide that Corporan is the better add. In League Y, Corporan and Soto are available, but so too is James McCann. Whereas in a vacuum you might prefer McCann to Corporan, you might currently prefer Corporan only because you were just “advocating” for him previously.

(Note: There will obviously be more impactful decisions than filling our second catcher slot in an AL-only, but the concept is what is important).

Attentional Bias and Logical Consistency

Unfortunately for us decision-makers, the advocacy effect does not hunt alone. Both attentional bias and logical consistency work with the advocacy effect to negatively impact our in-season decision making when managing multiple teams. In a previous article, a fictitious person named earl said, “No decision is an island.” Earl was not speaking about topography; rather, he was noting that our decision making mechanism weighs other decisions. When making multiple roster moves, and especially when making multiple “low impact” roster moves, it becomes easy to take the path of least (cognitive) resistance from a decision making stand point. Instead running an independent analysis for each roster decision, we allow our perception to be affected by recurring thoughts (attentional bias), arbitrarily increasing the likelihood of having the same player on multiple teams.

A big reason why we are so likely to allow ourselves to be convinced by the advocacy effect and attentional bias is that they allow us to be logically consistent. By grabbing a player in a league a couple of days after we grabbed him in another (i) makes the decision seem safe while (ii) reinforcing the legitimacy of the initial decision. The issue with all this is that it has nothing to do with our goal, which is to always make the best decision. Being logically consistent might make us feel like we are doing a good job of accomplishing our goal, but that is not the same as actually doing so. When we add in the fact that we are all flawed decision makers to begin with, being logically consistent becomes less and less appetizing. That said, let us take a look at how to better our process.

Recommendations

Start from scratch when making a roster decision.
Even if you have previously decided that Player X is inferior to Player Y, well, things change, man. More importantly, though, this helps us avoid taking the shortcut of falling into past analysis. Past analysis is fine, but taking it as gospel and allowing it to stop us from undertaking additional analysis will cause suboptimal decision-making.

Adjust for league construction and settings in the beginning of your analysis.
It is tempting to try and translate analysis from one league to another, but this after-the-fact translation is far from systematic and too often ends up being a projection of personal preference. By starting out by taking league settings and norms into account, we are less likely to mistakenly frame the situation as being similar to past decisions.

Avoid “player-creep.”
Player-creep is taking the same player higher and higher or more expensively with each decision. Just as this can happen in drafts and auctions, it can also happen with in-season moves. Picking up an undervalued player in all your leagues is great, but it is less great if you are cutting better and better players to do so (and/or if you are paying higher and higher amounts of FAAB dollars to do so). I have no clear solution for this problem, but I try to remind myself that the acquisition of a player in one league does not make the acquisition of that player elsewhere any better.

As always, this is not game-changing advice, but hopefully it helps us improve our in-season decision-making—an often overlooked and underrated factor in fantasy baseball success.

Jeff Quinton is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @jjq01
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