July 16, 2015

The Quinton

The Obstacles of a Lead

by Jeff Quinton

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Some of us are leading in our leagues and some of us are not. The chances of this being false are incredibly low. While leading is certainly preferred to being in any other position, it does come with its own set of decision-making and strategy obstacles. We will discuss those obstacles and what we can do to overcome them.

Obstacle: Egocentric Bias

While egocentric bias is quite the negative-connotation power couple, all it means is that we tend to give ourselves more credit for stuff than would an outside observer. This becomes an obstacle when we are leading in a fantasy-sports league because we will tend to underestimate the extent to which luck was a factor in us being in first on account of overestimating the extent to which we credit our own abilities. By underestimating luck, we are more likely to overlook the parts of our teams that are likely to negatively regress, whether it is a certain player or a position in which we are particularly thin or at risk of injury. Similarly, this will also cause us to overestimate the extent to which our players will bounce back (positively regress).

Solution: Obtaining distance or an outsider’s view are key in overcoming egocentric bias (as it is with overcoming so many biases that come with being ourselves), but this is difficult to do. The easiest solution is to have someone who can give you objective advice. It is often difficult to overcome the “nobody cares about your fantasy team besides you” obstacle in this situation, but if we reciprocate such advice to someone else, then a mutually beneficial relationship has got a shot of sticking. A less-sophisticated, but more-immediate solution is to take a look at rest-of-season projections for your players. I will often do this when determining which categories my teams will need the most/least help in, or, for points leagues, in certain roster spots.

Obstacle: Negativity Effect

The negativity effect, for our purposes, is tails on this bias coin to egocentric bias’s heads. We go to Wikipedia for some clarification: “The negativity effect is the tendency of people, when evaluating the causes of the behaviors of a person they dislike, to attribute their positive behaviors to the environment and their negative behaviors to the person's inherent nature.” While we might like the owners of the fantasy-baseball teams that are hot on our teams’ trails, we certainly dislike their teams. This makes us likely to overestimate the role of luck in our opponents’ teams’ success, while consequently underestimating the ability of the owner and the owner’s players’ abilities. The hindrance is that this will often cause us to underestimate the extent to which their teams will positively regress and overestimate the extent to which their teams will negatively regress.

Solution: No long explanation needed here. Instead, take the solutions from the egocentric-bias section, and apply those solutions to evaluating your competition.

Obstacle: Normalcy Bias

The normalcy bias is our tendency to underestimate or completely disregard the chance of something that has not happened happening in the future. It also includes our tendency to underestimate the effect of this unexpected something. In the case of trying to maintain a lead in fantasy baseball, the normalcy bias will often cause us to look at the ways our competition will try to catch us through too limited a view. We might look at the players we know to be available or our competitors’ likely trade partners, but this is underestimating our competition. By making assumptions about what is available in trade and the actions our competition can or will undertake, we increase our chances of being taken by surprise. The greater issue is that we are less likely to be able to respond to that which we did not plan for, especially in the case of fantasy sports, where there are only so many trade targets available.

Very few are immune to normalcy bias. In Nassim-Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (which, as you have probably guessed, is about unpredicted happenings), explains that we are all, no matter how experienced, potential victims of the improbably and unknown. He writes, “The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.”

Solution: While we should certainly make sure to do our due diligence on regarding the many outcomes that are not obvious on the surface, we cannot predict or imagine everything. Taleb understands this and notes that rather than striving for perfect forecast accuracy (impossible), we should “build robustness” that allows us to weather, or even capitalizes on, the unforeseen. For our purposes (when leading in a league), this means fighting complacency in redraft leagues and getting too cute by playing too much for the future in keeper leagues. Thinking that no one can catch us or that certain teams can only catch us in certain ways—pretty much thinking we have it all figured out—is the main way we are going to be caught off guard. Consequently, we want to always be reassessing the competitive landscape, our competitors, and our own teams.

Lastly, timing is also important here. Using our final bullets for a trade too early in the season when our needs for finishing in first are less clear can leave us less agile later in the season. This is not always the case, and we should still make trades that make us better (especially if we can still trade the acquired assets), but it is something to keep in mind.

While everyone who has gotten to the point where they can have the worries of leading has done well, we need to keep in mind that what has gotten us here, might not get us all the way home. So keep the above factors in mind and keep on keeping at it.

Source:

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

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