October 20, 2015

The Quinton

Audit Season

by Jeff Quinton

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Welcome back to the fantasy baseball offseason. After months of tracking our teams and our opponents’ teams, after watching our decisions succeed or fail, we are forced to start all over again. In redraft leagues, this means waiting for teams to make their offseason moves before we can really begin our player analysis. In keeper and dynasty leagues, this means waiting as long as it takes for each league’s offseason trade market to heat up.

The issue, at least from perspective of trying to act optimally in the offseason trade markets in keeper and dynasty leagues, is that we never actually “start all over again.” While this might seem like a bunch of words lazily thrown together, these words are working to say that we often do not start our offseason from neutral decision-making ground. We do not do so because we are influenced by our past experiences, particularly our negative past experiences. In order to make better decisions going forward, we need to make sure we analyze our past decisions and experiences, not just to learn from our mistakes, but also to understand what biases we might be harboring.

Forecasts, Valuations, and Process

In the offseason and throughout the season we made a lot of decisions based on forecasts. While not truly statistical forecasts (we could not do so without the aid of a computer program), we used simplified forecasts for the purposes of decision-making. We decided that Player X was a better keeper than Player Y, that we had no preference between Players A, B, and C, that Player Z was worth trading our best minor-league player for, and that Player W was worth $31 of FAAB in mid-June—not to mention hundreds of other forecast- and valuation-based decisions. Sometimes we were wrong and sometimes we were right. Sometimes we were wrong and lucky, and sometimes we were right and unlucky. It can get very confusing.

What we do know is that we often try to hide our mistakes, while embellishing our successes (mostly to ourselves). We do so because we want to be happy; a truly worthy endeavor. However, if we want to happy with our future decisions we need to take a more rigorous approach to analyzing the forecasts and valuations we used in-season.

While it is not feasible (for both our sanity and our life-balances) to do exhaustive analysis on every player, it is helpful to make sure we go at least one step past results when analyzing valuations and forecasts for players on which we made decisions. Saying “I missed on Player X” or “I was right on Player Y” heavily subjects our future valuations to the advocacy effect and hindsight bias. Instead, if we take our analysis just a step further by saying “I missed on Player X because I ignored that he always had command trouble, instead focusing on a small-sample of improved starts,” or “I was right on Player Y because his improved third pitch really does make him a different pitcher against lefties,” then we are less likely to concern ourselves with how our future decision will look to others or whether our past decisions will look logically consistent. Additionally, this process makes us less likely to commit a type I error. Put differently, it makes us more likely to say “You know what, inner-voice? I missed on Player Z, but for good reason. While the results were good, nothing indicates that he will continue to be this player next season.” Put differently, it better helps us to analyze process as opposed to just results.

Trade Talks and Changes of Opinion

Throughout the season we engage in trade talks and learn how owners value certain players. Acquiring this information is great and valuable. This positive can become a negative when the opinions of our leaguemates change (which they often do) and we fail to realize that they have changed. This is a negative because it often causes us to miss out on potential trades (e.g. a player we thought was unavailable becomes available) or it causes us to trade assets for less than market value (e.g. an owner who was previously disinterested in an asset we wish to trade has become interested, but we failed to check).

Checking these changes of opinions is difficult. For starters, it is tough enough to come up with a trade offer that we think is fair for both sides. After being told by another owner that they are not interested in our offer because “they are not looking to pay that much for a closer” or “they do not want to sell low on Player X,” the last thing we want to do is go back and ask them if they have changed their mind. This is our desire to appear logically consistent getting in the way of optimal process. This is where we end up complaining that “you said that Player Y was unavailable a month ago,” instead of happily acquiring Player Y.

So what to do? We need to (if you know the song, then sing it with me) check our assumptions. This is particularly important for the offseason because it is one of those times that owners tend to change their opinion on players. People tend to try to keep their opinions unchanged, which can make this a frustrating and often fruitless endeavor, but it is wholly worth the effort given the rewards previously discussed. We have discussed the importance of effort and hustle on this internet before, but a little bit of extra hustle at this point of the year, along with a slightly smarter process, can go a long way.

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