March 14, 2016

The Quinton

On Paying for Saves

by Jeff Quinton

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In golf, there is a saying: drive for show, putt for dough. It is a catchy saying, it rhymes. If you have ever watched a professional golf tournament, there is a chance you have seen two players with completely different skill sets battling to win a tournament. One player—driving the ball straighter and farther and hitting better fairway shots—will seemingly be out-playing the other 90 percent of the time, but the other player will just keep scrambling and making putts while the other struggles to execute easier putts. This can be frustrating to watch because putting seems like a strange add-on to the game. When we think of great golfers, we do not think about the putting stroke; we think about tee shots and iron play. Because of this, less effort often gets put into the skill of putting, but try as some might to ignore it, putting always awaits them at the end of each hole.

Relievers, holds, and saves are the putting of the fantasy baseball world. They are the trickiest to assess and the most dissimilar (where role is often more important than skill) from other positions and categories. Making matters worse, these roles and categories come with the least amount to gain (a reliever generally impacts less categories or accumulates fewer points than a starting pitcher or hitter). As a consequence, we tend to focus less on relievers even though most winning teams tend to have productive relievers. “We” in this instance does not just include us as fantasy baseball participants, but also the fantasy baseball experts. Not only does reliever advice often get boiled down to either “don’t pay for saves” or “get one of these group of players or wait,” we also see many experts follow this advice in expert leagues where multiple teams will punt saves.

The problem with this advice and this strategy is that it neglects the actions of the competition, which will vary from league to league. Obviously, no one is drafting Wade Davis in the first round or paying $40 for Kenley Jansen in a standard auction, so we already are not “paying for saves.” The helpful advice, although obvious to the point of not being noteworthy, is therefore that we should not overpay for saves. This advice is not noteworthy because we should not overpay for any player; we want to let our competition overpay for players or categories and then we can take the discounts they leave for us. The experts giving and following this advice know all of this, and yet they are still (for several years now) overly shying away from relievers.

Why is this happening in redraft and re-auction leagues? I believe it boils down to risk aversion. Paying market or slightly-less-than-market prices for a closer feels a lot riskier than paying market price for a hitter or starting pitcher. The catch, though, is that the risk of being a reliever is (or should be) already built into the reliever’s valuation, just as the consistency and/or reliability of a hitter is already built into the hitter’s valuation. This means that any further reduction of price is simply a risk-aversion tax. I believe this happens because it is easier to imagine being burned by a reliever than being burned by hitter. Yes, that is because relievers carry more risk (as we just addressed), but it also comes down to numbers. We usually draft 11-15 hitters in any given draft, while only taking 1-3 relievers. Getting burned by a hitter does not sting or stay with us as much because usually another hitter (either on our roster or in the free agency pool) picks up the slack. When one of the two relievers we drafted disappoints, we are at the whim of free agency and the waiver wire to find replacement relief. But, again, this risk is already built in, so if the market is not overrating closers, then we should be happily selecting them and their potential benefits at market or below-market prices.

At this point we should touch on punting saves. It is a strategy that has worked and can work, but it is more likely to work in certain circumstances than others. The more teams that punt saves in a given draft or auction, the less effective it becomes. Why? It becomes less effective because the price of non-closers is inflated with each team that is only selecting non-closers. Also, the advantages of having extra strikeouts, wins, quality starts, and hitting stats becomes less of an advantage when we are the only team with eight or nine starting pitchers as opposed to one of three or four teams. If the market in general is overpaying for saves—and not just the top closers, but closers throughout the entirety of a draft or auction—then we should be prepared to punt saves in the same manner we should be prepared to punt “ace” starting pitchers, catchers, middle infielders, stolen bases, or anything else if they are being overpriced in the market. Put differently, punting saves should be a tool we always have in our strategic toolbox should the circumstance call for it, but it should not be a strategy we head into a draft or auction knowing we are going to employ.

Ultimately, the idea here is to strip away the unnecessary confounding factors that are often involved in selecting relievers in order to allow us to draft or auction based on value and league-specific markets. If we can properly frame our decisions through value, remove uncalled for risk aversion, and stay strategically agile, then we can demystify relievers and saves and start making better decisions. Even better, we can make better decisions where our competition tends to act sub-optimally, and that is where the biggest gains are often found.

There are a lot of words here, but let us leave with this plan for our upcoming drafts and auctions: let us not go into drafts and auctions with a closer, reliever, or saves plan; instead, let us enter drafts and auctions with the best possible valuations and take the values that the market gives us.

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