The secret to winning at fantasy baseball is to always look for opportunities to improve your team. This may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people just lose it.
Also, you should take advantage of opportunities to improve your team until the end of the season. Many owners only pay attention to the draft, others just let their guys ride, some lose interest in the end, and far too many refuse to adjust strategy to suit the current realities of the fantasy baseball league they are playing in. None of those owners will win regularly because they haven’t received the note that they need to work to improve their team from game one to game 162.
I will give you an example. I’ve been near the top of a league where I play most of the season. I manage multiple teams so it’s not the one I pay the most attention to, but I’ve been involved enough to recognize early that multiple owners would hit the starting game limit you’ll find in most standard leagues. Although I had a lagging trend in wins, I knew that the other owners would not increase the wins once they reached this limit and that it would give me a chance to make some noise at the end of the season in the wins category.
I started streaming on an occasional pitcher last month in response. What didn’t occur to me was that a couple of the other owners would see that they were reaching the limit and would drop some quality launchers as a result. He didn’t want to sacrifice hitting for pitching, but rather rely on pitching transmission. But here were some quality starting pitchers who were suddenly sitting in the free-agent pool. What an opportunity!
What did I do? I took the opportunity to upgrade my team and picked up those pitchers, that’s it!
While this example may not describe your experience perfectly, the principles still apply.
- Adopt an early mindset that your goal is to improve your team by any means necessary.
- Play the long game while looking for opportunities, big or small.
- Take advantage of those opportunities, regardless of where they come from in the season. This means staying committed to the very end, taking advantage of a landlord’s trash, which could be their treasure.
Keep your eyes open. One of the many fun aspects of broken-style fantasy baseball is that there are always opportunities to hit, even at the end of the season.
