Balance – An Overrated Commodity

Editor’s note: The following article is not written by RotoScoop’s administrator, Dalton Del Don. It is written by Robby Wellington, who will be a regular contributor to the site.

With the third week of the year in the books and the fantasy waiver wire bereft of any real talent, owners begin the quest to improve their teams via the old-fashioned trade.

These days league message boards are often populated with posts along the lines of “Who needs steals? I want a closer in return.” That owner is, most likely, near the top of the league in steals, but hurting in saves and, like many other owners tend to do during this time of year, erroneously employing the principles of comparative advantage to rectify the situation. Because, this early in the year, a balanced team is not necessarily a good team. In fact, owners’ obsession with maintaining a balanced lineup and rotation throughout the year is one of the great fallacies of fantasy baseball.

Balance is certainly not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination; the ideal fantasy teams, and the ones that are usually still contending in October, have a balanced attack: a couple of mashers, a speed guy or two, some stud starting pitchers, solid closers. However, you should not be going out of your way to acquire a player to help you in a deficient category. Your primary goal when it comes to trading early in the year should be getting better players than you are giving up (another important goal should be shedding multiple marginal players for one or two quality guys, a staple of the savvy fantasy owner. . .but we’ll talk about that some other time).

Really the only time you should be concerned with improving your team in a specific category is with the trading deadline looming, and even then, you still shouldn’t necessarily be looking to improve in your weakest areas but rather in the most hotly contested categories where the most roto points can be either gained or lost. But right now, it’s still early in the year and you should be trading for talent, not overreacting over categories in which you are deficient.

That being said, there are probably plenty of owners in your league who are overly concerned that they are trailing in saves, SBs, HRs or some other category. Check the standings, find out who’s behind in which categories, and use that to your advantage in hammering out an advantageous deal.