RADIO
Kyle Bishop offers some words of wisdom for those whose 2018 fantasy baseball seasons may get off to a rocky start due to rough drafts or rotten luck.
Friends, it is a glorious day – baseball has returned at long last. After spilling gallons upon gallons of virtual ink in this space on projections, predictions, and ADP analysis, it’s finally time to see how the 2018 season will play out.
Don’t get me wrong – along with the rest of my RotoBaller colleagues, I take a lot of pleasure and pride in helping readers prepare for their drafts. Your league’s draft should be one of the highlights of the year, and a great performance there will set up you for success during the season.
But at a certain point, one has parsed all that one can from the past and exhausted ways to extoll the virtues or point out the flaws of this or that player. After a few months of preseason coverage, I’m pretty sure y’all know how I feel about, say, Ozzie Albies or Javier Baez.
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That's Why They Play the Games
And we all know this simple truth: The draft along doesn’t decide the outcome of your season, because every single one of us – yes, even you, Dorn – will have gotten some things wrong this spring. That young player you expected to break out will crater. The guy you were convinced would be the biggest bust of the season learned a new pitch or tweaked his stance and now he’s a pillar for one of your rivals. You bet on the wrong horse in a spring training battle. That minor injury turned out to be a big deal. Some Johnny-come-lately free agent signed and made your save spec worthless. We’ve all dealt with these and a thousand other suboptimal situations each season.
Does that make all the preparation a waste of time? Hardly…and fortunately, for those of us who get paid to create that content. It just means that your management efforts during the season are usually what makes the difference between winning a championship or falling short. And the investment you made in the spring will pay dividends all season long; not only will you have a higher likelihood of avoiding some of the pitfalls listed above, but you’ll be able to draw on your prep to help you manage your roster during the season. The keys to success in fantasy baseball – in most things, really – are adaptability and persistence. There’s a reason they’re called drafts, after all. You will almost certainly see limited carryover between your current roster and the one you’ll have at season’s end. On some level, everyone knows this, but many owners are still quick to take drastic measures at the first sign of trouble.
During a difficult start to the year, it’s easy to become frustrated and to let that frustration mushroom into full-blown panic. Nobody enjoys seeing something they meticulously constructed come crashing down, but sometimes that’s the way the cookie crumbles. It’s the beauty and curse of the game – no amount of preparation can guarantee victory. All any of us are doing is making educated guesses and hopefully getting more of them right than wrong. The universe may be pure chaos (and a cruel, uncaring void), but good processes will, given enough time, lead to more positive results than negative.
So if you had a tough draft, or hit some speed bumps in the early going, don’t despair. Take a few deep breaths, back away from that ill-advised impulse waiver claim or trade offer, and channel that energy into working hard – and more importantly, working smart – to fix whatever ails your fantasy roster. RotoBaller will be here all season to help you do just that. Here’s hoping that it wasn’t following our advice that got you into a mess in the first place.
Best of luck to you this season – and remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
