What Is A 2020 Fantasy Championship Worth?

August 14, 2020

In this week's edition of The Friday Meta, Kyle Bishop ponders how a championship in an extraordinary 2020 fantasy baseball season should be viewed.

It feels like much longer, but it was only five months ago that the NBA and NHL suspended their seasons. MLB, in the midst of spring training and bearing down on Opening Day, wasn't far behind.

We didn't know when - or even if - baseball would return. What we did know was that, assuming there were games, 2020 would be a season unlike any we've ever seen before. And as time went on, it became evident that the ongoing pandemic wasn't the only hurdle to clear for the sport to conduct business this year. At times, it seemed that ownership and the players would never come to an agreement.

Of course, they ultimately did, but not before we wound up losing over 100 games from the schedule. And MLB has already weathered multiple outbreaks, while players are also (predictably) suffering non-COVID injuries at a notably higher rate than usual. It's made for an incredible amount of uncertainty for fantasy owners - including, for some, uncertainty over what a championship in 2020 is even worth.

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Does 2020 Deserve An Asterisk?

It's been suggested that whichever team emerges victorious in this year's World Series - again, assuming we get that far - will forever be viewed as a less-than-legitimate champion due to a much shorter regular season and an expanded playoff field. We certainly won't see any volume-based records broken this year, but rate stats - no matter how impressive - won't carry the same weight as they would in a full season. Sure, we might see a .400 hitter for the first time in decades, but it won't really "count," right?

You could apply the same logic to whatever happens in fantasy this year. In a 60-game season, there isn't enough time to determine which teams are truly the best. Even the best players have slumps, sometimes lasting for weeks. And that's in normal circumstances, which our current situation does not even remotely approach. Those slumps may now constitute a significant chunk of the season. Injuries that would be minor in the context of a 162-game slate now may be serious enough as to cripple a squad. And as we've already seen, COVID has the potential to wreak havoc on any team at any moment. All this chaos has the effect of neutralizing many of the edges that experienced players have worked hard to cultivate over many years. To put it bluntly, there is just too much that is completely outside of fantasy owners' control.

That's one side of the argument, and it's largely compelling. But the opposite side of the coin has its merits as well.

Over the course of six months' worth of games, fantasy owners have a lot of room to maneuver. That provides more opportunities to make mistakes, but also allows for plenty of time to learn and recover from them. (At least in my view, this is what makes resiliency a crucial attribute for success in fantasy baseball.) This is a luxury not afforded to us in 2020. Batting 1.000 obviously isn't a realistic expectation, but we do need to hit on our roster decisions at a higher rate than usual in order to succeed.

Not only that, the shortened season means that a strong draft was more important than ever. With a much shorter runway, a mediocre showing in the draft room has likely already doomed a large number of competitors. Owners who drafted before the proverbial excrement hit the fan deserve some slack here, but those in leagues that held their drafts once we knew the shape the season would take needed to make adjustments to their approach. It reflects well on those who did and poorly on those who didn't.

As far as the chaos goes? Everybody's been dealt the same crappy hand. We're all dealing with uncertainty over health, roles, or even if games will be able to be played. If you can navigate that better than your rivals, you deserve credit. In many ways, winning it all this year is arguably more challenging than it's ever been.

So what is a 2020 fantasy title worth? It's a fascinating question - one that defies an easy answer.

The Friday Meta is Kyle Bishop's attempt to go beyond the fantasy box score or simple strategic pointers and get at the philosophical and/or behavioral side of the game. It is hopefully not as absurd, pretentious, or absurdly pretentious as that sounds.

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