Three Team Blockbuster

[Ken]

how do you handle players lost for the year due to injury, given that unfair "randomness that you detest" ?

it almost sounds like some random losses are better than others
#animalfarm

Very odd to put things in quotes that you aren't actually quoting. I never used the word detest, nor did I say anything at all about fairness. I just said it didn't make sense to me, those are vastly different. If you are going to reply to a post I'd recommend actually reading it first!

When evaluating players health should definitely be a criteria you use. Odds of being traded is just a weird criteria to be using when you want to actually be basing your valuations on the player and his baseball contributions (which, as noted, included whether he'll be on the field). To each their own, I just don't see the utility in using that factor, and I prefer leagues that allow you to keep rostering a player once you have added him. Not sure why that's so controversial!

[Ken]

Maybe try not to make it worse because of trades ?

Exactly - mjl's post about losing players to injury AND trade highlights this.

Using injury risk as a counter argument is odd when the point is that having BOTH is obviously worse than just having one.

[Ken]

One thing to keep in mind for this trade, Bauer moves to CIN where CF is just 404 feet at Great American Ballpark. That's a foot shorter than Progressive, and 6 feet shorter than Kauffman. So if he needs to throw the ball over the CF wall it just got slightly easier.

[The Feral Slasher]

Exactly - mjl's post about losing players to injury AND trade highlights this.

Using injury risk as a counter argument is odd when the point is that having BOTH is obviously worse than just having one.

I didnt think this would be such a difficult concept to grasp

[The Dane]

Okay.

The very separation between NL and AL only is pretty arbitrary, and growing ever more so with regular inter-league games. We only have "only" leagues now because it cuts the pool down so that we can have only 10-12 guys. It's really an arbitrary cut. Many leagues add players and so they add teams from the other league to make the pool size work. Some leagues lose owners and cut teams and don't even play with a whole NL or AL. There is no magic bright line between what is AL baseball and what is NL baseball. Maybe there was at one time, but it isn't now and hasn't been for twenty years and isn't coming back anytime soon. Think about the myriad ways people handled HOU switching leagues. (We allowed keepers from HOU to stay in the league, but once they were released, they were gone. In a couple of years, there were no more HOU players.) Did any of the ways anyone chose actually change anything?

Since the lines we draw to determine the size of the pool are completely made up and arbitrary and can change for any one of a million different reasons, it seems silly to say that in the one case of players being traded across leagues lose their stats, nothing can change. Why draw the line there? There's no better reason to draw the line there than to draw it anywhere else. It's hanging onto some archaic idea that just isn't salient anymore, if it ever was.

Several of my leagues keep the stats of players traded out. Frankly, I enjoy it more. One less hassle. One less chance for bad luck to ruin my efforts. Are those leagues easier or harder because of it? Not at all. I have championships and last-division finishes in both formats. It's just a little more fun, in my opinion. Fantasy is a GM-simulator. GMs don't control injuries but they DO control trades.

[Ken]

Several of my leagues keep the stats of players traded out. Frankly, I enjoy it more. One less hassle. One less chance for bad luck to ruin my efforts. Are those leagues easier or harder because of it? Not at all. I have championships and last-division finishes in both formats. It's just a little more fun, in my opinion. Fantasy is a GM-simulator. GMs don't control injuries but they DO control trades.

Yup, exactly my intention, but you wrote it much better than I did. Thanks.

[Sam]

Well, they have their highest paid player rotting away on the bench, and Franmil, for all his power, rarely scored or drove in runs. And this was an MLB-career trend, so the Sabermetricians might say something, but there has to be something to it. Subtracting his HRs, he’s been on base 163 times and scored just 33 and knocked in 34. Frustration must play a role. Lets see how he does with Cleveland, but getting Trammell was a huge return.

True - paraphrasing the below from Twitter.

Losing Franmil = ripping the heart out of the team
Losing Franmil = turning a player who wasn't even protected from the Rule 5 draft a year or so ago and a lefty into one of the top OF prospects in baseball.

Both valid points.