Update On My Teams -- Through Week 1

I’m glad I handed off my teams to other players because I’m traveling this week, and I love not being on the hook for lineup setting and free agents, What a joy simply to root for my guys, but not have to do anything about it.

That said, there are a couple things you should know if you plan to do this yourself. First off, the speculative guys you drafted probably aren’t going to be the guys on whom your managers would have speculated. That means unless they come out gangbusters, they’re probably getting dropped. That’s not always a bad thing because you might otherwise wait too long due to the endowment effect, but if you liked a guy for a particular reason, and your manager doesn’t realize it, expect him to be cut.

In fact, a couple of my managers asked me specifically if I minded if they cut my guys, and I gave my thoughts, but ultimately said cut them if you think there’s someone better. Otherwise, I’d have to compare the guys I liked to the universe of better options, and then I’d be running the team myself, in which case why am I sharing the potential prize money? The reason for doing it is so I don’t have to research all the options, and if I’m not doing that, how can I know whether cutting my guy was the right call?

A couple managers went ahead and cut my guys without asking. Of course, I could have said something to the effect of “don’t cut so and so” but that would entail I look, and evaluate the options, so I didn’t do that. One cut looked a bit odd, so I asked about that, the manager admitted it might have been a mistake, and that was okay. If I were running the team myself — even if I were dedicating my life to it — I would also make mistakes. In fact, one year Jeff Erickson and I interviewed Glenn Schroter, after he won the Main Event overall, and I asked him if he made any mistakes, and he said he made many. You will make mistakes in fantasy baseball. It’s unavoidable.

The main thing is to ensure your managers are making an effort and thinking about things rationally, that every move or standing pat has a reason behind it. That’s all you can ask, and so far (it’s very early!), all my guys have done that. While I’ll be annoyed if some of the drops pan out big for other teams, I have to let that go. I too might have dropped some of those guys — or other ones they didn’t drop — and it’s impossible to know how things would have shaken out in the alternate universe where I was running my own teams. It’s like those people who lament selling their 200 bitcoins for $8 each. Yes, it would be worth more than $5 million today, but even had they held it at $8, it’s impossible to know whether they would have stayed the course at $100 or $1000.

So far, my teams are middle of the pack — though they’d have been quite a bit higher had I not had acted on my premonition about The Hound.

. . .

Incidentally, here’s a photo from Copenhagen where we’re staying for a few days.

When I first got to Europe, I posted some of my travel photos on the RotoWire blog, but I got away from it when I got more used to living here. But now that it’s my own site, if I’m writing this from somewhere interesting, I’ll add a photo or two.