Fantasy Rebuilding: Lesson Learned.

 

At the time of this writing, my team “Wong Direction” sits at 52-116, good enough for 15th place in a 16 team league. It’s easy to make mistakes in dynasty when your team is going nowhere.

    If I wanted to clickbait this article, I would title it “I traded Wander Franco for Harrison Bader.” I am a Cardinals fan and watched Harrison Bader electrify the Birds with his speed and defense last year. With my team going nowhere, I wanted a player I could watch and root for every day. So I traded my 1st round pick for Harrison Bader in the offseason. That 1st round pick was used to choose Wander Franco. Going into the trade, I knew Wander was in the pool and I knew the pick would be used to get him. I have no rational explanation for why it happened. I have no defense for it. It is simply an idiotic moment on my part.

There was no deception involved, my trade partner even made absolutely sure I wanted to do it. I have to give props to the other owner, as he could have run away laughing with his Franco, but he later offered to reverse it knowing I made a mistake. I wanted to accept the reversal, but I decided against it. I am a firm believer in no vetoes and while this was not actually a veto situation, rather the owner of Franco approaching me, I still felt that it wouldn’t be right to take it back.

      That trade taught me an important lesson. No matter how much I deny it, I have a Cardinals bias when it comes to fantasy. I felt like I needed to own every exciting Cardinals player. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with wanting your favorite players, after all, we play fantasy to have fun. Doing so and refusing to acknowledge that it’s coming out of bias is the issue.

After that trade, I decided to take a step back from everything fantasy related except managing my teams. It wasn’t me being mad I made a bad trade, it was me worrying about what that trade would make me look like since I enjoy writing and giving fantasy advice.

The TL;DR of this is that everyone has bias, whether they admit it or not. When you are making trades in dynasty, ask yourself if what you are doing is helping your team’s future or solely to obtain that one player you “have to have.”