Reader Email: Legit Trade

We had an email from Gina who wanted to know specifically if a trade offer she got was a legit trade offer. Here is her offer received recently:

I've just been offered K. Youkilis for A. Wainwright. In your opinion, is this a legit trade offer? I'm currently in 1st place in my 10-team rotisserie league. I have the following players:

C - Soto
1B - Berkman
2B - Stewart
3B - Headley
SS - Reyes

The trade itself is not insulting and the value is pretty good when it comes to a position player for a pitcher. In a ten team league this still seams like a fair trade, but not knowing the remaining pitchers on her team makes it a tough call.

Without that info it's tough to make a judgment, but with Headley as a 3B/OF and Youkilis as a 1B/3B the flexibility added to your team is huge. If Wainwright is not the only top pitcher and the starting pitchers in her rotation I would debate it.

It's still not a sure trade and would need to be something done more for a need and not because you are "winning" a trade, but those things are tough to tell when I don't know the whole roster. This trade in my opinion though is a "real" trade.

RotoSavants Fan League: My Bad Start

To expand the overall fun of RotoSavants, I took head of creating our fan league this year. My love of deep leagues brought us into an 18-team roto league with many of our beloved fans.

To recap our first month of play: Team Jebens is leading our RotoSavants group to 2nd place, Lee Perrault is in 4th place, my team (Team Restivo) is in 15th place, Troy Patterson's team is in 16th place and bringing up the rear is Aaron Murray's team in 18th place entering tonight's games.

In the overall standings, team "CA Penal League All-Stars" (great name by the way) is leading the way with 135.5 points with Team Jebens on his back trailing by about 4 points. The separation between 2nd and 3rd place is 11 points.

So now I'll get into the more entertaining part of this piece: how I obviously failed in drafting in this league. I picked near the bottom overall so I had the wheel when I wanted to make decisions on guys. In a deep league, being aggressive is normally the rule of thumb: I'd rather get players that I want and reach a little than get players I don't want later.

Strategy Fail: Draft Three Closers
Coming from playing one 19 team league last year and auctioning in a 20 team league the day before, I somehow thought a great strategy curveball would be to go after three closers. So I went and grabbed two "good" closers in Andrew Bailey and Joakim Soria and then decided that I'd go grab my new "boy" Mike Gonzalez. Yes, he had an awful spring but I decided to use a 10th round pick on him. Still, we didn't know that it was structural problems until he blew up in April and the O's gave him a DL stint with (originally) no timetable for return. Whenever you hear no timetable for return, that's almost the worst thing to hear. However, now we hear that he will be back soon in a few more weeks.

Another reason my strategy might have backfired, I found that one team was willing to punt saves and fields a group of 9 starters. The strategy has worked for him so far, he is double digit in three of the five pitching categories. In a league like this I never really want to try and employ that type of strategy because it really makes me have to go trade for saves later in the year to make my move.

I like to try to speculate for saves on the waiver wire and trade from strength later in the year when it comes to trading saves for power/steals, but this was a #fail for me in this league. I'm still tied for 13th as of tonight in saves, thank you Evan Meek and your 1 save!

Oops: Catcher
My two catchers in this league I drafted were Kelly Shoppach and Miguel Montero. Montero, my 5th round pick, is one of 7 of the top 90 players who is currently on the DL (I'm counting Manny Ramirez in this list). I thought Shoppach would also be a good investment, it appeared the Rays soured on Dioner Navarro and if Shoppach returned to form that would be a great cheap investment, instead he hurts himself on a home plate play. That forced me to go spend a bunch of FAAB on Navarro's next apparent replacement: John Jaso.

Edwin Jackson in the 11th Round
Enough said. Jackson has been a batting practice machine this year. Jackson's hits per nine has exploded and it appears his 5.07 ERA in the 2nd half of last year might be more of who he is than his 2.52 ERA and All Star appearance last year. For some reason in a few leagues, either my ace or soft ace/second starter, has carried me while the other has been a dud.

So I'm using this forum to also tell the league that I am officially on the trade block looking for home runs (among other things) and will trade away steals...

Alfonso Soriano: Trade or Keep?

The Cubs enjoyed a winning weekend, and Alfonso Soriano was a big reason why. With 4 HR and 10 RBI over his last three games, he’s finally on a hot streak, which he never really had last year. In fantasy circles Soriano came cheap during the 2010 draft, so should managers trade him while he’s hot or plan to ride him for the season?

Everyone who drafted or traded for Soriano last year was severely disappointed. How much his bad knee affected his batting stats is unknown, but it certainly didn’t help. Soriano set career lows for pretty much every stat worth counting. I’d think that some of that is due to his inability to beat out any grounders, as he had his second lowest infield hit percentage of his career. He also had his second highest infield fly ball percentage, so he clearly wasn’t putting the bat on the ball well. Also, the career low trend also applied to his BABIP, at but that also means he had a career low in BABIP, at .279. Taking into consideration his injuries and his very low BABIP, he was due for a bounce back.

I looked at his strike zone swings and was a bit surprised. Cubs fans are used to assuming he swings at everything outside the zone, and while his 2009 O-Swing% was higher than his career average, it was actually better than 2008. He made better contact than his career average, both inside and outside the zone. It seems he simply was not getting a good piece of the ball.

It’s still early in the 2010 season, and I don’t expect him to reach 600 plate appearances again. However, his numbers across the board have rebounded. One number that I like a lot is his line drive percentage (24%), which shows he’s making solid contact with the ball. He’s also making great contact at pitches inside the zone (90%).

Even if you assume this weekend’s hitting doesn’t translate into a full season of top performance, I think it’s safe to say that Soriano will be a great #2 OF for fantasy managers, especially in daily leagues where you can adjust for the one or two games he doesn’t start. I’d be willing to pencil in 25 HR and 80 RBI. I say keep Soriano, or trade for him if a fellow manager is still skeptical (or didn’t notice his weekend performance).