Reassessment

When is it time to reevaluate players on your team? In particular, when is it time to decide that a player is worth more or less than his (uninflated) auction value?

I started thinking about this because of one of sas4's recent comments.

Assume he (Chad Gaudin) was picked up early in the season but after the auction, as a sleeper, for a buck. Notice how no one wants to trade for a player like him simple because the owner got him so cheap? How a player is acquired can have a bearing on value.

I think that timing has more to do with desirability than how a player was acquired. To be sure, a player either purchased in the end game of an auction or in early April as a FAAB replacement will not have very much perceived value. There's a reason that this player went for $1 or $2 at the end of the auction, or wasn't even drafted and was a "free player" after the auction.

At some point, though, we have to admit that a handful of these players were bargains, and that we shouldn't have let them slip through the auction. Generally speaking, this happens most commonly when:

• A suddenly increased role or opportunity due to injury leads to a strong performance.
• An injured player bounces back after one or more years of substandard production. Jermaine Dye in 2005 and last year is one example.
• A rookie or second-year player who wasn't supposed to make much of an impact or be "ready" right away breaks through.
• A mediocre or subpar pitcher suddenly turns it around.

I list these factors in order of most likely to convince me that the change is real to least likely. Of course, this is based on general experience; it is entirely possible that a specific situation ranks higher or lower based on the player in question.

I don't believe any serious Roto player would disagree with this premise. Not anymore. There was a time when working this particular angle was possible, and you could convince a newbie owner that a veteran coming back from injury was washed up, that rookies generally all stink, and that bad pitchers will always remain so. No more. At best, weaker owners will simply refuse to trade anyone who gets off to an aberrant start, afraid that they're going to miss out on the next Jermaine Dye or Raul Ibanez.

Another mistake owners no longer make is buying into two hot weeks in April as a significant indicator that a player has improved. We all know that 10-12 games in early April are as insignificant a sample size as 10-12 games in late July. Tricking someone into trading his slow starting Brandon Inge for nothing is a thing of the past. It's amusing when Rotoworld tells us to "sell high" or "buy low".

However, there does come a point where you can no longer ignore a player's fast start and have to begin to reassess his value. And this point is not in the middle of June. The worst thing you can do is simply hold on to your improved player because you are too timid to reassess. By mid-May, at the latest, you should determine whether or not your player is off to a fast start or if his improvement is real.

Obviously, this is not an exact science. Furthermore, if you don't watch a lot of baseball, you'll have nothing but the numbers to examine, bringing you back to the problem of a small (40-50 games) of sample size. But you do have to reassess your team, so these a few things to look for:

• Does the player have a history, either in the minors or the majors, of this type of performance? A minor league or major league journeyman is far more likely to revert to form.
• Did the player do something different over the offseason, such as hire a new trainer, or develop a new pitch to add to his repertoire?
• Is the player's team playing a tough schedule, or has he been putting up stats against a weaker opponent?

Traditional sabermetric measurements are best, which is why it's just as important to look at SO/IP (for both hitters and pitchers), BB/IP, HR/IP (for pitchers) and OPS (for hitters). If a pitcher is off to a fast start but isn't striking out a lot of batters, there's a good chance he's going to hit a rough patch at some point.

The key is finding a comfort zone between your assessment of the player at your auction and how much better you believe he's gotten since. If you traded James Shields in early May thinking that his 0.92 WHIP was a fluke, you can't be feeling good about that now. What you should have looked at was his 12 strikeout performance against a strong Indians line-up and his nine strikeouts against Oakland in his last two April starts and noticed the possibility of a trend. Then, you either would have a) held on to him or b) demanded more than you would have in trade on Opening Day.

By now, Shields owners aren't moving him without getting a top hitter in return. As sas4 points out, when a player is picked up most certainly is important. But it's always important to reassess.