Luck vs. Skill, and how to define them

Two of my league mates and I were having a discussion today about what elements are involved in winning.

One of them said:

There is no foolproof method of how to win at fantasy baseball. The big keys are injuries and the ability to make dump trades before your competitors do. Of course, you need to have strong base of undervalued players after the auction, too.

This e-mail is really talking about the element of luck more than anything else, particularly when it comes to injuries and undervalued players. To a degree, you can be risk averse and stay away from injury-prone players (or reduce your bid limits for these players). Similarly, we all have a pretty similar idea of who the "undervalued" players are come Auction Day. I'm willing to bet that, at this point in the history of Roto, that most veteran leagues are nearly matching the price points for almost every player in baseball, assuming that the auctions are held on the same weekend.

Dumping certainly involves a certain amount of skill, but these skills have more to do with salesmanship than any acumen that pertains to baseball. This isn't to minimize this skill; in fact, the ability to convince another owner to make a trade that helps you out more than he's helping another owner out is crucial to winning.

The second e-mail said:

...having undervalued players makes the game easier, but I'm not sure it is a key. Injuries, of course, are the ultimate wild-card, particularly on the pitching side. With hitters, if you take the position that you need 14 relatively full time players, you can absorb a hit. With starting pitching, its very difficult to make up for that big-time injury.

Developing strategy is really what I consider a key. With solid strategy, I think you are going to outplay the majority of your competition.

When it comes to differentiating yourself from the pack, I believe that we've reached the point in Rotisserie where strategy is more important than player evaluation. Again, this isn't to say that player evaluation isn't important. However, we are all reading many of the same magazines, surfing many of the same web sites, and we've come to a pretty narrow consensus about what players are worth.

The biggest key to the kingdom is valuation within a framework of maximizing your point potential. If I buy $300 worth of stats and you buy $300 worth of stats, we theoretically have equal teams. In practice, though, if I finish with 80 points and you finish with 75 points, I win. This is a constant.

I've always said you don't want to take this concept too far. If you have a strong team heading into your auction, you're not going to throw away the power categories for the fun of it. However, you must always identify opportunities, both before the freeze date, at the auction, and during the season, to make sure you squeeze as many points as possible out of your team.

This is where most of the skill in Rotisserie comes into play. If 12 owners have a range of prices between $27-30 on a sheet for Brian Roberts, the owner who gets him at $30 isn't necessarily more savvy than the guy who only had Roberts at $27. However, the owner who buys Roberts is smarter if he knows that he shouldn't buy too much speed in the auction, and how to manage his roster in-season if he does indeed wind up with a surplus.

Conventional wisdom tells us that managing this surplus simply means trading it for something else. However, maximizing your points might not mean doing this at all. You might wind up dumping wins if you can't trade Roberts for a top starting pitcher and know that getting 50 cents on the dollar for Roberts just so you can acquire Mark Buehrle is a dog of a deal. Understanding how to adjust to these realities in your league is key. Buying undervalued players and avoiding injuries is obviously great, but it isn't something we have a lot of control over. Managing your roster to maximize your point total is where you can exert control, and where skilled owners will always manage to have an edge.