Time to Panic?

Is your team off to a sloppy start? Did you feel great after your draft, but now find yourself with symptoms oddly reminiscent of a hangover? These are very common problems at this early point of the season, but relax: 162 games make for a very, very long campaign. If you feel like panicking, take a couple deep breaths. There will be time enough to panic a little later – it’s simply too early to perform a major overhaul of your team at this point.

The first thing I urge you to do is to stick with your cheat sheet for now. You drafted the way you did for a reason, and it’s unlikely that the logic that led you to the decisions you made is completely invalid just a few weeks later. Nobody plays 162 games without some kind of slump. Of course it looks especially ugly when it happens just at the beginning of a season, since players haven’t put up any other stats to put a slump in the proper perspective. But trust me, not too many players hit .190 for a whole season after hitting for .300 the last couple of years. And nobody will finish with zero homers when he averaged 20 or more over his career so far, unless that player is struck by a season-ending injury. Maybe you might consider benching slumping players for now and waiting for them to get back on track, but don?t drop them for players who just had a good start.

Let others make this type of mistake, and, furthermore, try to profit from these errors. Search the waiver wire carefully for players who have been dropped because they have underachieved so far. Of course, you won’t find A-Rod there (unless you have a truly shortsighted owner in your league), but players like Bud Smith, who started the year by being sent down to the minors, could be available. So could players who have missed a few games such as Ryan Klesko or Brian Giles, as happened in the league of one of the Cafe forum regulars.

This is the time of the season where you have to be patient. Closely follow any transactions that others make and be there to get your piece of the cake when the time comes. There are, however, players you have to watch carefully, such as the ones who are starting to show declining skills due to age (Fred McGriff might be an example of this) or are coming back from lingering injuries (Jason Kendall, who leads the list of disappointments so far, may not be as fully recovered as we thought).

Of course, I’m not trying to talk you out of making a useful trade. In fact, I would encourage you to see if there are any deals worth making out there. But go about it in the fashion mentioned above. Try to search for players who have underachieved in the first weeks (like Robbie Alomar, for example) and try to give your counterpart a player who has played great in the first weeks, and will fall back a bit. Michael Barret and Eli Marrero may be the best examples here – both will be good catchers for a fantasy team, but won’t put up those monster numbers for the rest of the season! As always, if you can buy low and sell high, you’ll find yourself in good shape.

So please: be patient! The season is too long to start panicking now, even if it’s tempting. There will be more than enough opportunities to go into panic mode when the unforeseen strikes later in the year.