What Goes Up

A few installments ago I had mentioned that there are many, many parallels between fantasy baseball and life. Here’s an example.

A number of years ago I had assembled a talented but pricey team led by Jeff Bagwell. Walking out of the draft I really felt this could be the year that a championship flag would be flying high over Confederate Park. By late May Dem Rebels were dead last in large part because the pricey stars were underperforming in a big way. Bagwell was having a horrible year batting in the low .200s with only a few home runs. Panic set in coupled with multiple phone calls from various vultures, I mean teams, asking if I was ready to play for next year. Rather than patiently realize the season still had four long months to go, I caved and traded the core stars for future potential. By the end of the year Dem Rebels were safely tucked in last place and Bagwell finished with a .336 batting average and 38 homeruns. The rest of the players jettisoned from the Rebel roster had their typical years as well.

Fast forward to 2010. Derrek Lee, long-time favorite of Dem Rebels is having a less than stellar season. Finally in frustration he was reserved from Monday-Thursday a few weeks back. Turns out those were the exact four days not to sit him. Here are the stats he’s produced for Dem Rebels (having been reserved for three games:

OBP: .3158 TB: 64 R: 24 RBI: 20 SB: 1

Here are the stats he’s produced overall:

OBP: .3417 TB: 76 R: 27 RBI: 23 SB: 1

By getting frustrated (and forgetting the lesson from the Bagwell Years) the Rebels lost .0259 in OBP, 12 Total Bases, 3 Runs and 3 RBI by sitting Lee for THREE GAMES!

In order to capture a player’s statistics, we have to struggle through the bad games to get the good games. None of us know when a player is going to have a great game or week or when they will struggle. We can look at logic and say “This pitcher is in Colorado this week so I should sit him since he’ll get hammered.” Inevitably if that pitcher is reserved, he’ll throw seven innings of three hit ball. But let him start against Pittsburgh for “that easy win” and he’ll get lit up like the 4th of July.

The parallels in real life:

The stock market (represented in this example by the S&P 500) has had an average rate of return of 5.9% from 1997-2007. That includes all the great days and all the horrible days that make the news. Now if you happened to be invested during that ten year period, but missed the best ten days (ten days out of the 2517 total trading days) your return would drop to 1.1%. And of course, just like with Lee, we don’t know when those ten best or worst days are going to occur. Emotion gets us into dangerous positions. Since having his blistering three game set, Lee has been 5 for 31 (.193). Usually with investing when things go bad, people jump for the sidelines until they see a recovery and once they see it (i.e. once the market has ALREADY gone up) they hop back in, having missed the spurt of growth. Having seen the spurt of growth, Dem Rebels activated Lee just in time to capture another correction while completely missing the spurt.

Patience is the name of the game. As long as you have good stuff (players, stocks, investments, even relationships) you will be successful in the long run. Now how do you know if you have good stuff? Oy, that’s another Monroe Doctrine.