When you enter your seasonlong fantasy baseball draft this spring, you'll come prepared. You'll have cheat sheets, you'll have positional ranks, sleeper picks and insurance picks. You'll have given some thought to positional scarcity and when the right time to build your starting pitching staff is. Whether it's your personal research or that of experts you trust, you face the draft room feeling pretty ready.
The timer counts down and duhn-duhn-duhn-daaaaah, it's showtime. The first round probably goes pretty smoothly, but sometime in the second or third someone makes an unexpected move, which is followed by another unexpected pick, and, boom, you're rattled because things are no longer going according to plan. You feel it in the pit of your stomach, maybe a light sweat on the brow as you ask yourself uneasily, am I doing this all wrong?
All the logical, rational, well-strategized preparation flies out the window as doubt creeps in. All of a sudden, you're not just executing a carefully crafted draft plan, you're thinking of what this draft means. How you could really use the prize money, how you really want to stick it to that leaguemate who beat you in the final days of the 2015 season, and most of all how you can't screw this up right now!
This emotional uprising is occurring in a totally different place in your brain than the place that helped you do the research, plan the draft and bring the notes. It's happening in a much older and more primitive part of the brain that relies on fear and habits to motivate decisions rather than logic. It can derail a draft in an instant.
Maybe I watched too many after-school specials growing up, but the idea that "knowing is half the battle" has always stuck with me. If you can understand what your brain is doing during the draft, and what the brains of your competitors are doing, you're in a good position to override primitive, panicked decision-making and stay true to a smart, rational plan. That's what we're hoping to accomplish here, by pointing out four common sources of what amounts to biased, sub-optimal decision-making, not just during your draft, but in many areas of life.
Groupthink
Quite simply, you participate in groupthink when you do what everyone else is doing. There are amazing examples of world-class musicians playing for free or famous art on sale for a fraction of its true worth -- anonymously of course -- and herds of people paying it no notice at all. Even if one thought to oneself, "Wow, that music is special," the follow-up thought of, "It can't be that special, no one else is stopping to listen," would probably override it. It works the other way, too. No one wants to be the only one ordering a basic black coffee at Starbucks or not drinking a protein shake at the gym (or doing a tequila shot at the bar, if that's your thing) or any number of things we do to fit in with our peers.
So when starting pitchers start coming off the board early on or there's a 2-3 player run on shortstops well before you planned to nab one, you have a choice. You can panic and get one because everyone else is getting theirs, or you can take a deep breath and assess the situation. The primitive, fear-based part of your brain is much more simply wired and can act much faster than the evolutionarily newer pre-frontal cortex that is responsible for the uniquely human ability to develop complex strategies. That deep breath is therefore an important pause moment; it serves to short-circuit the panic response. Regroup and prove to yourself that there will be pitchers you want available when you're ready to take a pitcher. Remind yourself that you're after that sleeper shortstop who is going to be there in a few rounds anyway. If you start to feel panicked because of what everyone else is doing, review your notes and cheat sheets, and sort the draft inventory by position so you can see that there are actually shortstops left in the draft.
Availability heuristic
One of the causes of groupthink is something called the availability heuristic. It means that people will act on information they're more aware of or exposed to. Thus, if there are several ESPN.com articles about the importance of drafting pitchers early, or a player getting a lot of attention in the media, or several mock draft write-ups that highlight regret at waiting on a certain position, those things are going to influence the drafters in your league. They're meant to influence you in a positive way, of course, but it's hard for our brains to remember that players in the news a lot aren't the only players in the draft. There are plenty of hard-working, talented fantasy assets that aren't being talked or written about 24/7. The players in the press most often see their draft stock rise, often at the expense of equally or more talented options about whom we have less to say.
Endowment effect
While it's true that people follow the media's lead by drafting players that make for popular stories, we also bias our draft-day decisions through our own exposure. When you do mock drafts, do you always try to get Paul Goldschmidt? Clayton Kershaw? Kris Bryant? Are there players that have "ended up" on all your teams? If so, you're susceptible to the endowment effect, the idea that once you've invested in something -- literally or mentally -- you will value it more than people who haven't invested in it. For instance, say you're trying to decide between the Stephen Curry and Draymond Green jerseys and they're pretty even in terms of pros and cons. Eventually you choose Green, and instantly the discrepancy between the two is amplified in Green's favor. Now that you own the Green jersey, you value it more (tell yourself everyone has No. 30, Green has all the triple-doubles, he's the defensive-player-of-the-year candidate and so on).
The endowment effect exists largely to reinforce our sense of self. We go around categorizing all kinds of information all the time, none perhaps more important than self vs. non-self. Thus, when we invest in certain items or ideas, they become part of our self-concept, and in the interest of protecting that self-concept, we elevate the object's value. What does it have to do with fantasy baseball, you ask? Well, if you seek out or end up with the same players over and over again in your mock drafts, you're likely starting to develop an ownership bias about them. That might lead you to take them earlier than you need or want to. The endowment effect is not necessarily a bad thing, either. Perhaps you're getting late-round value that strengthens your team over and over again in mocks and being able to replicate that in your actual draft would be great. But if you keep ending up with Shelby Miller because of where he falls to you, don't let habit take over on draft day. You don't want Miller as part of your self-concept. Just beware of what is leading you to the same players over and over again.
Pseudocertainty effect
At some point in the draft you'll want to take a minute and assess where you are. How balanced is your team? Have you taken enough risks? Do you have enough reliable production? The pseudocertainty effect will help you here. We have an innate tendency to modulate our risk appropriately (most of us do, anyway) such that when things are going well we reduce our risky behaviors, and when things are going poorly or outcomes are uncertain we increase risk taking. It's the pseudocertainty effect behind sayings like, "Don't rock the boat" or "When your back's against the wall, go high or go home".
Here's where, despite what I said about your draft plan and adhering to it in the face of draft-day surprises, you can build in some flexibility. No draft goes perfectly according to plan and your cheat sheets and notes no doubt contain several targets per position. If you find yourself after the first eight rounds with eight players that fall on the riskier end of the spectrum (guys who could make the leap to the next tier, or return to the high tier, but could also easily fall well short of their lofty expectations) your instinct might be to start loading up with safe, low-ceiling, higher-floor players. The pseudocertainty effect would advise you to stick with the riskier end of the spectrum of your targets since your team is already shaping up to be a low-floor/high-ceiling unit. You will continue to maximize that ceiling by taking the highest-upside players available. That goes against what a lot of experts might advise and requires a boldness a lot of us simply don't possess.
What if your draft has led you to all of the super-stable targets in your notes? Are you bored with your team? Do you start taking some shots at riskier targets when you don't need to? Again, I'm not opposed to balance, but if things are going well and you're building a solid, high-floor fantasy team, pseudocertainty says not to mess it up with guys that have just as good a chance of taking your middle-of-the-road team down as they do of elevating it. In this case, it's to your advantage to keep the floor of your team as high as possible.
In the end, your fantasy baseball team is yours and you have to like it and live with it for a very long season. I believe that no matter how much you want the crown or winnings, fantasy baseball should be fun, so if you reach for a player or knowingly make a sub-optimal decision during your draft to get a guy you love, don't let that derail you either! Hopefully you recognize some of the potential pitfalls I've described here and now have the mental backup to overcome them and proceed with your strategic plan, whatever it may look like.