Analysis of a trade proposal in a 12 team mixed league.
In my 12 team mixed league I made a trade offer that I thought was fair: Granderson for Haren. The opponent responded by saying “sure, and I will give you Hawpe for Utley.” Was I that far off??

Haren has been great so far; but also lucky. My colleague on the Fantasy Focus blog at The Hardball Times just wrote a very interesting article using the LIPS metric to analyze the luckiest and unluckiest players. If you read my very first column on their blog I wrote about what it takes to be an “expert” and one of the requirements was being able to use strategies and information that others don’t know and don’t use. Derek is excellent at this, and his LIPS analysis is required reading.

LIPS essentially stands for Luck Independent Pitching Stats, and was invented by David Gassko, a contributor to the site. Haren has been the second luckiest pitcher in the AL after Chad Gaudin this year. The below is NOT meant to suggest that Haren will collapse; but it is meant to suggest that there should be some downturn in his performance, though it could always happen next year! But Haren simply is not as good as his stats indicate to date.

Analysis of his component skills bears this out: Haren has a very low 25% hit rate, and a very high 81% strand rate. There is very likely to be a correction here. His xERA is a still good 3.69 but nowhere near his current ERA of 2.30. The Hardball Times is even more pessimistic; his xFIP (or Fielding Independent Pitching) ERA is 4.12. Haren also has a high Fly Ball rate of 41%. Clearly he is being helped by his park, and the vagaries of luck.

As for Granderson, he has been a top 20 point scorer to date in the league, hence my initial thought that I should trade him. 12 HR 43 RBI and a .283 BA may not seem like much. The league scoring gives 1 point for each base on a hit. So, Granderson’s 15 3B and 24 2B really increase his value over the traditional big three stats. THT has his line drive percentage at a very solid 20.3, echoing his improvement from last season. His groundball percentage is also a low 32.8; so he is hitting lots of balls in the air. Should he keep it up those power numbers should continue.

Granderson does have a gaudy .344 BA on Balls in Play (BABIP). However, his expected BA is .276; his actual BA is .283, so his performance does appear to be legit. At a minimum he doesn’t appear to have as much downside as Haren, based on the component skills analysis.

When I explained my reasoning (mostly the above) this owner claimed that he already knew this info (!) I find it highly unlikely. If the owner knew of the downside he clearly would not have been so aghast at the deal that he would consider it on par with Hawpe for Utley. That does not imply, though, that he should have taken my offer.

The final nail in my coffin is the fact that Haren is the single highest point scoring pitcher to date in the league. It is too much for me to expect that I could get a guy like that for Granderson, even though Granderson is no slouch, being in the top 20. He only has two top quality pitchers; Haren and Felix Hernandez (though he can be debated ad nauseum). I failed to look at this aspect of the deal when making the offer; instead trying to use the negative information as propaganda to try to pry Haren away at a discount.

One of the problems with trading are these types of issues. Everyone sees different things in different players; the fault is mine for not appreciating that this owner would not see things as I saw them and would likely appreciate or even care about the downside given his team’s position. Nor should he, Haren is likely to be more valuable. The great military analyst Carl von Clausewitz posited that the failure of a war is really a failure of policy not of tactics; my failure here was one of policy for sure.
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