Early Season Stat Blues

No, that's not a song off the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

It is, however, an affliction that all of us suffer from. You draft a guy with certain expectations and on April 8th, he's let you down. You wonder, "What was I thinking?"

Savvy owners draft skills and not stats. They do this not just becuase stats typically correlate to skills but because skills can be purchased at a discount but stats cannot. If you've done a good job in discounting last year's numbers when appropriate, you should have no trouble doing the same after the season's first week.

The trouble, of course, is that these stats are now poisoning actual standings and thus seem far less abstract and more threatening.

Yes, stats, ultimately, are all that matter in this game. But remember, we're all in the player predicting business. What a player has done stops mattering the second he does it. All that matters then is what he's most likely to do going forward.

So if you're in an early season rut already, fear not. Remember, Johan Santana had a 6.00-ish ERA in June last year. We have an almost ridiculously long season ahead of us.

Still, you want to get off to a good start because good stats matter as much now as they matter at any time during the season. If your players are overachieving, you have a great opportunity to lock in profits by trading them. First, you have to recognize that fact and then you have to find that starry-eyed owner who firmly believes that past results absolutely indicate future performance. Make sure that owner isn't you. END.