February 9, 2017

Rotoballer's Nick Mariano covers the prominent behavioral effects that can lead to suboptimal decision making on your 2017 fantasy baseball draft day.

The human brain is one of the most powerful and fascinating things, and one of the greatest things it has given us is fantasy baseball. Utilized properly, it is your greatest weapon on draft day and beyond. Blindly followed, it can stab you in the back.

Our brains did not evolve for the sake of fantasy sports (or much of modern day life). Mechanisms that helped us assess threats in our cavemen days aren't tailored for this lifestyle. The catch is you won’t even notice what's happening, it’s like that incredibly smart friend you have that you go to for advice, except you fail to realize that they have their own inherent biases and shortcomings that get packaged into their advice.

Yes, we’re talking about cognitive biases folks. I’m sure you have some general awareness of how the mind can play tricks on you, but what you may not know and what you’ll hopefully find helpful, is seeing some that run rampant on draft day and beyond. I imagine most of them will make you go, “ah, that makes sense”. You'll see how they weave in and out with one another and can form a super-soldier of bias that can lead you astray. Let’s dive right in with the biggest culprit:

How Your Mind Can Play Tricks On You

The Anchoring Bias - This is the tendency to rely too heavily on a past reference or one piece of information, which usually ends up meaning the draft room’s default rankings, ADP, or even your own personal rankings. As soon as you enter the draft, either the default or your customized pre-draft rankings are staring you in the face. Yes, sometimes we openly laugh at how a site could put that guy so high in their rankings, but often we get unconsciously locked in on some piece that keeps us tethered.

It doesn’t even have to be something so “in your face” as ADP. Maybe this one article you read in January spoke highly about a player, and you tucked that away, he’s now your sleeper extraordinaire. That article “anchored” you to your favorable perception. You see how this can do you dirty?

Outcome Bias – Here’s where we judge decisions by the outcome instead of how we made the decision at the time. You may have heard people preach “trust the process, not the results”, well outcome bias speaks to that. Maybe you had a great process two years ago, but injuries/luck/etc. led to a fifth place finish. Last year you changed things up and took pitchers with six of your first eight picks. Or you traded away Giancarlo Stanton right before he got injured, and brought in Jonathan Villar who vaulted you to a first place finish. Well you might look to replicate everything you did last year without really examining it, just blindly believing that finishing first means you have a battle-tested recipe for success.

Hindsight Bias – Another retrospective one, where we look at the past and view outcomes as having been predictable based on knowledge of later events. You're a savvy fantasy stud, so this offseason you looked back at some breakout players and noticed most of the hitters worked on pulling the ball more in spring training. So this year you invest heavily in guys doing the same. We naturally want to find patterns and connect dots (this is the clustering illusion), but we can really shoot ourselves in the foot with that. Not that every pattern is a mirage, but be sure you take more than one pass at the data.

Confirmation Bias – One of the more common ones that is talked about across all subjects is the tendency to seek out or interpret information in a manner that reaffirms your preconceptions. Say you really want A.J. Pollock, you owned him during his 2015 breakout and you're dead set on him anchoring your squad this year. Well between now and draft day, if you come across an article about Pollock you are going to give a lot more weight to positive points moving forward and scoff at the cautionary signs surrounding him. If you see someone then being a wet blanket towards his prospects of success, you are much more likely to discount it, gloss over it, or straight up not want to even read it.

Neglect of Probability – This is when we disregard probability when making a decision surrounded by uncertainty. When we are planning and estimating what numbers our team will look like for the year as the draft rounds go by, sometimes we can really lock in those insane steal totals from an early Jonathan Villar selection or 45+ homers from Mark Trumbo. What happens if they get hurt? Have an awful year? Get abducted by aliens? We don’t cover ourselves at all, and move forward as though the outcomes are certain. Not that you can replicate Villar's speed or Trumbo's power with a late pick, but you can still draft a category specialist just in case.

Serial Position Effect – Here is when you place considerably more weight towards either the initial or most recent events when making decisions. Intimately tied to this are the primacy and recency effects. For primacy in relation to baseball, we’re much more likely to remember a strong debut that a player had (whether it is a start by a pitcher, a hot first couple of weeks, or even a big rookie season) rather than a midpoint in a player’s season or career. Alternatively, if you’re dealing with recency bias then you can forget about how mediocre a player was all year long if they threw together an amazing September.

This also applies to how you absorb information, as if I list off a bunch of traits or statistics for a player then you might place a lot more weight in your overall opinion of that player depending on what I say first or last. Let’s frame a 1940s psychological study done by Solomon Asch in baseball terms. If I tell you that Player X is “strong, intelligent, has good plate discipline, injury-prone, and self-centered” compared to telling you that they are “injury-prone, self-centered, strong, intelligent, and have good plate discipline”, you’re going to conjure up two different images based on the sequence. You’d probably bump up Player X if I gave you the first description, but you’re more likely to knock him down if you heard the second one.

Beneffectance – This is one of our ego’s strongest bodyguards. In a nutshell: we’re responsible for things when the outcome is desirable and we’re not responsible for undesirable ones. We won? It was all of that draft prep, working the waiver wire with an eagle eye, and working over our leaguemates with great trades. We lost? Well it was because this guy got hurt, or this player didn’t live up to the expectation (note: we don’t really go back and question our expectation, simply shifting blame to the player for not meeting it).

Please don’t walk away from this thinking you’re a helpless slave to these effects. Knowledge is power. Don’t be afraid to look yourself in the mirror and embrace your humanity. Your brain deserves your love, as it’s been ride or die with you since Day Zero. Blind faith in anything though, especially yourself, is usually a good way to act a fool. If you enjoyed this, I encourage you to go look into the work of Dr. Renee Miller, a neuroscientist who loves sports and is an amazing writer.