The First Trade of the 2012 Denslow Cup Season
April 20, 2012
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Posted by Daniel "Dee" Clark
This afternoon the Towel and I completed a trade in the Denslow Cup that we had been discussing since last week. It involved David Wright and Ryan Zimmerman as the centerpieces, and since I had Zimmerman, my side was going to be bigger. We play in a league that uses both OBP and Slug% as well as the traditional rotisserie categories. Obviously Wright’s projected numbers year in and year out are going to give him a little more spring value than a guy like Zimmerman in our league because the couple percentage points Wright walks more than Zimmerman essentially cancels out the 5 or 6 extra points of contact percentage that Zimmerman will throw up come October. Wright will steal roughly 10-15 more bases most years than Zimmerman, though, which gives him the edge. Both are injury prone to an extent as well.
What I’m getting at here is that a trade involving these two guys should simply not involve any other truly valuable players beyond these two guys because they are strikingly similar players in a league like The Cup. To further solidify my point, Wright’s ADP in ESPN league’s right now is 36.0, and Zimmerman’s is 39.0. It does not take much value to square up a trade between two players that are 3.0 draft positions apart.
What that means is that I got hosed, because I threw in Josh Beckett and John Axford to go along with Ryan Zimmerman to bring back an oft injured 29-year old whose best season was now five years ago. What’s more, Wright is in the middle of one of the hottest periods of his career at the dish and has a fractured finger. Finally, the Mets are awful. There is no realistic reason to think that anyone in that lineup will bang in 100 runners or score 100 runs himself because it’s basically a lineup comprised of refuse, Wright, Ike Davis, and Daniel Murphy. Beckett is currently being taken at the 103 spot on average and Axford is going ten spots earlier. What that means is that according to ADP, I gave up three guys in the top 100 for the guy I just described.
How could I do that? Well, in short, I didn’t like looking at my squad every day and not seeing Wright’s name. I hated watching highlight shows of him performing so well and playing so courageously through injury while on another manager’s squad. David is my favorite player. As I write this, I occasionally drift off and take in the objects in my room. Directly under my television is an autographed photo of David driving in Luis Castillo from second that Whitney got me for my 26th birthday.
David Wright is my favorite baseball player ever (tied with Nomar…duh), and I don’t mind if I got hosed in April to get him on my squad, because he is the kind of player that will keep me motivated and interested for the next six months. If I didn’t already have Jimmy Rollins, Andre Ethier, or Shane Victorino, I’d be making the same kind of boneheaded moves to get them too.
That brings me to my final thought of the day. I love the squad that I drafted this season more than any season in the past. I have an entire lineup of my kind of guys. When I say that, I mean that my squad collectively knows how to hit. They crush strikes and take balls. They hit the ball in the air. They are either terrific athletes or young enough that it doesn’t matter yet. And now, I have David. If I don’t win this season, I’m going to be pretty upset, but what I’m fairly sure of is that my team hits, and that’s a really, really big deal to me, because for the next six months, they are an extension of myself. When I look at my lineup before I go to bed, my team’s performance over the previous 24 hours is going to have a large and meaningful impact on the next 24 hours.
That’s just life in The Denslow Cup, bro.
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