With the White Sox finally pulling the cord on Gordon Beckham this past week, there is a fantasy lesson to be learned here, even if 2014 fantasy owners shouldn't touch Beckham with a long-reaching object.
Beckham was a fantasy baseball darling upon getting called up in the first week of June 2009. He hit the ground running, slashing .302/.369/.465 with five home runs and four steals over his first 50 games. The last thing on any owner's mind was to sell him at this point. A bond between player and owner was developing.
It's so cool that I have this guy! I'll get to own him for the next 10 years in this dynasty league! Damn, I'm smart.
Sadly, he hit just .243 over the rest of his rookie season (53 more games) and has managed a career .244/.305/.373 slash line while perhaps hitting his low point this season as one of just three qualified players with an OPS under .600 (Jean Segura and Zack Cozart being the other two).
Beckham's case is not unique. A highly touted prospect (Beckham was a consensus top-10 fantasy prospect, who was considered a high-floor hitter coming out of the University of Georgia) hits the ground running in his first 50 games at the big-league level, before falling off a cliff. An obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that pitchers simply figure out how to get the phenoms out after information floods the industry, and the player in question isn't equipped to make the necessary adjustments.
Not all of these cases end in abject failure, like with Beckham, but they all share the common thread that if you had sold the player in your fantasy baseball league after their first 50 games, the return would have been greater then than it ever would be later on.
Here are the slash lines of 10 (cherry-picked) elite prospects after their first 50 games
Jeff Francoeur (.339/.375/.644)
Delmon Young (.292/.310/.446)
Desmond Jennings (.286/.379/.504)
Pedro Alvarez (.251/.332/.458)
Dustin Ackley (.291/.372/.489)
Jason Heyward (.301/.421/.596)
Jesus Montero (.286/.330/.485)
Bryce Harper (.286/.367/.497)
Wil Myers (.311/.363/.497)
George Springer (.254/.348/.487)
Obviously it's sort of cheating to put Francoeur in there, but he's perhaps the most famous example of why it can be advantageous to sell high during a hot prospect's debut season. Harper is a debatable case, but this author would wager that even if his value wasn't as high as it will ever be after his first 50 games, the haul an owner could have received by trading him then would have so staggeringly outweighed his production over the past two seasons, that it would have been the perfect time to sell. The book has not been written with regards to Myers or Springer, but selling high after 50 games seems like the best course of action at this point with both players. Even players like Matt Wieters, Colby Rasmus, Eric Hosmer, Xander Bogaerts and Gregory Polanco, who didn't have excellent numbers through 50 games, would have fetched a hefty haul based on the general perception that they had hit the ground running and would only get better. Heck, the Evan Longoria and Jay Bruce types who have been very solid from a fantasy standpoint, still probably would have fetched a better package had they been dealt during their rookie seasons than they would in the middle of their respective primes.
The point is, just like MLB teams, dynasty league owners over-value prospects. Most experienced owners know that minor leaguers are often best used as currency when making a run at a title, but it seems that a lot of owners stop thinking this way about players once they are promoted to the big leagues and have early success. There's confirmation bias involved. The player has been rostered for a reason. Prospect prognosticators have pumped up his hit tool and power potential to lofty heights, so once he starts living up to those projections, the only possible explanation is that he really is THAT good. But this logic is often flawed, and we don't realize it is until it's too late to trade the player for a crazy return.
Guys like Miguel Cabrera, Albert Pujols and Ryan Braun tend to be the exception, yet owners so often treat other star prospects as if they could be the next Cabrera/Pujols/Braun. (Mike Trout doesn't really fit here, because he actually did not get off to a hot start to his career). Paul Goldschmidt and Andrew McCutchen don't really fit either, because neither was highly touted enough as a prospect to fetch a gigantic haul in a trade after their first 50 games, and they didn't perform anywhere near the levels they have over the past couple seasons. International free agents that transition instantly, or almost instantly, onto the big-league roster (Yu Darvish, Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig, Masahiro Tanaka, Jose Abreu, Rusney Castillo) don't really fit this exercise either, as the size and length of the contracts and the typical age of the player make them a far cry from typical prospects.
It's certainly fun to try to get the next superstar that will make a team competitive for a 5-10 year run in a dynasty league, and sometimes intuition has to come into play, but too often do we waste the opportunity to cash in on guys like Beckham. There are many more players who fit this theory, and others who don't, but the frequency of declining production so vastly outweighs the amount of times these high-pedigree prospects get moved in fantasy leagues after a hot start. It's certainly worth thinking about next summer when owners are reaping the rewards of a hot start to a star prospect's career.