Absent one of those truly remarkable seasons where everything breaks right all year long, there comes that point in every season where your fantasy team hits a slump. You check the box scores every night hoping to see some counting stats, but they simply do not come. Every pitcher you throw out there lays an egg. Nothing goes right.
I’ll admit there have been times when I’ve let slumps like that ruin a season. Watching a once mighty team take a precipitous drop in the standings is frustrating, and I have, in the past, just stood pat to try to ride it out.
The problem is that when a team-wide slump lasts for longer than a week or two, your entire season can be derailed. It is during those times that passivity is not the answer. The way to get your team through the downtimes is to address your issues via a trade.
To help you on the way, we provide our rotisserie league trade chart. Updated each week, the chart helps you evaluate any trade offer to see whether a deal not only makes sense for your team, but is fair to both sides.
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Manny Machado is having a terrible season. There is really no other way to say it. He’s currently on pace for a .240-74-24-79-2 stat line. Ordinarily, a star such as Machado, who has not hit fewer than 33 home runs since 2014, would earn the benefit of the doubt even with such a slow start. But Machado’s success in, and lack of success away from, Camden Yards, has been well documented. In Camden, he’s a .296/.352/.536 hitter. Away, he’s a .271/.319/.443 hitter. With him showing little interest in running and with little in his statcast data or underlying metrics to suggest a rebound is coming, his trade value falls.
As does Trevor Bauer’s, whose walk-rate remains one of the worst in the league and who continues to rack up outrageous pitch counts nearly every time out. Bauer had a remarkable second half of 2017 and an even better 2018. But right now, those seasons look like outliers, rather than the norm. With his high strikeout rate and passable numbers, Bauer remains a valuable commodity. But not nearly as valuable as earlier this season.
But with some fallers come some risers, which begins with Yordan Alvarez. By now, you’re familiar with his incredible Triple-A numbers and his two homers to start his major league career. There’s risk with Alvarez — there’s a plausible scenario where he struggles and gets sent back down to the minors. But given his upside, he immediately enters the trade chart at the value of roughly a top-30 outfielder.
Jay Bruce, who has been on a vicious tear, also enters the trade chart. Given an opportunity with the trade to Philadelphia and Andrew McCutchen’s injury, Bruce went on a huge power streak. Now playing in a hitter-friendly environment, Bruce may challenge the 35-homer plateau and is a fine target for power-needy teams.
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Dan Harris is a featured writer for FantasyPros. For more from Dan, check out his archive or follow him on Twitter @danharris80.