Last year, I started a series here at FantasyPros about behavioral science and thinking, and how we are able to apply different cognitive biases and ways that our brains work to fantasy baseball.

For a myriad of reasons, I needed to step back from certain aspects of writing, and the behavioral series was one of those aspects.

But I’m here to pick it up again with Part 4 of the 13-part series.

The pieces are evergreen, mind you, so you can get caught up pretty quickly.

You can read Part 1 on Anchoring Bias here, Part 2 on Availability Bias here, and Part 3 on Outcome Bias here. 

Before we get into Part 4 today, it’s important to talk about the idea of this, and give credit where credit is due.

My big escape in 2020 during the early part of the pandemic was reading. I always enjoyed reading books, but I ramped it up in 2020, and have continued ever since. There were a ton of great books that I read (here are some my recommendations), and one of them that stood out the most was a baseball book. 

Well, kind of.

It was “The Inside Game” by Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic. This is Law’s second book, as he wrote “Smart Baseball” in 2018.

With “The Inside Game,” though, Law combines different areas of behavioral science that are talked heavily in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which, as Law mentions, is required reading for everyone in a Major League front office.

Law borrows 13 chapters from Kahneman’s book, and he applies the critical thinking and cognitive biases that are a part of everyday life to baseball.

It’s a very fascinating book, and Law does a fantastic job tying the two together to make it easy relatable reading for baseball fans who aren’t big on behavioral thinking.

It’s a book that I enjoyed so much, I read it twice. I recommend you doing the same, too.

When reading it, though, aside from how I could apply the lessons in my personal life, I realized that all 13 applied to fantasy baseball, as well.

Over the next few months, I’ll be covering these different biases in a way that you can apply them to your fantasy baseball managing to help inform your decisions.

I’ll touch on the cognitive bias, touch briefly on how Law applies it to regular baseball (I won’t give away his entire book. You need to buy it and read it!), and how we can apply that thinking to the fantasy game that we love.

Now, let’s get into Groupthink.

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Groupthink Bias

The fourth chapter in Law’s book is “But This Is How We’ve Always Done It: Why Groupthink Alone Doesn’t Make Baseball Myths True.”

Before we get into the relevancy it has for fantasy, or how Law applies it to baseball in general, let’s look at the term itself.

Merriam-Webster defines Groupthink as: “a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.”

There are a few examples of this that Law uses in his book from a real-world sense in which we hear things said over and over so often, that we begin to believe that they are true without seeing the data behind it. Law issues evolution being “just a theory,” (it’s not), five-second rule existing (nope, not true), and humans only using 10 percent of their brains (also not true) as a few examples.

We’ve seen the misinformation era over the last six-plus years in our political climate, and we’ve seen it for years when it comes to vaccines. 

There was a 2015 Gallup poll that found 73 percent of respondents had heard at least “a fair amount” about the “disadvantages” of vaccines, and 52 percent of people said they were “unsure” if vaccines were a cause of autism, and 6 percent who said vaccines did cause autism.

This is all based on a study in the late 1990s that was not only proven to be false, but also retracted.

Yet the misinformation was put out there so often that it was accepted as being true.

How Does Law Apply It

Law applies it first in his book by talking about the myth of lineup protection and whether or not it exists. The thought is you place either a good hitter behind your best hitter, and the pitcher is forced to go after your best hitter because they won’t want to face the good hitter. Or you can say that you don’t want to put a bad hitter after the best hitter because the pitcher will pitch around the best hitter to face the bad hitter.

But there is no data to show that this exists. But that doesn’t stop Law from listing multiple examples of writers, managers, and players discussing it as if it is a real thing.

Law also touches on one of my longest-held personal beliefs about clutch not existing. I’ve argued this for more than a decade now, so I had my own bias (confirmation) set in when I read this part of the book.

Law cites Patrick Brennan’s piece on clutch in 2019 for Beyond the Box Score. In it, Brennan looked to see if clutch was sticky by looking at 434 batters who had at least 300 plate appearances in two straight seasons from 2014 and 2019. And Brennan found nothing.

But to hear the conversation thrown around, we will hear arguments that a player is clutch. They come through in big moments. It’s not quantified at all, it’s just a reputation that someone gains by the conversation that takes place based on the outcome of a tiny sample.

How Can We Apply it to Fantasy?

For fantasy, groupthink can come in different forms. The three that stand out are:

• Pre-draft value of players
• This is how it’s always been
• High-stakes leagues

The first bullet is something that fantasy players do every single year. It’s valuing players as a group and accepting that that’s the only potential outcome for the player.

Since I’m writing this as we head into the 2022 season, let’s use Jacob deGrom (P – NYM) as an example, shall we?

deGrom was limited in 2021 due to a sprained UCL. It’s a shame, as he was having a historic season and was on his way to another likely Cy Young Award.

deGrom didn’t need surgery, as he was able to rehab it and the reports are out that say he’s “fully healed.”

But yet, if he’s fully healed, deGrom would be a sure-fire first-round pick in fantasy drafts. Instead, he’s going 26th overall and if you take him, good luck defending it to the community.

Why?

Well, because we are all assuming that he isn’t healthy because we’ve seen pitchers struggle with rehabbing UCLs in the past and they would typically lead to missed time. So the consensus of the community is that deGrom is either still hurt or will get hurt again, plummeting your season.

But … what if the community is wrong? What if deGrom actually is healed (we know very little due to the lockout) and he’s able to pitch a full season?

Taking the injury into account, say that deGrom is able to give you 140 innings. Given the track record of deGrom being the best pitcher in baseball, wouldn’t those 140 innings of elite production plus a replacement-level pitcher still warrant an early pick being spent on him?

Those who are fading him aren’t wrong, but the groupthink here is that deGrom is someone who must be avoided at all costs. 

Let’s transition to the second bullet point here, as we look at the traditional thinking around fantasy. I’m talking about the leagues that still insist on having two catchers, as well as those that use the traditional roto scoring.

Now, while those aren’t my preferred leagues, I’m not here to poo-poo those who play in them or enjoy them. But what I will challenge is the reasoning. 

If you say “because I like them.” Cool. End of convo. 

But if you say “because that’s how fantasy has always been played,” I’ll challenge you on that.

Just because that’s the way something has been done doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evolve.

Imagine, in a larger more serious sense, if we applied that groupthink logic to everyday life. We wouldn’t evolve as a society. We are already fighting for equality with a more evolved society. Just imagine if we haven’t evolved to where we are today. 

Law has a passage that resonates well for fantasy and for real-life baseball.

“The greater challenge is to dislodge such entrenched information from the minds of other people whom you’re trying to convince of some new idea – that lineup protection is myth, that vaccines are safe and essential, that climate change is real, and so on.”

How do we do this? 

Law points out that “direct confrontations often backfire,” but if you “show people what they might stand to lose, they may be more receptive to new information.”

Law also talks about people changing their minds if they hear from thought leaders, which in this case would be more writers and analysts in the fantasy industry.

We have seen the pushback in real-life baseball with the designated hitter from traditionalists, with the main argument being – I kid you not – the strategy being removed from the game. This here is another example of groupthink, as it’s a line that fans have been fed for decades as if you need an advanced degree to execute a double-switch.

If you’re in a two-catcher league, ask why? If it’s because it’s always been that way, challenge it. Point out how ineffective catchers are in one-catcher leagues, let alone two. If your league is still using batting average and saves, talk to your commissioner about changing the scoring to OBP and saves plus holds. Show them that the way teams use their bullpens is changing and that the number of players who are getting the types of save chances they did in the past are decreasing year to year. Show them why OBP is a better representation for baseball over average, and that teams (there’s your thought leader) are using OBP metrics over batting average. Moneyball was a long time ago, and we shouldn’t be this far behind in evolving our leagues. 

That leads us to our last point, where we’ll talk a bit about the thinking behind high-stakes leagues. I’d say it’s a hot-button topic, but it’s more exhausting than anything.

When we write, we often discuss ADP or recent drafts that were held on NFBC. The idea is that the data there is more in-line with experts because the leagues there often have a higher buy-in than other leagues. 

Some of the leagues run $50, but some run into the thousands.

So because of this, the thought is that because high-stakes players spend a lot of money, they not only have more to lose, but they also are the best players.

You can make a case for the first part, sure. But the second part? No, that’s nonsense.

I believe it was Yancy Eaton who tweeted “How do you know if someone plays high stakes? Easy, they’ll tell you.”

And boy, that hits the nail on the head.

There are many great players in that community, and there are many bad players. 

Just like in Yahoo leagues. Or CBS leagues. Or ESPN leagues. Or Fantrax leagues. 

The thing is, not everyone is able to afford to play in the Main Events on NFBC. Not everyone has the means to build up a bankroll and hope that they even break even on NFBC to be able to play in the larger leagues where the “best players” are able to play.

Again, there are great players there. Very smart players who we should all learn from. 

But having the means to do something does not equal being good at something. It’s a class problem, not an intellectual problem.

You want to learn from Phil Dussault after his historic NFBC season last year. You also want to learn from Glenn Colton, Rick Wolf, and Fred Zinkie who won Tout last year. You want to learn from Ian Kahn who won AL Labr. You want to learn from Zack in your home league who won your league. You want to learn from everyone. 

But yet, we’ve been conditioned to believe that NFBC players are a step above the rest. 

Just like the other areas of groupthink that have been discussed, I’m here to tell you that this thought, too, is wrong.

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Michael Waterloo is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Michael, check out his archive and follow him @MichaelWaterloo.