Friends and Family Matters

First place in five of 10 roto categories. Second place in three. Third place in the other two. A 26.5-point gap over the rest of the field.

RotoWire.com’s Chris Liss didn’t just win this year’s Yahoo! Friends and Family Baseball League. He dominated it, scoring 133 of 140 possible points.

“This will never happen again,” Liss said in a phone interview. “In a 14-team league with experts, this will never happen again as long as we live. Everybody panned out – everybody.”

Liss had what he considers his best baseball draft since he began playing fantasy sports in 1995. In his first eight rounds, he selected Albert Pujols(notes), Carl Crawford(notes), Alex Rodriguez(notes), Roy Halladay(notes), Derek Jeter(notes), Mariano Rivera(notes), Justin Upton(notes) and Jayson Werth(notes). Between Rounds 11 and 14, he took Justin Verlander(notes), Trevor Hoffman(notes), Ubaldo Jimenez(notes) and Brian Wilson(notes).

If there ever was any doubt as to whether Liss’s team would win the league, it ended in early June. After Crawford’s stolen-base binge gave his team a substantial lead in the category to open the year, Liss packaged Crawford and Werth in an eight-player deal that brought him Hanley Ramirez(notes). The rest took care of itself.

So, other than drafting who he drafted and making the moves he made, how did Liss do it? What tips does he have for somebody looking for his results?

“I don’t think you can get this because this happens once in a very long time where everything aligns,” Liss said. “But there are things you can do.”

Liss then went on a tip drill that lasted for five minutes over the phone and took even longer to transcribe. That amount of time will pale in comparison to how long these tips will take to properly execute, but the results should be enough to make everyone’s efforts worthwhile.

Develop your instincts through experience
Liss: “If you do this for 10 or 15 years, and you watch box scores every day, read about players, write about players, talk about players and research players, you build a certain database of what happened in the past: players that are like other players and how they broke out at this time but they didn’t break out in this situation, and how this guy who everyone thought was good but he never did well, and this guy nobody thought was good but he did well. You get a huge database of guys with their different skill sets and different scouting pedigrees, and it’s all in your brain.

“All this data that you don’t even know (is there) is just there because you’ve observed and written about it, talked about it and researched so much of it over a long period of time that you start to have instincts about players, and these instincts become more and more reliable with the more experience that you get.”

Don’t let others’ instincts cloud yours
Liss: “The one thing you don’t do is listen to people. You can listen to me as far as to say don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to anybody’s cheat sheet or what anybody else is saying, because they don’t know [expletive]. Nobody does. You have to build your database on actual facts – not opinions, but facts – of what these guys did statistically, what their situation was before the season and what their situation was after the season.

Take the right risks in the right leagues
Liss: “I took Justin Upton. It’s not just taking the next guy who everybody is saying is the next Justin Upton because that might not work. You just have to have a sense that this guy is worth the gamble, and you have to get lucky … I didn’t know Justin Upton would have this kind of year. I thought, ‘Well, he hit 20 home runs or whatever in very little at-bats and had an .820 OPS. He’s ready. He’s in a hitter’s park. I’m going to roll the dice on a once-in-a-decade talent.’

“But I didn’t get Matt Wieters(notes). I would have taken Wieters at a certain point – I would have, but you have to know the league you’re in. In some leagues everybody is jumping all over the Wieters and Uptons really early every year, and you probably won’t get them. You might have to go more vanilla. In expert leagues, people are so ‘saavy,’ it’s suckerish to buy into the hype … I feel like you should make me take Justin Upton in the fourth round this year, but in the seventh round which everyone else thought was a reach, I looked at who else was going and thought that was a good gamble.”

Revisit your preseason instincts in the postseason
Liss: “If you’re really high on like 10 guys before the season, at the end of the season you should look back on how those guys did. Most of us remember the ones who did great and are like, ‘Yeah, I knew that guy was going to be good.’

“But how about the guys who did terrible? Then you have to look back and don’t just say, ‘Oh, I did terrible,’ but you should think back into the mindset that you were in at the beginning of the season and how much you liked that guy. Go back over the logic you had about that guy and get back to where you were loving that guy who ended up sucking, and work on creating a dissonance so that in the future, when you start liking players, you can start remembering the dissonance between how much you liked that player and how badly he did, and use that as your mental database.

“That’s part of it, too. It’s all about refining that sense you have, that sense of instinct. But you can’t do it by just patting yourself in the back. Really look into your misses, too.”