The Fine Art of Churning

When financial advisors churn your money that’s fraud and a very bad, not to mention expensive thing. When you churn in fantasy baseball however, it can easily be the key to stealing a league title, especially if your opponents don’t catch on quickly enough.

So what is churning?

Churning is what we call it when you take advantage of league rules to maximize your stats and win categories by force of getting more starts and at bats than anyone else.

So who can churn?

Basically anyone in a league where there are no league maximums or the league maximums are very high. When I say maximums I mean inning limits/start limits for pitchers, and games played for batters.

So how does it help?

Well think of it this way. If you draft 5 starting pitchers and each gets 35 starts you have 175 chances to get a win from your starters. By churning however you may be able to double, triple or even quadruple the number of starts you get - and thus get that many more chances to get wins.

Of course it doesn’t apply to just wins, it can work for almost any category except for Average, WHIP, and ERA.

So how do you do it?

Well it’s really about turning over your players and in some ways it’s a tricky thing to do. You need a handful of players who you are willing to lose if someone else decides to pick them up. But in its simplest form you never leave a slot unfilled on any given day if you can draft someone decent from the FA list (and you are not paying a fee per pick up).

Thus on a day your third baseman is not scheduled to play, you either plug in someone from your bench who is scheduled to play that day or draft someone that you can plug into that slot from the free agent wire (in most leagues you need to do this the day before).

With pitchers you grab the best starter/match-ups that you see for the following day. I mean even mediocre pitchers are likely to fatten their records on Kansas City and Colorado. Technically you could have the maximum number of starters working for you every single day of the season.

Of course you need to use some discretion. Some pitchers or batters simply never will justify a pickup.

But isn’t that cheating?

Every game has its rules, and playing within the boundaries of the rules is never cheating. If your league has no limits and you don’t take advantage of it, almost assuredly some smart owner will. The rules were defined by whoever the league creator was and he probably planned to take advantage of them.

Is there anything I should know or think about?

Absolutely. The core of your team is untouchable. It doesn’t matter how much you churn if you don’t have a good framework to work with. If you let your good players go other people are going grab them up. Once other players catch on to your churning and decide to do it thenselves the picking can get very slim. You don’t want to be stuck with a Jarrod Washburn when you could have a Roger Clemens pitching every five days. But hang on to the very best, not to the mediocre. Mediocre could be picked up off the Free Agent wire anytime. Those are the guys you churn with/for.

Closers are hard to churn since there are so few of them. Only in shallow leagues where plenty of closers are available is this a good strategy.

Once other players start churning, the pickings will get very slim and just like in any type of fantasy ball the smartest and best foreteller will have the advantage, sometimes this will mean that in order to successfully churn you will have to look not a single day ahead but several days ahead. Eventually you can reach a stalemate - where no one ever lets a decent guy go. Then you are back to regular fantasy baseball.

So when do I want to do this?

Well the most important thing you can do in fantasy ball is to keep your eyes open. The when really depends on you and what you are seeing, and of course where you are in the standings. A lot of people don’t realize they can churn and a two to three week gap before they can catch on can give you a huge advantage. This is really a neat trick towards the end of the season or when you are really far back in the standings - especially if your opponents never see it coming.

Anything else?

Only the most important thing. Make sure your league has the right rules to do this. If you have a low or even medium set of limits then you can easily exhaust them without getting the best from your team.

Also this is an outstanding tactic to use in head to head leagues, especially in the pitching categories when you are behind in a week’s standings. Just make sure you approach it intelligently.