There are a couple trades to get to this week, and if you want to skip straight to the voting just scroll on down. This week I want to talk more about the trades we’re making in TDGX since my weekly column allows me to expand on some points. It’s more of a general comment on our TDGX team than anything else. In the meantime, you can continue to send your pending and completed trades to traderscornertdg@gmail.com. I’ll respond to every email and post them in the column. I’ll also respond to your comments here.

Getting back to the trades in TDGX, this week was a busy one. Several teams seem to have started the process of “selling” and we are right there in the middle of the dance floor. Our team sits anywhere from 10th to 15th place on a given night, but honestly, we weren’t expecting to compete for a title this year given how we constructed our roster. Older players/players with injury histories, players who are showing signs of falling off a cliff, and players at positions that we consider deep. These are guys we have planned to unload since the beginning. Hence the trades of Andrew Cashner, Albert Pujols, Mike Moustakas, and Travis D’Arnaud. Big names. Great players. Just not part of our plan.

Players who are part of our plan are guys like Trout, Heyward, Dahl, Soler, Castro, JP Crawford, Arenado, Rendon, Ventura, Bradley, and to a lesser extent prospects like Candelario, H Ramirez, Hanson, Paulino. These are players that are at varying levels of the majors and minors who have the talent that we want to build our team around and the youth to keep the team running for more than just the near future. We didn’t go all prospects, but we don’t care to carry any older vets on our squad either. We’re also not concerned with pitching, which we consider a risky investment (as evidenced by this week’s latest TJ victims).

So what are we acquiring if we have a decent young core and some solid prospects to grow with? Well, for starters we are accumulating 2015 draft picks. While other teams are looking at them as just chips or throw-ins, these picks are valuable to us thanks to the Invisible Hand bid of 20 keepers for the rights to Mike Trout. Most of the other teams in the league will be replacing 5 players on their roster…we’ll be replacing twenty. That’s a lot.

On top of that, the supplemental rounds we’d be picking in to refill our roster would have us pick dead last in every round. So not only would we get fringe players to choose from, but we’d get the crap of the crap. In an effort to counter this and get back some of the value we’ll lose with this one-time penalty, we’ve gone after picks in the first five rounds in a lot of our deals. So far, we’ve accumulated 12 picks of those first 100 players. Those are important picks to us.

Timing is an issue here too. Getting some deals done before players lose value or other teams decide they want to start trading too is important. We don’t want to compete in negotiations for Soler with ten other “sellers”.

The bottom line is that our trades have nothing to do with how we felt about our draft. They also have nothing to do with anybody else’s player values. We have our own values, our own plan, our own team. You should too.

We vote on trades here in this column all the time, but to be honest it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks of your trade. If you like it and it works for your team and what you’re trying to accomplish, then good on you. If you have the keys to the car, don’t let somebody else influence how you drive it. There are just too many factors at play and only you know what all of them really are.

Here are this week’s trades…

Trade #1

12tm, dynasty league. 6×6 H2H, 22 man rosters and 3 minor league spots

Trade #2

Standard 5×5 ROTO 12 teams with 37 man rosters and 8 DL spots, own forever with no salaries. Starting lineup includes standard positions w/ 5OF plus 1CI, 1MI, 2 utility spots.

[polldaddy poll=8048811]

Mike’s on Twitter @643ball