Why I can’t trade Mike Stanton for Jay Bruce

Jay Bruce is my favorite player and the Godfather of Diamond Hoggers. Often times when I am in a fantasy league where the participants know me, they try to exploit me for this.

In one of my more prominent fantasy leagues, there’s an owner of a team called Boca Da Beppi. That is the team for which Jay Bruce is owned by.

In that league, the owners are lining up one by one to acquire one of my prized assets, Mike Stanton. It’s for good reason, as we’ve already discussed.

Lately, the owner of Boca Da Beppi has been barking up my tree for you guessed it; Stanton. And he’s dangling Jay Bruce. He knows my weaknesses. He knows how badly I would love to have Bruce under my control in this keeper style format for a few years, giving me more reason to live and die with every Bruce at-bat this summer. But I can’t do it.

I can’t do it because Mike Stanton is a 22-year old OPS’ing monster about to come into his own and become the sole reason that I’m going to go from 9th place to the top three in this competitive league where pride means more than cash prize.

I can’t do it because Mike Stanton is the hottest thing going right now, and I knew it that Saturday afternoon last March that I snagged him just a hair sooner than the next guy. For all the things I did wrong last year, this was the biggest thing I did right.

And irony has a mysterious way of working. FanGraphs recently weighed on the subject of Bruce vs. Stanton, and they did it in terms of fantasy value for us:

Mike Stanton has a ton of power, and if component hitter aging curves are to be believed, the 22-year-old should be able to improve his strikeout rate — and therefore his batting average. With power down across baseball, he’s a stud.

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And then you can return to the ages of the respective sluggers. In a keeper league, the two years that Stanton has on Bruce are absolute gold. If they are similar now, and Stanton is two years younger, that means you definitively want the massive Marlin. He’ll give you two more years of production and he’s two years further away from his peak (on the good side). His peak will be much better than Bruce’s peak.

I’m going to ride this out with Stanton. I’ll pair him together in an outfield that will have Jason Heyward and eventually Bryce Harper, and I’ll hope for the best. And no matter how bad I would like to own Bruce, I’ve already accepted the fact he’s owned by an owner that believes more in one-sided than good old fashioned win-win business.