What If More Americans Knew Racism Against Black People Hurts White People Too?
PLUS: Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Lost Daughter" AND How to Make the Most of Your MLB Fantasy Draft
For decades, Democrats have struggled to understand why White working-class voters have drifted from their party. The working class, after all, had formed the foundation of the Democratic New Deal coalition that dominated American politics in the mid-twentieth century, and the Democratic Party was always more sympathetic to the concerns of labor than Republicans. The most famous account of Democrats’ falling-out with the working class is Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which argued Democrats in the late-twentieth century lost the support of many White working-class voters by abandoning a populist New Deal-style agenda for more pro-business, economically conservative policies. Not seeing much difference between the parties on economic matters, White working-class voters began prioritizing cultural issues like abortion or school prayer at the ballot box, leading them to support Republicans. Frank argued Democrats could reverse this trend by refocusing on populist economic issues like health care and education and downplaying contentious cultural issues.
Most Democrats now treat Frank’s argument as gospel. After the disastrous 2016 election, Democrats worried Hillary Clinton’s reputation as an establishment New Democrat-style politician of the 1990s had turned-off White voters in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. To address this problem, Democrats embraced the populist economic and social policies espoused by her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders. While Joe Biden didn’t adopt Sanders’ platform wholescale, Sanders’ priorities shaped the 2020 Democratic platform and were incorporated into Biden’s Build Back Better plan. In the meantime, “Joe from Scranton” was careful not to wade too far into culture war politics during the campaign. He eked out victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in part because he made small inroads with White working-class voters.
Democratic outreach to working-class voters in 2020 was about more than regaining political power, however. Another reason Democrats have doubled-down on an economic agenda aimed at the working class is the threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy. Democrats worry if they can’t prove the American government can work on behalf of the working class that working-class voters will give up on the political process or throw their support behind a strongman like Trump. In this way, Democrats argue the very future of American democracy depends on restoring faith in the government’s ability to directly improve the lives of working-class Americans.
Yet after a year of pushing a populist political agenda whose scope is often compared to the New Deal, working-class voters have not rallied around Democrats. Looking at Biden’s declining poll numbers, it’s more likely working-class voters have instead drifted away from the Democratic Party. Granted, other factors such as the pandemic, rising inflation, and events in Afghanistan and Ukraine have driven public opinion in this time, and Democrats have not done much to sell the American public on Build Back Better. But Democrats still hold out hope that if they get back to their roots as a working-class party and pass a popular working-class agenda (the component parts of Build Back Better poll rather well with voters) working-class Americans will return to their column.
It’s not a bad idea! Yet despite Democrats’ best intentions, I fear their efforts may prove futile. More specifically, I worry Democrats have a major blind spot when it comes to race. I’m not thinking here about some sort of Democratic misstep when it comes to the politics of an issue like critical race theory. Instead, what I think Democrats don’t understand is the way so many White Americans identify the Democratic Party as the party of people of color, especially Black people. That’s a challenge for Democrats because many of those White voters also operate under the assumption politics is a zero-sum game that rewards one group of people at the expense of another. Consequently, many White people assume Democratic policies in general benefit Black people at the expense of White people, which undercuts Democrats’ ability to win over White working-class voters with the passage of new social programs that would benefit those very voters. The problem is even if White working-class voters conclude a Democratic bill would improve their well-being, many would still oppose it because they believe that Democratic bill would end up either not benefitting Whites as much as it could or lift the social standing of Black Americans too close to that of White Americans.
Democrats won’t be able to win back White working-class voters until they confront this dilemma head-on. Furthermore, they won’t be able to do it with pocketbook appeals or by urging people to reject racism out of the goodness of their heart, since that does not counter the Democratic Party’s perceived bias against White people. What is required is a novel combination of both: White voters will need to be convinced racism not only hurts Black people but White people and the country as a whole as well. Thankfully, Heather McGee has written a book that usefully explains how that has actually happened in the United States.
McGee is the author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, which was longlisted for the National Book Award last year and is now in paperback. Prior to writing this book, McGee worked at and later served as president of Demos, a think tank focused on issues related to inequality. The core idea behind her book came to her one day during a visit to Capitol Hill to present research on personal bankruptcy to members of Congress. While stopped outside a senator’s office, McGee overheard someone inside loudly complain about deadbeat fathers who exploit lax personal bankruptcy laws to avoid child support payments by impregnating multiple women.
That experience led McGee to suspect her approach to advocacy was all wrong. McGee had always tried to take race out of the conversation when presenting her research, focusing instead on broad-based cost-benefit analyses and how certain policies would help or harm people of varying income groups. The goal was always to downplay race and play-up a program’s economic benefits to prevent racist attitudes from sabotaging the bill’s prospects. Now, however, she began to suspect many White people viewed government action through a racial lens regardless, one that assumed government programs redistributed money from Whites to Blacks, from “makers” to “takers” and from “taxpayers” to “freeloaders.” It didn’t matter if a program would benefit large numbers of White Americans; what mattered was that Black people didn’t “deserve” the benefit and that White people would suffer either economically (as taxpayers or competitors in a market for jobs or benefits) or in terms of status (since Black people would suddenly have benefits or access to opportunities that had previously been afforded only to White people.)
McGee cites a study by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers of Harvard Business School to support her thesis. In research conducted during the early years of the Obama administration, Norton and Sommers discovered White Americans were more likely to believe there was more anti-White prejudice in American society than anti-Black prejudice, and that the number of White Americans who expressed that belief had risen dramatically since the end of segregation and the passage of laws designed in part to reduce racial inequality. They found White people tend to think about racism and politics in zero-sum terms, or, as Sommers put it, “If things are getting better for Black people, it must be at the expense of White people.”
McGee connects that line of thinking to America’s long history of institutional racism, which many White people accepted since it provided them with economic and social benefits denied to Black people. Simply leveling the playing field or adopting inclusionary policies was regarded by many Whites as a loss of economic and political advantage. For example, many Whites view voting rights legislation not as a matter of treating Black voters the same as White voters but as a law that benefits Black people at the expense of White people. Such laws were also opposed by many Whites because they undermined the status and privilege that came with being White in a racially hierarchical society. No matter how bad things were for poor or working-class Whites in a socially stratified nation, they at least had a sense the powers-that-be would look out for them before lifting a finger to help Black people.
Once racial barriers began to fall in the twentieth century, many White people began opposing policies that would have helped them if such policies also assisted Black people; in some cases, they even renounced benefits altogether rather than share them with people of color. McGee captures the essence of this reaction with one striking example: Public swimming pools. In the early twentieth century, many cities across the United States constructed grand public pools. These pools became sources of public pride, and they were often celebrated as melting pots where people of all ethnic and economic backgrounds were welcome. Public works advocates hailed them as democratizing institutions. These pools, however, were also often segregated. When the Supreme Court ruled in the 1950s that public pools needed to desegregate, cities such as St. Louis, Missouri; Jackson, Mississippi; and Montgomery, Alabama, closed their pools rather than admit Blacks, which ultimately denied Whites in their cities access to pools. At the same time, there was a surge in the construction of private backyard pools and private swimming clubs. As McGee writes, “A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real.”
The closure of public swimming pools is a memorable example of how racism came to harm not only those who were historically the victims of racism in the United States but also nearly every other American who could benefit from legislation aimed at improving the quality of public life. You may think the swimming pool example is rather trivial, but McGee devotes whole chapters to much bigger issues to illustrate the ways in which the harms of racism end up spiraling back onto White people. For example, in order to get Medicaid passed through Congress in the 1960s, a deal was made to allow states to administer the program. As it turns out, the states with the highest percentages of Black residents tend to have the stingiest Medicaid programs. Not only does that end up preventing many Blacks from accessing the program, but it also keeps many Whites from doing the same. In fact, in terms of raw numbers, more Whites than Blacks in those states go without health care. In another example, banks first began issuing subprime mortgages primarily to people of color. When alarms were sounded about this risky practice, many White politicians and regulators ignored it because it was a risk incurred by the Black community. Soon, however, this practice spread to White communities. When the Great Recession arrived in the late 00s, Black homeowners were hit hard, but again, in terms of raw numbers, more Whites suffered.
McGee has all kinds of examples like this throughout her book, ranging from the environment (where regulators turn a blind eye to pollution in minority communities that soon affects the quality of life in White communities) to drug addiction (which many White people were fine with treating as a crime before law enforcement—which had long cracked down on Black users—began rounding up White meth and opioid addicts) to education (where the move toward privatization in the decades after desegregation has deprived the remaining public school students of all racial backgrounds of educational opportunities) to voting rights (where we now see laws designed to make it harder for Blacks to vote coming back to disenfranchise White voters) to guns (the proliferation of which, often associated with a fear of Black crime, has resulted in a surge of suicides among White men due to the fact that suicide attempts involving guns are much more likely to result in death; today the number of suicide deaths by gun far exceeds the number of gun-related homicides in the country.)
McGee argues White working-class Americans generally support the content of liberal social policy but that conservatives and powerful economic interests exploit racial anxiety to gin up opposition to their enactment. Recall, for example, how the individual provisions of the Affordable Care Act were more popular than the bill itself, which Republicans rebranded as “Obamacare” to more explicitly attach it to the Black president who proposed it. During his rantings about the bill, Rush Limbaugh characterized it as a “civil rights bill” and a “reparations bill.” Professor Michael Tesler found that Whites with greater levels of racial resentment grew more opposed to the Affordable Care Act the more it was associated with Obama.
Racial resentment has long shaped American politics. Southern Democrats refused to support the New Deal unless Black Americans were forbidden from receiving benefits. The specter of “welfare queens” undermined support for programs aimed at alleviating poverty. The infamous Willie Horton ad explicitly (and deceptively) used fears of Black crime to tarnish Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. Yet in the wake of the first Black presidency and the most prominent Black rights movement since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, matters of race have moved to the forefront of political affairs in the U.S., unnerving many Whites who fear they are losing their status in American society. Donald Trump, who was also a proponent of zero-sum politics, exploited America’s racial fault lines like no other American politician since the end of segregation. His pledge to make America great again by restoring the social status of Americans who felt increasingly marginalized in an America that had embraced it diversity more and more with each passing year resonated with his White base. Studies by Diana Mutz and the Public Religion Research Group found Trump voters were driven more by fears of losing status and cultural displacement than economic anxiety.
As those studies show, Trump’s White working-class supporters didn’t rally to him on account of his economic record. In fact, Trump’s economic policies didn’t really direct many benefits to White working-class Americans either. His tax cuts favored the wealthy over middle- and lower-income Americans. Trump’s trade war with China levied financial pain on the White rural farmers who turned out in large numbers on Election Day for him. His trade deals weren’t dramatically different from the status quo. What his supporters liked was that Trump identified with their sense of racial anxiety. They were willing to follow him even to their economic disadvantage so long as he was sticking it to the libs and their multiracial coalition.
This leaves Democrats in a tough spot. They can’t simply win over White working-class voters with race-neutral economic policies because those voters don’t trust Democrats to prioritize, let alone look out for, the interests of White people. When these voters hear Democrats talk about “the economy” or “jobs” or “health care,” or even “infrastructure” and “paid-leave” and “child care,” what they hear aren’t generic, inclusive, broadly-defined ideas, but words loaded with racial implications. However Democrats address these issues, many Whites believe they are not Democrats’ intended beneficiaries.
So what do Democrats need to do to address this issue? They can’t just hope their policies will speak for themselves or continue to rely on race-neutral rhetoric to sell their proposals. It would also be immoral for Democrats to turn their back on issues of racial justice or embark on a series of Sister Souljah moments to convince working-class Whites that Democrats will prioritize the interests of White Americans over those of people of color. It might help Democrats to highlight the specific ways their programs benefit White working-class communities, but that still leaves them exposed when it comes to their support for programs that serve members of historically-marginalized communities.
To break through with White working-class voters, McGee recommends forming multiracial coalitions to address issues that cut across racial groups as well as countering the zero-sum political narrative. Her best advice, though, is the most straightforward: To overcome White assumptions that programs that benefit people of color hurt White people, state explicitly that racism against Black people not only hurts Black Americans but White Americans as well, and explain why. Racism makes us all worse off. People need to know the sooner we embark on efforts to overcome racism against people of color in this country, the better off we’ll all be.
This is imperative because McGee fears White Americans who have benefitted enormously from social programs created with little concern for cost at a time when Black Americans were either forbidden from receiving those benefits or exploited to secure those benefits for Whites might withdraw their support for similar programs if they were convinced people of color now benefit too much from them. My fear, though, is more than economic. It’s that White people who have enjoyed the benefits of democracy will opt to roll it back if they see people of color gaining more political power in the United States. In the short term, that may ease White concerns about cultural displacement and possibly even benefit them. In the long run, though, whatever form of government that replaced our democratic system would prove disastrous not just for some of us but for all of us regardless our race.
Signals and Noise
Some of the week’s best articles about the war in Ukraine: “Vladimir Putin Has Fallen Into the Dictator Trap” by Brian Klaas (The Atlantic); “Why Putin’s Nuclear Threat May be More Than Bluster” by Anthony Faiola (Washington Post); “As Russian Troop Deaths Climb, Morale Becomes an Issue, Officials Say” (New York Times); “China Sees at Least One Winner Emerging from Ukraine War: China” (New York Times); “Putin Killed Trump’s ‘America First’ Movement” by Matt Lewis (The Daily Beast)
McDonald’s, which did billions of dollars in business in Russia, has closed their restaurants throughout the country. But don’t worry, Putin has a replacement! It’s called Uncle Vanya’s! Here’s the logo. (In Russian, the letter that looks like our letter B sounds like a V.)
“If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view.”—Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on the Western media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. I mean, he’s not technically wrong. (Meanwhile, the Kremlin wants Russian state media to air more Tucker Carlson.)
“You say, what’s the purpose of this? They had a country. You could see it was a country where there was a lot of love and we’re doing it because, you know, somebody wants to make his country larger or he wants to put it back the way it was when actually it didn’t work very well.”—Donald Trump, rationalizing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a way for Russia to lovingly reunite with their neighbor while increasing the size of their country.
We have some data in about the effect of the new voting laws many Republican state legislatures passed last year and it’s not good. Texas rejected close to 23,000 mail-in ballots during their recent primary. That’s 13% of all mail-in ballots. The rejection rate was higher in Democratic counties (15%) than Republican counties (9%). Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema felt it was more important to preserve the filibuster in the Senate than prevent this from happening. This is also evidence Democrats should not settle for reform of the Electoral Count Act for the sake of bipartisanship. If being partisan means protecting the right to vote, be a partisan.
In other election news, Georgia has joined Florida in creating an election fraud police unit. I’m sure voters will rest easy now knowing cops will be patrolling the ballot box. This is state-sponsored voter intimidation aimed at discouraging Black Georgians from voting.
With COVID cases surging in Europe and China and sewer data not looking good in the U.S., Congress has decided it just doesn’t need to fund the fight against the coronavirus anymore. Republicans, who want to be seen standing up to government efforts to fight the pandemic regardless the reality of the pandemic, demanded the $15 billion allocated for virus aid be stripped from a $1.5 trillion budget bill if it wasn’t fully paid for. When Democratic leadership moved to fund it by reallocating unspent money already allocated to the states, numerous congressional Democrats balked. The aid, therefore, didn’t make it into the bill. What does this mean? Here’s Ed Yong in The Atlantic: “The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly. Next week, the government will have to cut shipments of monoclonal-antibody treatments by a third. In April, it will no longer be able to reimburse health-care providers for testing, vaccinating, or treating millions of uninsured Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated and infected. Come June, it won’t be able to support domestic testing manufacturers. It can’t buy extra doses of antiviral pills or infection-preventing treatments that immunocompromised people are banking on but were already struggling to get. It will need to scale back its efforts to improve vaccination rates in poor countries, which increases the odds that dangerous new variants will arise. If such variants arise, they’ll likely catch the U.S. off guard, because surveillance networks will have to be scaled back too. Should people need further booster shots, the government won’t have enough for everyone.” Idiots. As Yong notes, we spend $700 billion a year on our military in peacetime but can’t find $15 billion to fund public health initiatives in the midst of an ongoing public health emergency that will soon leave at least one million Americans dead in roughly two year’s time. A total institutional failure.
More from the Dept. of Institutional Ridiculousness: You may have heard this past Tuesday (two days after we set our clocks forward one hour) the Senate unanimously—unanimously—passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent. If the House passes the bill (no sure thing) it would mean no more setting clocks ahead or back! That’s great! Except a.) It won’t take effect until November 2023 to accommodate airlines that have already set their flight schedules, which is weird because it’s hard to believe airlines can’t adjust their schedules by a measly hour when thunderstorms, blizzards, and hurricanes unexpectedly mess with their ETDs and ETAs all the time; b.) The bill’s sponsor, Marco Rubio, basically snuck the bill past everyone, so no one was around to object to its passage, which, as Paul McLeod at Buzzfeed observes, makes one wonder what other bills could be snuck through the Senate on account of the Senate’s dumb procedures (paging Elizabeth Warren); and c.) Because there was no debate over the bill (a lot of Senators apparently had no idea Rubio was bringing it to the floor nor had given any thought to the legislation) it’s still an open question as to whether we should set our clocks to summertime or wintertime hours. Sleep experts say we should pick standard time, not daylight saving time. And check out this map from the Washington Post:
What that map means is a lot of kids in the winter would be going to school in the morning in the dark. Of course, there are trade-offs to eliminating daylight saving time and schools can adjust their start times if need be and kids in higher latitudes go to school all the time in the dark and I don’t really care whether we pick standard time or daylight saving time so long as we ditch the whole “fall back/spring ahead” thing, but is legislating by trick play really a good way to address this issue, particularly since the last time the U.S. dumped daylight saving time (in the 1970s) we brought it back after a few years?
Former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York is a creep. Rather than own up to his behavior and make amends, he blames “cancel culture” for forcing him from office. (Here are the allegations against him.) Now he’s thinking about running for governor again and maybe starting his own political party if Democrats don’t put him on the ballot. His sense of political indispensability is almost as bad as his serial sexual harassment. What would his father think…
So apparently Idaho’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin addressed the same white supremacist conference Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Paul Gosar spoke at a few weeks ago. She says she didn’t know anything about the sponsor of the event when she sent her video to him and does not believe she should be held accountable for the people she associates with.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa wants Democrats to pass a prescription drug plan because he knows his own party won’t do it if they take over the Senate.
Finally, in a follow-up to an article I published about a month ago, Dolly Parton has asked not to be considered for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Parton posted on Twitter, “Even though I am extremely flattered and grateful to be nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I don’t feel that I have earned that right. I really do not want votes to be split because of me, so I must respectfully bow out.” Shortly afterward, during an interview on FOX News, Parton said, “[M]y perception, and I think the perception of most of America — I just feel like [the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is] more for the people in rock music….[Inducting me] kind of would be like putting AC/DC in the Country Music Hall of Fame. That just felt a little out of place for me.” It’s pretty weird it takes a nominee to tell the RRHoF they don’t meet the criteria for induction. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has (I would argue prudently) not removed her name from the ballot. Hopefully voters will heed her wishes.
Vincent’s Picks: “The Lost Daughter”
The universe seems like it’s picking on Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman, from Broadchurch, The Favourite, and The Crown) the main character in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter, currently streaming on Netflix. When she arrives at her vacation home on a Greek isle, a nearby lighthouse greets her with a sweep of its floodlight and the blast of its foghorn. A cicada lands in her bed while she’s asleep and buzzes her awake. A large pinecone falls from a tall tree and strikes her on the shoulder. While relaxing on the beach, a big, noisy, obnoxious family crashes her solitude.
The family becomes a major annoyance to Leda. The young adult men scamper about like hooligans, exuding menace. The family’s matriarch Callisto (Dagmara Domińczyk) is a vain, bossy woman who actually isn’t a mother yet (she’s pregnant at the age of 42 with her first child) but carries herself as though she’s mastered the art of motherhood; Leda sees right through it and immediately despises her. There is another mother in the family, however, named Nina, played by Dakota Johnson (the Fifty Shades series, The Peanut Butter Falcon) who draws Leda’s sympathy. It isn’t just that she’s harassed by other men or that even her husband treats her as a piece of tail. It’s that Nina, still in the flush of youth, is the mother of a 4-to-5 year-old daughter who leaves her exhausted. Nina tries to hide it (notice how Gyllenhaal makes sure we see the wrinkles around Nina’s eyes) but Leda sees right through that, too.
And then one day, Nina’s daughter goes missing. Don’t worry, she’s eventually found, but then the little girl’s doll goes missing as well. Let’s just say what happens to that doll is quite a bit more intriguing than the child’s momentary disappearance.
Anyone seeking some peace and quiet during an island getaway would be agitated if they had to share a secluded beach with a bothersome family. It also makes sense that someone paying attention to Nina might also be worried about her. But the longer Leda stays on vacation, the more unnerved she seems to become. The film helps fill in the gaps for us with flashbacks to Leda’s younger self, played by the up-and-coming Jessie Buckley (Wild Rose, Chernobyl, season four of Fargo). Here we find Leda as a mother of two young children who has put her own academic ambitions on hold while her husband fulfills his own. She’s clearly unhappy, but more importantly, she struggles as a mother. Whatever joy she derives from it is rare. Her kids are a handful—one might even say mean—who leave her even more exhausted than Nina, but Leda also seems to lack an instinct for motherhood. She has a gift for the study of comparative literature, but not for playtime. Parenthood to her is stifling and suffocating. It reduces her to a biological function that deprives her of a rich intellectual life and a career in academia. She aspires to be so much more than a mom.
Most movie mothers are Supermoms. They effortlessly juggle childcare and careers with plenty of time for self-care. When they are seen struggling, they always seem to creatively make the best of it. No matter what happens, their children always come first. While the “evil mother” is a familiar character in film, what we never see is a mother like Leda who has come to resent motherhood, who doesn’t have a knack for it and may even regret becoming a parent. We never see that character because society does not accept her. While many mothers surely feel that way, they aren’t allowed to admit it and must pretend otherwise. It is as though such feelings run counter to the natural order of the universe.
Society is likely to regard a mother who dislikes motherhood as selfish or an abomination. It may even be that Leda as an individual is selfish or touched by a streak of cruelty. Yet as The Lost Daughter also shows, fathers are not held to the same standards as mothers. Leda’s husband in the flashbacks is essentially an absentee father who gets to do everything Leda longs for. Her vacation home’s caretaker (Ed Harris) has been on leave from his family for years, but that seems like something men can get away with. During one conversation between the two, they almost bond over how miserable parenting is, but even with no one else listening, he won’t openly admit that. As a man, he’ll never have to, because fatherhood comes with much lower social expectations than motherhood. He can do everything Leda does and more and still get a pat on the back for being a good dad.
The Lost Daughter, adapted from a novel by Italian author Elena Ferrante, recently won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards, which recognizes outstanding independently-produced films. Gyllenhaal also took home the award for Best Director. Colman and Buckley, whose roles require them to walk the line between holding it together and melting down, have received Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively. And let’s not overlook Johnson, who brings an easy appeal to Nina, leaving us to wonder if the character’s youth is being wasted on motherhood.
The Lost Daughter is a radical film in the way it examines the expectations society imposes on mothers. It is likely millions of women toil under those expectations, unable to openly admit motherhood is a struggle that leaves them feeling empty and unfulfilled. In her own way, Leda—with both her faults and attributes—stands for them all.
Garbage Time: How to Make the Most of Your MLB Fantasy Draft
It looks like we’re going to have a season of Major League Baseball after all! Now that a new collective bargaining agreement (hello universal designated hitter!) is in place, spring training can start, with opening day about four weeks away. That also means fantasy league drafts are just around the corner, too. If you’ve never played fantasy baseball before, you might want to give it a try. Fantasy baseball involves managing a team consisting of players from across the league. The goal is to beat the other fantasy team owners in your league by compiling the best hitting and pitching stats, usually runs, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, batting average, wins, strikeouts, saves, ERA, and WHIP (walks + hits per innings pitched). You can join leagues or organize your own on a number of websites, including ESPN.com. It’s a fun way to pass what can turn into a long season.
Unless you’re in an all-keeper league, most fantasy baseball seasons begin with a pre-season draft to fill-out rosters. It can be an intimidating moment because you’re on the clock (most drafts give team owners 1-2 minutes to make a pick) and you’re trying to assess a bunch of players to build the best team possible. Do you go for that third baseman or do you pick another starting pitcher? Will that young phenom you’re thinking about selecting build on last season’s success or was he just a flash in the pan? How do you distinguish between all the outfielders on the board?
Well I got some tips for you. I’m predicating this guide on a head-to-head category format, in which each team owner plays another team owner each week and tries to beat them in each statistical category. (For example Team A may beat Team B in six categories [i.e., runs, stolen bases, batting average, wins, strikeouts, and ERA] while Team B may beat Team A in three categories [i.e., home runs, RBI, and WHIP] and they may tie in saves, meaning the final score that week would be 6-3-1.) These tips would also probably apply to a standard rotisserie league in which teams are ranked in each statistical category and points awarded according to ranking. Head-to-head is good if you have a lot of team owners and you like the weekly challenge; rotisserie is better if you have fewer team owners who are more casual fantasy league players (although this latter format may make the end of the season rather anticlimactic if owners build insurmountable leads come August.)
The first thing to sort out is keepers. If you’re starting a league from scratch or if you’re playing in a league that doesn’t have keepers, this won’t apply to you. If you’re inheriting a team in a keeper league, it will. Keepers are players you hold over from the previous season. Usually there’s a limit to how many players you can keep; the league I play in has a limit of three.
Keepers can get tricky. You should absolutely keep an elite offensive player (i.e., Trea Turner, Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., Mike Trout, etc.); as for pitchers, only keep super-elite starting pitchers who tend to rack up massive stats with each outing, of which there aren’t many. But don’t keep a player just because you can or because they’re good, since if you choose to keep fewer than the maximum number of players owners are allowed to keep, you’ll get moved up in the drafting order. What you’ve got to figure out—and this usually involves looking at the available players in the free agent pool and guessing which players other owners are likely to keep—is if you can improve your team by keeping fewer players. So for example, if you’re in a 10-team league with 3 keepers per team, and you’ve got the 6th, 15th, and 33rd best-players in the league on your roster already, it’s almost certain you can improve on that last player. You’d just have to figure out if the upgrade is worth it (i.e., I wouldn’t upgrade from a first baseman ranked 33rd for better starting pitching, nor would I, for the long-term health of your team, upgrade from a rising prospect for a player who is still good but in decline.)
Now you’re ready to draft. In online drafts (which is how most fantasy leagues are run) the best available player will always appear at the top of the board. You could always select that player, but I’d advise thinking more strategically, particularly since you’ll be filling in a roster by position. (A standard roster might include a catcher, first baseman, second baseman, third baseman, shortstop, three outfielders, a DH/utility, six active pitching slots, and five bench spots.) If you just select the best available player, you could end up with way too many players for one position or find yourself with few options for certain positions later in the draft.
To help you sort out players, I recommend looking at websites that place players in tiers according to their ability. The tiers might come with arbitrary names (Super-Elite, Elite, All-Star, Very Good, etc.) but tiers help you in two ways: They allow you to compare players across position and let you know how deep each position is. Understanding positional depth is critical: If you know, for example, there are more elite shortstops left on the board than elite first basemen, you may want to pick an elite first baseman before picking an elite shortstop, especially if you think there will still be elite shortstops available when it’s your turn to pick again. You may also look at tiers and find a position full of all-star type players but few elite players, and that those elite players are likely to be gobbled up by the time you get around to picking them; if so, don’t rush out to pick the all-star player when you can probably get a comparable player at the same position in later rounds.
You should pay close attention to infield positions, though. Outfielders are a dime a dozen. Infielders are often eligible at only one position, and if that position lacks depth, you can struggle filling that position all season with a stat-producer. In fact, don’t worry too much about drafting a full outfield. Good outfielders will pop up as the season goes along, making it really easy to plug holes there if someone gets hurt or underperforms. That’s harder to do with infield positions, even in a 10-team league.
Also, don’t overinvest in starting pitching in the draft. It’s always good to have at least two aces on your team who can rack up strikeouts (and wins). But pitchers only get one start per week (two if you’re lucky) and you’re usually capped at around seven starts per week total. You don’t want a bunch of scrub starters, either, but if you draft a couple league aces and another all-star type starter, you’ll be set up pretty good. Use a pick in the second-half of the draft to add a fourth starter. As the season goes along, keep an eye on the free agent pool to pick up a fifth starter; there will always be a handful of undrafted pitchers who come out of the blue and have great seasons. Additionally, I would recommend leaving pitching slots open for streaming, which is when you select a free agent pitcher for a one-day start. If, for example, there’s a decent free agent pitcher set to start against the Orioles or the Pirates (who are projected to be bad this year) just pick them up for the day and feast off their statistics. If you pay close attention to the day-to-day match-ups, you can really take advantage of this option and leave yourself some roster flexibility.
You also don’t need to worry about prioritizing a catcher. Catchers aren’t everyday players, they tend to get hurt, and they’re usually valued for their defense more than their offense. At times I’ve even considered playing without a catcher given how they have a tendency to drag my team batting average down. If you can land an elite catcher in the middle rounds, go for it, but otherwise, just pick a catcher from a good offensive team that is likely to pile up decent stats just by batting around other good players.
Relief pitchers are always a headache. You may run into owners who stock up on closers and try to beat you in saves, ERA, and WHIP. If you don’t have owners like that, look to take relievers once you’ve got your infield and top three starting pitchers set (usually somewhere around picks 9-11.) Again, don’t overinvest in closers, but do pick a bunch of them in the later rounds of the draft. Give yourself a bunch of closing options so you can rack up saves and potentially prevent other owners from drafting them as well. (Owners have a tendency to overdraft back-up positional players, who only take up roster spots. Just take your back-up players from the free agent pool when you need them.) Consult bullpen depth charts to see what players are projected to close for each team and draft them. And remember: Some closers end up pitching lights out all season, while others flameout or crash. You need to have as many closer options as possible, but it’s not worth prioritizing them over everyday players.
If there are still closers left for your last couple picks, go ahead and select them. Otherwise, burn your last two selections. You’re going to need roster space as the season goes along, particularly if you’re streaming pitchers or if it takes a while for an offensive player to heat up. Make your last two picks and then waive them so you can immediately begin rummaging around the free agent pool if necessary.
When drafting, keep an eye on statistical diversity. I made the mistake one year of drafting a bunch of players who ended up scoring runs but not getting RBIs. It took me a couple months to work that problem out. To this end, consider where your players will bat in their teams’ lineups (you don’t want a bunch of 4-5 hitters and no 1-2 hitters.) Also, keep an eye on that most elusive of stats, stolen bases. Given how out-of-fashion the stolen base is in the contemporary game, one or two quick players is all it takes to win that category each week. And remember: A home run counts as 1 in three categories (runs, HR, RBIs) and can net you more than one in RBIs. Sluggers are valuable (so long as that’s not all they hit; I see you Joey Gallo.) Your online draft service will probably feature players’ yearly statistical projections.
Try to avoid drafting more than two offensive players from the same team. If you do, you’ll get hammered when that team has a day-off or gets rained out. Fill in your team with players from across the league (although it is awesome when players from hot teams churn out stats for you, which can happen if you stream offensive players hitting in high-altitude Colorado.)
Finally, when you’re trying to decide between players in the draft, remember the Rule of 29. The age of 29 is when a baseball player tends to reach their athletic peak, so look for twenty-eight and twenty-nine year-olds. You can figure out a player’s age with a quick Wikipedia search. The closer to 29, the better, but always choose younger than older if the difference is comparable (i.e., I’d rather have the 27-year-old whose stats have improved from year-to-year than the 31-year-old whose stats have plateaued.) Another thing to consider when comparing players is the player’s team. It’s hard for players to accumulate stats all on their own: Good pitchers need their offense to score runs to win games; closers need to play on winning teams to pick up saves (although closers on bad teams may end up saving a lot of close games); and hitters need other players to move them around the bases or to hit in. A good player on a good team is more valuable than a good player on a bad team.
And one more thing: Don’t sweat your draft too much. Focus on the first five rounds. Be nimble in rounds 6-10. But just remember there’s a free agent pool during the season you can draw from if your draft goes sideways. Some picks will go bust; some will surprise you. Players will get hurt or slump and need to be replaced. You’ll find hidden gems as the season goes along, though. It wouldn’t be a fun fantasy league season if all you did was draft a team and sit back to watch them accumulate stats for the next six months. With all its ups and downs, the fun in a fantasy baseball season is how you manage, in both senses of the word.