At the heart of fantasy baseball is predictability. You predict that certain players will perform a certain way. We call it fantasy, but it is entirely based in reality. Real people perform in real time.

The fantasy is that their reality impacts my reality.

My fantasy team doesn’t exist. But the baseball—the baseball is real.

And the baseball in reality is predictable. Players who get on base two out of ten at bats will hurt your team, while players who get on base three out of ten will help. So you figure out who those players are going to be and you try to get them on your team.

Even when they are on your team, that average is for the whole season, not each game. A great fantasy team can lose because the prediction doesn’t hit at that time. But it almost always will sometime. Even if it is next year.

Here’s the thing, though. We have to deal with moments. Real moments. Times when our guys are struggling and we think we need to do something. We can’t keep losing while waiting for the law of averages to even it out. Action seems to be called for. 

So, do you pick up a guy who is hot and drop someone who is underperforming? In a vacuum, this seems like a good idea. Well, the law of averages (and experience) will tell you not to do that at all in April, because average hasn’t had time to average. It’s like flipping a coin and you keep getting tails. The coin isn’t the problem. You need to keep flipping to get to the heads.

However, the answer is probably yes in August. Cold streaks at the beginning tend to even out over the course of the season. But if you’re at the end of the season, and the player isn’t performing still, there is less reason to believe he will now. 

The real challenge of fantasy baseball is in understanding when predictable outcomes matter. 

If we treated other things in life this way, would it change our perspective? If we played fantasy at work, politics, social life—would our use of predictability help us make decisions? 

Maybe. But I suspect we already kind of do. People treat the real stuff like fantasy—that life is all games to play. Rather than the other way around. We treat the real stuff like fantasy—entertainment playing out on screens in a social media reality.

How we determine what is predictable is the real secret. If it is actually based on data, then we can be confident in our decisions. If there is a process or methodology to base our decisions on, we are far more likely to make the right choice each time.

If not, we’re just gambling with our real lives.