Trading players you don’t own

There’s another caveat.  The person in the second deal, knowing you don’t have the player yet, can go to the first team you are dealing with and make a seperate deal for this player, thus scuttling your original deal.

I’ve tried this theory a few times this year as I’m in a pretty active league.  The results have been: (1) getting screwed when the second guy backs out afetr I’ve made deal 1, (2) getting screwed when the second guy went and made a separate deal with the first guy, cutting me out and (3) lots of wasted time on deals that were never consummated.  Needless to say, I am no longer a proponent of this approach

Don’t see how Casey Blake and Zambrano would net anyone Wright. I don’t think Mark Renyolds and Zambrano would do that, and Reynolds is far better than Blake.

i try this strategy all the time but there are several large pitfalls to be wary of:

1) let’s say i start offering blake to manager B (assuming I will get him from manager A), I run the risk of manager B simply circumventing me and trading with manager A (i.e. maybe manager A has a better “decent pitcher” than I do)

2) another possibility is that manager B will want to know the deal I have in place with manager A and may think of the entire deal as a 3 way trade.  in that case, he is likely to evaluate the trade from 3 angles and determine that i’m getting “too good of a deal.”

3) more often than not, you don’t just have a trade sitting in your inbox waiting for you to click accept.  there’s usually a ton of back and forth and negotiating before that happens.  the most likely scenario is that you are “in talks” to get blake from manager A and then you start dangling him in front of manager B.  the problem is that those “talks” end up leading nowhere 75% of the time, esp is manager A gets wind of your talks with manager B.