Transactions

Despite the restriction on transaction number and the resulting paranoia about saving some of those precious pick-ups for the final play-off run, we have still made 133 transactions through the first 8 weeks of this season.  For me personally, I like to fret and worry over a transaction before finally pulling the trigger in the morning, regretting it all day, and waiting to see if anyone picks up my playa off waivers taking advantage of my poor managerial decisions and over reactions.  I decided to look more closely at the transactions and see if there were any trends that I could pull out for our league.  I began by looking at the players that were picked up and dropped thus far. 

By and large, it seems like our teams are maintaining their makeups throughout the season. The positions with the greatest turnover are 2B and 3B with teams having 62.5% and 60% of those positions that they did at the beginning of the season.  LF and SS, however, have been the most added with 123% and 140% of the roster spots that they had at the beginning of the season.  With Placido Polanco having all sorts of hand problems, I have been in the market for a 2B and know that the position is quite sparse, so it makes sense that this position has been dropped so consistently, while the SSs that could fill in in the MI position have all been taken!  I was most surprised that the relief and starting pitchers have remained pretty consistent throughout the year.  Given that there will be at most 30 closers during the season, it makes sense that there wont be a mass exodus of closers.  The amount of moves for the RP and SP positions have been the highest of any position, though.  Also of note is that there have only been 9 waiver adds, which to me shows that there have only been 9 moves that others consider stupid enough to take advantage of.
Beyond the actual transactions, I wanted to see if the timing of our transactions had any trends.  I began by looking at which days we made transactions.  I went into this analysis with the thought that the most transactions were made on Sunday (to stream in those starters and get those extra Ks) and Monday (when the new week is starting and you can grab a 2-start starter or just get a fresh player).

While there were a lot of transactions made on Sunday and Monday, the most transactions were made on Wednesday and Thursday.  I suppose that by the time Thursday rolls around, you have a pretty good idea of how the match-up is going and you can make adjustments when you think they will actually have a real effect.  Next, I wanted to look at what times our transactions were made.

Aside from the 4:30am waiver-clearing time, it seems like the most transactions are made right around noon and then at around midnight.  Because we are only allowed to have a player play on the day he is picked up when the transaction goes through before the first pitch of the day (usually 1:05 or 2:20), it makes sense that we would want to scrunch those transactions in right before the deadline.  At night, after out players have let us down for yet another day, we like to go out and replace them in a highly spiteful and angry moment.
It would be interesting to see if these trends would hold up if we had unlimited transactions rather than capping then at 50.  I would assume that we would make many more impulsive transactions and the average time that a picked up player remained on a team would plummet, but I imagine that the trends regarding when and who is picked up would stay pretty much the same.  Thoughts?