2025-26 Ottoneu Arbitration Results Recap

How many Ottoneu managers out there woke up Saturday morning to sadly see their favorite players suddenly more expensive? Or maybe you stayed up Friday night to check in, despite the risk of nightmares caused by seeing your $5 Nick Kurtz now voted off your roster? Yes, Ottoneu Arbitration has come to an end and all those dollars are locked and all those vote offs are complete. The good news is, that also means the off-season is really underway and you can start making trades. But before we walk away from arbitration, let’s take a look at what happened.

First, a quick reminder of what arbitration is. Most Ottoneu players know, but if you aren’t an Ottoneu player yet, this will help you understand the context for the article. Ottoneu arbitration is intended to help maintain competitive balance and comes in two flavors: Allocations and Vote Offs. With allocations, each manager gets $25 to add to the salary of players on other teams, with some rules on how those dollars are spread out. In vote off leagues, each manager votes for one player on each other team and the player with the most votes is removed from the roster, with the manager who lost the player getting a discount on the player at auction.

So when we look back at arbitration, what we are looking at is the most under-priced players in Ottoneu. These are players whose 2026 draft/auction cost will be much higher than it was in 2025. That’s true in vote off leagues and allocation leagues – vote off you are trying to remove other teams’ best values; allocations you are trying to turn their best values into less valuable values.

The players hit hardest in this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone. Cal Raleigh was hit with the most dollars in allocations, given the most individual allocations, received the most vote off votes, and was voted off in the most leagues. Across the entire Ottoneu universe, 63% of the teams that could allocate to Cal Raleigh and 60% of the teams that could vote for Cal Raleigh, did so. Only one other player (Paul Skenes) got allocations from more than 60% of eligible teams and only one other player (Nick Kurtz) received more than 50% of possible votes. Aaron Judge might have won the MVP award, but the Ottoneu community pretty clearly believed Raleigh was the most valuable player in our game.

The fact that Skenes got so many allocations but Kurtz was the one to get so many votes is kind of interesting and points to a difference in how vote off and allocation leagues behaved. Here are the top ten players in terms of dollars allocated and votes received:

A number of names appear on both lists – Raleigh, Kurtz, Crochet, Caminero, Sanchez, Wood, and Judge. The other three names on the two lists are pretty interesting. For the vote off leagues, Hunter Brown, Roman Anthony, and Pete Crow-Armstrong made the cut, vs. Tarik Skubal, Shohei Ohtani, and Paul Skenes.

Judge stands out here as an anomaly on the vote off side, but in general, the players who are most-allocated to are players who put up absolutely elite seasons, almost regardless of price, while the players who are most-voted for are players who broke out.

The logic here makes some sense. If Shohei Ohtani is already $80, allocating money to drive his price up reduces his value to the team that has him. But if you vote him off, yes he is a free agent, but the manager who lost him gets a $5 discount on him at auction. Unless you are sure you are going to have $90 to bid on him, you run the risk of the manager getting him back at almost the same price, or possibly a lower price.

There’s another factor at play – in vote off leagues you only get one vote per team. One vote off league that saw Ohtani get some votes but NOT get voted off, the current league champ ended the year with a $92 Ohtani and a $7 Kurtz. Even if you think Ohtani should be a $100 player, Kurtz is a more logical vote recipient. Even with a $5 discount at auction, that manager is going to see Kurtz’s salary go up quite a bit. Ohtani might be more productive and more valuable, but his salary simply isn’t going to go up by as much.

Meanwhile, in an allocation league, you don’t have to choose. In one allocation league, a team with a $60 Ohtani and a $9 Kurtz had $4 allocated to the former and $5 to the latter. That team also had money allocated to Skenes, Raleigh, and Zach Neto.

Some big picture numbers, just for fun – there were more than 71,000 allocations made, totaling nearly $100,000 in salary added to players. There were 572 unique players who got at least $1 in allocations. The most received by a single team was $50 (there is one 20-team Ottoneu league, and allocations in that league can get up there). The most received by a single instance of a player was $25 assigned to Cal Raleigh in one league. He wasn’t the only player over $20 though – there are 46 managers out there who woke up Saturday morning to a player whose salary had increased by at least that much. On the vote off side, a total of 200 different players received at least one vote. That doesn’t count the 7 votes for “no one” – an option for managers who think another team has no player worth voting off, lest you give that manager a $5 discount on a player who might not go for $5 more.

I am still digging into the arbitration data, so there may be more to come later this week. What do you want to know? What questions would be interesting to answer?