On Saturday, Sal Stewart hit his 30th HR and Sarah Langs pulled yet another fun stat:

Sal Stewart is the 14th rookie in MLB history with 30+ homers and 100+ RBI in a season the 9 previous players to do it since the rookie of the year award began (1947) all won it

— Sarah Langs (@slangsonsports.bsky.social) 2026-08-29T19:07:32.184Z

That sent me scampering to the FanGraphs Rookie Leaderboards where you would see that Stewart, for all the fun counting stats, is the 7th best offensive rookie by fWAR (and is behind some (pitchers, as well), and the 9th best by wRC+.

But this article isn’t about Stewart, it is about the two fine young gentleman who top that wRC+ rookie leaderboard Esmerlyn Valdez and Munetaka Murakami. There are no many debuts more fun that those two. Murakami is going to have 30 HR any day now (I am writing Saturday, so maybe he already does?) and Valdez is on pace for 40, if only it were for those pesky months in Triple-A.

But Murakami and Valdez share something beyond prodigious power: a prodigious inability to make contact.

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Hot Right Now (HRN) is a weekly Ottoneu feature focused on popular players currently being auctioned or players who you should think about auctioning in your Ottoneu leagues. Even if you don’t play Ottoneu, we’ll be highlighting players you should be looking at in deeper and keeper formats. In this feature, we will break down players into two sections:

1. Current Auctions: A closer look at players being auctioned at a high rate.
2. Hot Performers: Players with a high P/G or P/IP over the last 14 days who are also rostered in 80% of leagues or less.

The RotoGraphs Ottoneu team plans to run this feature weekly, updating fantasy managers on the biggest movers in Ottoneu leagues with an analysis of how these players could or could not help your roster.

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With the All Star Break behind us, it is time for MLB teams to commit one way or the other – go all in for the playoff push or start building for the future? The trade deadline is just over two weeks away and you can expect to see a flurry of activity. Someone will get a new closer. Someone will upgrade at shortstop, bumping another bat to the bench. Someone will clear a spot for their top prospect to debut.

And that, of course, will have fantasy implications. While our partners on the green side of this site will go in depth into the whos and whats and whys of all that activity, this is where you can come for thoughts and analysis on the fantasy implications of each trade.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about the importance of looking at a hitter’s performance on a per-game-started basis, particularly if you are in a daily lineups league. There are real risks to considering a hitter’s overall line without considering what they do when they start, and those risks can cut both ways. If you look at their rate stats and dream on the value of that .350 wOBA, you might miss that they lose plate appearances to pinch hitters, which might cost them 10% or more of their PA, even when they start.

If you look at their per-game stats, you might underrate a player’s power output or stolen base contribution because those numbers look bad overall, but they are actually on pace for 20/20 over 160 games. Today, we’ll account for those risks and look at a set of players whose overall and per-game performance might be hiding how good they have been on a per-game-started basis.

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Fantasy baseball is a stats game, both in terms of scoring (you are literally trying to maximize certain stats) and in terms of building a roster (you use stats to figure out who to roster). But if you play in daily lineups leagues, almost all of the stats we look at are presented in the wrong format for your purposes, particularly for hitters.

When you check out Michael Conforto’s player page, you will see he has 8 HR and a .243 average in 160 PA, which puts him on a 30-HR pace for a full season. You’ll also see him at 3.44 P/G in Ottoneu points leagues. But if you have been moving him in and out of your lineup based on when he does/doesn’t start, and you look at what he has given your team, you’ll see something more like 5 HR and a .223 average, with 4.06 P/G for Ottoneu points leagues. Why has Conforto been better for your team in points leagues (though, to be fair, still not good) and worse in roto?

His starter/substitute splits.

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As we move deeper into the season, teams are starting to ask themselves if it is time to buy or sell and, if so, what buying or selling looks like. How aggressively do I want to ship out potential keepers for a shot at a title? How far do I have to get in rebuilding my roster before the deadline so I am ready for 2027? In at attempt to dig into some of this, I have been looking at 2025 roster and results data. I have a long series of questions I want to look into – how much is too much to spend on top players? Stars and scrubs or balance? – and today I am going to start with this one:

If you are trying to build a strong 2027 team, is it best to do that via keepers you held through the off-season? Players you trade for during the off-season? Or the auction?

I think this is a pretty useful question to answer right now because it impacts sellers and buyers. Sellers are already thinking about 2027 directly; but buyers are trying to determine how willing they should be to break apart their core to win right now. So they are also wondering how they can/will build a 2027 roster if they are giving up keepers today.

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A couple of weeks back, I dug into how Ottoneu Prestige League rosters have evolved over the years. That was interesting, but not much more than that. In fact, my conclusion began:

Honestly, there isn’t a ton to take from this in terms of actionable next steps.

Great work, Chad. But I did say I would dig further and look at some other data to try to get a better sense of roster construction. I have a million questions I would like to answer for myself (I would very much like to win OPL, though I very much doubt I will), and with round three less than a week away, I started with this:

Given 40 roster spots, how do you balance hitters, starters, and relievers to maximize your scoring?

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This year marks the sixth edition of the Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL), a competition that pits 240 teams from across the entire Ottoneu universe in a best-ball contest for ultimate glory, exciting prizes, a one-of-a-kind t-shirt (the image above is the 2025 t-shirt art), and a fancy bat. Modeled loosely off the UEFA Champions League and other league-spanning competitions in the soccer world, OPL is open to any team that finished in the top half of their league the prior season. Like it’s counterparts in the soccer world, it forces teams to fight on two fronts. You are playing both your regular league and competing in OPL with the same roster, but different competitors and different rules.

The result is a unique roster building challenge. While your standard Ottoneu league will require you to set a lineup each day, OPL is best ball – your top scorer at each position, including up to two starting pitchers and five relievers, each day score points; everyone else doesn’t. Way back in year one, I dug into the data to look at how to build an offense and a pitching staff that could compete in OPL. With round two of the 2026 edition underway, I decided to look back at round one and re-evaluate what I found in 2021.

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Dylan Crews is back, baby!

On the Agenda: 

1. Closer Chaos
2. Quick Hits
3. Various News and Notes
4. Streaming Pitchers
5. Ottoneu Six Picks

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“Alright Keegan, just go out there and get us going – start things off with a stri…”

[Kevin McGonigle enters the chat]

On the Agenda: 

1. Closer Chaos
2. Quick Hits
3. Various News and Notes
4. Streaming Pitchers
5. Ottoneu Six Picks

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