Author Archive: Chad Young

Ottoneu arbitration opened last week and that inevitably leads to a million debates about the right way to do your arbitration. Do you allocate funds to Pete Crow-Armstrong no matter what team he is on? Or do you make sure to prioritize using arbitration to rein in the best teams? Do you assign arbitration to rookies or prospects? Or only give to established players?

On Friday, I published an updated Ottoneu Arbitration Omnibus that has a bunch of articles covering these kinds of strategic questions, reviewing arbitration results from the past, and more. And there is a ton of good stuff there.

But today, I want to focus on a single, simple concept the drives my arbitration strategy:

I want my arbitration to help my team as much as possible for as long as possible.

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Years ago, Brad Johnson created the Ottoneu Arbitration Omnibus, trying to gather all the Ottoneu arbitration content from the site into a single place. It seems every year I get questions about arbitration strategies and plans, and the reality is, I don’t always have a lot more to say. Much of how I think about arbitration was shaped years ago and while I certainly make adjustments year-over-year and learn new things, the high level stuff stays the same.

But the last edition of this omnibus was published in 2019, and it is probably due for a refresh. So, without further ado, your one stop shop for all things Ottoneu Arbitration.

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We have been on a journey this week. Well, I have been on a journey, and maybe some of you joined me for that journey. And this journey has taken me into a a deep look at followers. Part I: Do they exist and how effective are they for fantasy? Part II: How do league rules impact their value?

Today, we are going to come full circle. This investigation was spurred by a conversation in the Ottoneu Slack community and today we are going to look very specifically at followers Ottoneu leagues.

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In Part I of this journey (and it is a journey), we discovered that:

• There are very few followers
• There are even fewer predictable followers
• There are even fewer predictable followers who put up numbers obviously good enough to be trusted in fantasy baseball

You could be forgiven for walking away now, muttering under your breath, “Why is he still writing? What more do I need to know?” But we ended with a caveat:

There are some guys worth using when they follow if you happen to roster them, but there aren’t many of them, and even they aren’t really sustainable or predictable enough to roster them specifically as followers, with rare exception.

Those exceptions have less to do with the pitcher’s involved and more to do with your league structure, which is what we’ll cover in part II.

And you can’t end on a cliffhanger like that, right? I introduced eight questions in Part I and answered the first three. Today we are on to the next three.

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As the manager of a fantasy baseball team, I am constantly asking myself what I can do to make my team better. How can I add a few more HR or close that gap in saves? How can I strengthen my middle infield or take advantage of my supremely deep outfield?

I can ask these questions and find potential answers because I know what I am striving for. Stats roll in, standings update, and my team ticks up or down in response to what I did. Or in response to the whims of the baseball gods. Or in response to yet another injury. But regardless of what happens, I know what the target is and I strive to get closer to that target.

At RotoGraphs, we don’t have standings to track, but we do have a target: to effectively serve you, dear reader. To help you in your quest to dominate your fantasy foes, to share information you will find useful, and maybe, just maybe to entertain you a bit along the way. With that in mind, we’d like to get to know more about you and what you think about us.

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I don’t know about you, but as a kid I was inundated with messages about not being a follower. “Don’t be a sheep,” they said. “Be a leader,” they said. “If your friends all came out of the bullpen to throw bulk innings after, would you do that too?” they asked.

And now I want to call all those people and say, “Have you been watching the MLB postseason? Everyone wants to be a follower!”

The opener/follower structure is certainly having it’s moment and it’s easy to understand why this has value to MLB teams. You can split the opening innings between a left-handed and a right-handed arm, making lineup construction a little more difficult. You can let your follower get to a third time through the order without that third time starting with the big bats at the top. And you can guarantee you get one of your pen arms in the game for the first inning, when you can control the matchups.

The value to fantasy teams, however, is less obvious and worth evaluating.

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Back in early March, when we were young and naive, full of hope and optimism, not yet beat down by the Tommy John surgeries and broken hamates of the world, I shared my 10 bold predictions for the 2026 fantasy season.

I sorted those predictions from “coldest to boldest” so I’ll go through them in that order here. I guess that means if I miss on the first couple, things could get really ugly, huh?

My goal in evaluating these will be to ask three questions: 1) was I right? 2) was this prediction helpful for fantasy drafters? and 3) do I expect to double down on this for 2027?

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Over a fantasy season, it’s hard to trace results back to the decisions or actions you took that led to that result. We take so many actions from keepers (if your league has them), to the draft, to trades, to FAAB or waiver moves, to lineup decisions, that parsing what mattered and what didn’t can be impossible.

Instead, I find it is more productive to evaluate things the other direction – look at decisions you made or actions you took, determine how they impacted your final results, and then decide if you did something right and repeatable or wrong and avoidable. That is how I started the analysis of my trade for Tarik Skubal. And that’s why I am diving into my bullpen in Ottoneu League 1.

I felt I had a strong team, with a good lineup and a top-tier rotation. I finished 4th. That’s not terrible – we pay out the top four spots and I still get bragging rights over eight managers, many of whom I have competed with for nearly two decades. But it isn’t what I hoped. And the bullpen might be why.

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On June 27, I had a team sitting in second place in a 4×4 league, 6.5 points out of first. This particular league, an Ottoneu league called the Food and Travel League, pays out prizes in the form of food and/or beverages. It is one of my favorite leagues, both for the prizes and the competition, and finishing top three in that league is a goal every year – it’s much more fun to receive food than to figure out how to ship it.

I had never won this league and while the gap to first made me wonder if this was the right year to push in my chips, I also saw a clear path to finishing second or third (fourth place was 7.5 points behind me). But I was behind the pace on innings pitched and needed arms. I was third in all of the pitching rate stats (HR/9, ERA, WHIP), but was ninth in IP and, as a result, tied for eighth in strikeouts. Gaining points in Ks while maintaining my rates was an obvious path forward.

So I made a trade. I ended up winning the league, but the trade was costly and it is worth wondering if the trade is why I won the league, or if I could have won without the deal.

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Whether you think first of Lenny Kravitz or Yogi Berra, the simple truism used to title this article is a more than just a pithy saying. Sometimes we think a game is out of reach – and it turns out it isn’t. Sometimes we think a series is won – and it’s not. And sometimes you think it’s late September and my fantasy standings are locked in. But are they really?

There is still a lot that can happen even in the last four days of the season.

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