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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Welcome to the final two weeks of the season. Or close to it, anyway. When games wrap up Sunday afternoon and evening, we will officially have 14 days remaining before the regular season wraps up on September 27.

With the end so near, sit/start calls for your rotation have changed. Maybe in your head-to-head league, things are pretty normal – you max out innings and games played; if you have a limit on games started by your pitching staff, you try to identify the best starts that fit under that limit. The stakes are higher, but the process might be the same.

But in season-long leagues, there are some nuances that should change your typical thought process.

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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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