On June 29th, as the clock neared midnight ET, Jake Mailhot and I completed a trade in League 32 that saw us swap a couple of big names.

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Much like Hot Right Now, Cold Right Now will be a weekly Ottoneu feature with a focus on players who are being dropped or who maybe should be dropped in Ottoneu leagues. Hot Right Now will focus on players up for auction, players recently added, and players generally performing well. Cold Right Now will have parallel two of those three sections:

1. Roster Cuts: Analysis of players with high cut% changes.
2. Cold Performers: Players with a low P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

There won’t be a corresponding section to Current Auctions because, well, there is nothing in cuts that correspond to current auctions.

Roster Cuts

Luis Urías, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 20.51%

Urías went from underrated to overrated to disappointed to productive player to injured and has now gone back to the minors. After missing more than a month with an injury suffered on Opening Day, Urías simply has not produced for the Brewers, posting a .145/.299/236 slash line and just 2.05 P/G for his Ottoneu managers.

Some of the issue is certainly poor luck – his .179 BABIP and 12.5% line drive rate are both unsustainably low. But Urías just was not making strong contact in his limited time this year. Never a guy with elite contact quality, his brief (so far) 2023 has been a big step back and re-raised concerns from his prospect days that he simply won’t hit the ball hard enough to be an impact player. He showed in 2021 and 2022 that he can hit just hard enough to be a successful MLB hitter, but this year he just isn’t doing it.

You can see in that chart, his HH rate was stuck well below league average until 2021, and has been trending down so far this year. If you want to take something positive from this, his brutal June looks an awful lot like other slow patches for him in the middle of 2021, and a couple of times in 2022. Given still-strong plate discipline numbers, there is good reason to think Urías can play his way out of this.

I don’t mind cutting him now, especially if you are spending $10+ on him (median salary is $6), but watch his minor league performance. A hot week could be more than enough to get him back into the Brewers lineup and producing like he did in 2022.

Kris Bubic, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 16.35%

Just another round of Bubic being auctioned and cut to decrease his cap penalty. And still no other reason to be nominating or bidding on him.

Matthew Boyd, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 15.06%

Boyd has looked so good in flashes, but the performance hasn’t been consistent and now he is going to miss the rest of this year and maybe all of next after having Tommy John Surgery. No reason to stash him. He is still rostered in almost 16% of leagues and that should fade to 0 as the year goes on.

Josh Rojas, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 14.74%

Rojas was an exciting player a couple of years ago, with a decent amount of hype in fantasy circles, and he delivered two decent-ish seasons. But this year has been ugly.

The greater than 10% walk rate that helped give him a high floor has dropped t0 8.6% this year. Always a guy who hit a relatively high number of line drives, Rojas kept that rate up at 25% this year, but his exit velocity on line drives fell from 92.1 in 2021 and 93.4 last year to 90.7 this year. That lower quality of contact has brought down his BABIP and his HR/FB% (to zero, which isn’t ideal) and left him without much value.

There are only 12 qualified hitters with a LD% higher than 25% and none has an xwOBA lower than Ezequiel Tovar’s .292. Rojas had an xwOBA of .268. Hitting a lot of line drives is a good thing, but you still have to hit the ball hard for that to matter.

You’ll notice a lot of past tense in those paragraphs – that’s because Rojas has been sent down to Triple-A. And he really isn’t hitting any better there. There is no good reason not to move on from Rojas if you haven’t already.

Cold Performers

To measure cold performers this week, I’m looking for players with low P/G or P/IP in the last 14 days.

Bo Naylor, 2.1 P/G:

When Naylor got the call, I was quick to get him into my lineups and he has not really delivered. He has only had 40 PA since coming up and his P/G is hurt by PH appearances, but not enough to explain away 2.1 P/G. The strikeout rate is high and Naylor is clearly struggling to adjust.

But I want to urge patience on Naylor. His first couple of weeks of Triple-A in 2022 were not good, before he adjusted and took off. His first taste of Double-A in 2021 was not good, before he adjusted a took off.

Naylor has shown a good approach throughout his pro career, drawing a lot of walks and flashing big power. His first MLB HR was no cheapie – a 417-foot shot he hit out the other way in Kauffman Stadium, a notoriously bad power park. There are going to be growing pains, but if you can let him work through them, the prize could be big.

Jack Suwinski, 3.33 P/G:

This is all part of the Jack Suwinski show, as his high K-rate leaves him susceptible to cold streaks. The concern for managers, of course, is what if the league has just figured him out and the cold streak won’t be followed by another hot streak?

Here are some numbers for you:

• Suwinski’s average EV on the season: 91.6. Over the last two weeks: 93.4.
• Suwinski’s hard hit rate on the season: 48.6%. Over the last two weeks: 56.5%.
• Suwinski’s strikeout rate on the season: 31.7%. Over the last two weeks: 30.2%.
• Suwinski’s walk rate on the season: 15.5%. Over the last two weeks: 16.3%.

So what is driving this slump? His BABIP (.190) and HR/FB rate (13.3%) are both just extremely low, especially given the continued hard contact.

If you, like me, are getting frustrated, take a deep breath and wait for him to start mashing the ball again. It’s coming. And if you don’t enjoy the roller coaster, the next time he hits four homers over a four-game stretch (a feat he has accomplished twice so far this year), get him on the block and sell. I’m holding, enjoying the peaks, and accepting that the big picture is still very good, even if the valleys prevent it from being great.

Johan Oviedo, 2.89 P/IP:

This guy is maddening. He looked quite good to start the season before running into a tough start against the Dodgers. And he actually fared kind-of-okay, giving up 5 R (4 earned) over 5.1 IP against LA. And you had to feel good starting him against the Nats next time out and he got LIT UP. The he had another rough go against the Jays, before he settled back in.

After that run, from May 12 until June 25, he made 9 starts and posted 4.70 P/IP. Things looked good and if you are like me, you weren’t too worried about Milwaukee on July 1. But he threw another stinker, giving up 8 ER on 9 H and 3 BB over 5 IP, good for -5.70 points. Brutal.

The nice thing is things are easy on you for the moment. He gets the Dodgers next and there is no way I am risking that. Then he hits the All-Star break. But when he gets back, he should get either the Giants or Guardians at home in Pittsburgh and both of those are tempting.

For now, I am in wait-and-see mode with Oviedo. There are some really intriguing signs, but the season numbers are just a bit above replacement level. If you need pitching, he is an acceptable arm, but you have to play matchups and be okay with the risk that comes from a guy who has given up big games to the Nats (23rd in wRC+) and the Brewers (28th).

Each team shall during the regular season maintain a roster of 22 major-league players that can fill out a starting lineup as defined below. The remaining 18 roster spots can be used for reserves, consisting of both major and minor leaguers.

That is the text of the very first rule on the Ottoneu Rules page and it is also probably the most debated text passage in all of the Ottoneu universe. And yet, I am not sure we have ever discussed why it’s so hotly debated or what you can or should do about it. Today we address Rule 1a.

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Much like Hot Right Now, Cold Right Now will be a weekly Ottoneu feature with a focus on players who are being dropped or who maybe should be dropped in Ottoneu leagues. Hot Right Now will focus on players up for auction, players recently added, and players generally performing well. Cold Right Now will have parallel two of those three sections:

1. Roster Cuts: Analysis of players with high cut% changes.
2. Cold Performers: Players with a low P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

There won’t be a corresponding section to Current Auctions because, well, there is nothing in cuts that correspond to current auctions.

Roster Cuts

Louie Varland, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 24.36%

Varland is a Stuff+ All-Star, having posted great Minor League Stuff+ numbers and very good MLB Pitching+ numbers. The thing is, he’s also not very good. Through 82 MLB IP he has a 4.83 ERA and an even worse FIP. His xFIP and SIERA are stronger, but still not actually good. He has looked good in 41 Triple-A IP but not-so-good in 105 Double-A IP.

My take on Stuff+ is that it can be a very good early indicator if something is changing for a pitcher or if there is something positive going on that we aren’t seeing in the results. But at some point a bad pitcher with good Stuff+ is just a bad pitcher.

Varland is up to 228 innings between the high minors and the bigs and there it’s been up and down, at best. The limited innings in Triple-A have been great; the less limited (but still, to be fair, limited) innings in Double-A and MLB have not. It’s possible a breakout is coming, but I am not holding my breath.

With Varland sent back across town to St. Paul, plenty of managers are bailing and I can’t blame them. There are still hints of an exciting pitcher here, but if you are contending, you have to assume he won’t help you this year and either move on or, if you can, trade him.

John Schreiber, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 16.99%

Schreiber emerged as a legit bullpen piece last year and more or less picked up where he left off this year. Then in mid-May he hit the IL with a lat strain and he appeared in the May 22 Cold Right Now because, hey, injured reliever, time to move on! The cuts this week are either re-cuts from managers who were paying him more than $2 early in the year and are cutting back cap penalties now or managers who just finally gave up. He had been throwing as of three weeks ago, so you can imagine some managers were hoping to have him back by now.

This week, however, he was placed on the 60-day IL so he no longer takes up a roster spot. So if you still have him, unless you really need salary relief, you might as well sit on him and see what happens. If he’s a free agent in your league and you can pick him up for $1, I would consider it, as long as cap space isn’t an issue.

Seranthony Domínguez, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 16.3%

Dominguez, like Schreiber, is a reliever on the IL, and those are always easy cuts. He also hasn’t been pitching well. So if you did have him on your roster, this injury might be a blessing in disguise. Move on.

Gio Urshela, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 16.03%

Despite tanking in 2021, Urshela put up a .344 wOBA over his three seasons with the Yankees. He followed that up with a solid season in Minnesota (.332 wOBA) but has fallen hard again this year. The issue seems to be a continuation of a problem he has had since that last season in New York.

Urshela has never had a huge issue with strikeouts, nor has he ever been great at drawing walks, but he has flashed some solid exit velocities at times and in his big seasons in New York, hard contact drove him. But those have been trending down, and that trend turned ugly this year.

None of that looks particularly inspiring, does it? You can add one other data point to that. In his two best years in New York and his strong year with the Twins, his average launch angles were 13.5, 12.3 and 11.8. In his rough year as a Yankee his average launch angle was 7.5; this year it is 8.3.

He seems to have lost the ability to hit the ball hard and he isn’t elevating it much, at all, hitting a career-high 48.1% grounders.

Of course, the elephant in this section of the article is that Urshela suffered a season-ending injury, but leaving that for last wasn’t a mistake. Injured or not, Urshela had ceased to be a useful Ottoneu player. The injury just makes it that much easier to let him go.

Owen Miller, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 15.71%

On May 31, Lucas Kelly covered Miller in his Hot Right Now. Miller was being picked up across Ottoneu, with a hot performance driven by three things:

1. An improved K-rate. That has fallen off. Since May 31, he is striking out in more than 23% of plate appearances. When Lucas wrote him up, Miller had decreased his rate of strikeouts for two straight seasons, but if his current form continues, that won’t be true for long.
2. A sky-high BABIP. That has also fallen off. Since May 31, he has a .250 BABIP, which is a far cry from the .366 he sported before that date. That’s not a huge surprise – guys who don’t hit the ball hard (and Miller does not hit the ball hard) don’t typically sport elite BABIPs for long periods of time.
3. Excess playing time thanks to injuries to Willy Adames and Luis Urías. That has also fallen off. The Brewers have gotten healthy and Miller is back to being a bench bat.

None of this, by the way, is new for Miller. His hot streak in 2023 is just his second-best stretch dating back to last year and the explanation is pretty easy to see when you compare his rolling wOBA to his rolling BABIP.

This is pretty straightforward – you can help your wOBA with home runs, walks, or hits on balls in play. If you don’t walk much or hit for much power like, for example, Owen Miller, your wOBA is going to be very highly correlated to your BABIP. And you should note, that graph does not have two scales. His wOBA and his BABIP tend to be, more or less, the same. He has a career .293 BABIP and projects to have a BABIP between .295 and .307, depending on which line of his player page you look at. There is not a lot to get excited about here.

Cold Performers

To measure cold performers this week, I’m looking for players with low P/G or P/IP in the last 14 days.

Josh Donaldson, 0.55 P/G:

In his first two weeks off the IL, Donaldson smacked 5 HR and posted a 128 wRC+ that could have been much higher if not for a .053 BABIP (no, that is not a typo). The crazy thing is that .053 BABIP represents his best stretch of the season, as he has just a .051 BABIP on the year as a whole. Then he went 0-14 over his next four games. And then he stopped playing.

Friday he was a PH and went 0-1. Saturday and Sunday he didn’t play at all. This stretch culminated with Donaldson and manager Aaron Boone having a conversation Sunday and Boone saying Donaldson would be playing more. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time a manager said one thing and did another, but let’s take Boone at his word and assume Donaldson will be back in the lineup soon. Should he be back in our fantasy lineups?

I think the answer is probably yes. He has a 22.2% barrel rate this year. His His xwOBA (.355) is exactly .100 points higher than his wOBA (.255). That is the largest such gap for any player with 60+ PA this season. Donaldson has seen an increase in his strikeouts this year, but even that is trending the right direction as he has been better since coming back from injury and even better over the last couple of weeks.

There is no way that BABIP can continue to be so low. While the HR/FB rate will drop, as well, he is hitting the ball with authority and plays his home games at a little league field Yankee Stadium, which can only help. I think he is an interesting buy low and he is available in more than 85% of leagues.

Gary Sánchez, 1.92 P/G:

Sánchez joined the Padres on May 30 and for two weeks set the world on fire. For the last two weeks, however, he has kindly focused on lowering temperatures and undoing the damage he caused. His strikeout rate has bloomed to over 30% on the year. Sánchez is not hitting the ball as hard, he isn’t barrelling it much, and his propensity to swing and miss is well-known.

It is worth noting that the last few games have been better and everything we are looking at here is small sample sizes. He was hot for two weeks! He was cold for almost two weeks! He has been hot for like 3 days again!

I don’t see all the same signs with Sánchez that I did with Donaldson (he shares the same low BABIP, but the xwOBA and other Statcast indicators aren’t as exciting and his strikeout rate is heading the wrong direction). But he has one big advantage Donaldson doesn’t: he’s a C and the bar to being successful at C is low. He is also just CRUSHING lefties. A catcher who you can confidently start a couple of times per week facing a LH starter isn’t a bad thing to have on your roster.

Matt Strahm, 1.11 P/IP:

Strahm looked like a breakout for the Phillies earlier this year. Then they moved him to the pen and he was good, but not great. And now things are going off the rails. Strahm has given up 4 HR in his last 8 IP, and it is awfully hard to be a successful Ottoneu pitcher with that kind of HR rate.

While that early success was super exciting, it’s worth noting that he wasn’t really pitching to a better FIP than he had at many other times in his career.

Doing it as a starter instead of a reliever, made it special, but he isn’t a starter anymore. So what do you do with him? He has been cut in more than 40% of leagues over the last month and more managers should be moving on. He isn’t helping you and there really isn’t reason to believe he will. Even if he gets back into the rotation, I would expect regression from his relief numbers (consistent with most bullpen-to-rotation moves) and not a return to his early season success.

The 2023 version of Ottoneu Hot Right Now will include three different sections:

1. Current Auctions: A closer look at players being auctioned at a high rate.
2. Roster Adds: Analysis of players with high add% changes.
3. Hot Performers: Players with a high P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

The FanGraphs 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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We’re nearing the half-way point of the season and teams are aggressively buying and selling to set themselves up for titles (whether those titles are this year or in future years). Identifying trade targets is generally a league-by-league kind of thing, as buyers can only buy players sellers are selling, but you can find targets by looking at broader trends across leagues, as well.

Plus, as a buyer, you can’t always wait for someone to decide to sell – sometimes you need to be proactive and reach out and see if a team is ready to move a bat you need. Today, I am looking to identify hitter trade targets for buyers, by comparing players’ median salary to their 2023 points per game. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was inspired by Ezequiel Tovar. I was excited about Tovar before the season started. I wasn’t alone in that. But he started cold, his value tanks, and now I can’t get anything useful for him off my trade block in Ottoneu League 1.

But Tovar has quietly put up a strong first half. I am getting excited again! But if no one wants to acquire him from me, maybe his value is low and I should be buying. Which got me wondering if there were others like him – players whose overall lines look pretty bad, but have actually been quite good for most of the year. So I set out to find out.

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The 2023 version of Ottoneu Hot Right Now will include three different sections:

1. Current Auctions: A closer look at players being auctioned at a high rate.
2. Roster Adds: Analysis of players with high add% changes.
3. Hot Performers: Players with a high P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

The FanGraphs 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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A couple of weeks ago, I went through my league 1 roster and outlined who I might use to try to buy as I make a run for the top of the standings. Today, we’ll go the other direction, using my Keep or Kut Listener League team as inspiration for a deep dive into who you should sell, should you need to sell.

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Much like Hot Right Now, Cold Right Now will be a weekly Ottoneu feature, primarily written by either Chad Young or Lucas Kelly, with a focus on players who are being dropped or who maybe should be dropped in Ottoneu leagues. Hot Right Now will focus on players up for auction, players recently added, and players generally performing well. Cold Right Now will have parallel two of those three sections:

1. Roster Cuts: Analysis of players with high cut% changes.
2. Cold Performers: Players with a low P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

There won’t be a corresponding section to Current Auctions because, well, there is nothing in cuts that correspond to current auctions.

Read the rest of this entry »