It’s an annual tradition to sit down to write this and feel like every prediction is either too bold or not bold enough, at which point I adjust them all and then they flip – the “too bolds” becoming too tepid and vice versa. This year I am just sticking to my initial predictions and living with the consequences. So enjoy my ten bold predictions – and feel free to share more in the comments!
This is the third installment of this annual Ottoneu tradition. In 2021, I broke the 12 players I rostered most into six buckets of types of players I look for. In 2022, I covered the five players I rostered in more than half of my Ottoneu leagues. This year will look more like last year – the 2021 piece still basically holds true, even if the names have changed, so no need to rehash it.
I’ve been vocal about this in the past and I’ve been asked to explain why I am so adamant about not price enforcing. The simple reason is because the risk isn’t worth the reward. But I can offer more detail than that.
Sometimes in this game of ours, you make a mistake and it comes back to bite you almost immediately. The pitcher you should have benched who gives up a first-inning HR. The trade you make for the injury-prone pitcher who hits the IL the next day.
Sometimes, however, those mistakes are a slower boil, taking their time to show you what you did wrong. This is a story of one of that kind of mistake – with the advice that you just can’t worry about it.
On Tuesday, just hours before I dove into the auction for league 1199, I laid out the challenge I faced for the brilliant minds that read this site, and promised to return with news of how things played out. This is my foretold return.
This post won’t be long. And it has more questions than answers. But it’s the most immediately relevant thing I have ever written (at least to me). What do you do in auction where you have a choice between getting a star or building a balanced team and you can’t realistically do both?
Today, Ottoneu launched the 2023 edition of the Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL), a best-ball, overall competition open only to teams that finished top-six in their league in 2022. It has become one of my favorite aspects of Ottoneu, with unique rules that create a nice challenge for balancing competing in your “home league” and fighting through to the playoffs in OPL.
If you have an eligible team, I recommend joining, but I’m not here to convince you to join (you should join). I am here to complain about trade-offs.
Last week, after powering through two live auctions and starting a slow one, I wrote about the differences between the two approaches to auctions, focusing on how they are structurally different. I also promised to come back with more about strategy in both formats. And here I am!
It’s Ottoneu auction season, and while most auctions won’t happen for a few weeks, there are plenty of leagues auctioning right now. I have already finished one auction and I am in the middle of a second as I sit here writing. How am I writing while mid-auction? Am I the world’s best multi-tasker?
No. I am in the middle of a slow auction. And this has me thinking about something that is important in Ottoneu but not specific to Ottoneu: the differences between slow and fast auctions.
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Last night was the auction for the FanGraphs Staff League, going into year 13 and still going strong. My recap will focus on how things went for me and my co-manager, Niv Shah, who built and runs Ottoneu. The goal is to share a lesson you can learn from us so you don’t the mistake we did. But if you want to see the full draft, you can! Eli Ben-Porat streamed the auction, so you can see how this played out live.