Bold prediction season is my favorite sub-season within draft season. Way ahead “we are drafting way too early season” and just barely edging out “prospect ranking season.” The worst sub-season within draft season is “pitchers and catchers reported two days ago and now every news alert is an injury” season. I hate that season.

But bold prediction season is the best. It brings out the absolute best of the baseball world. Everyone is putting a stake in the ground for the players they love. People are being wildly optimistic, because it is spring and it’s getting warmer out and the season hasn’t started yet so anything is possible. It just doesn’t get more fun than this.

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The FanGraphs Auction Calculator is an incredibly useful tool, that can model auction prices based on your preferred inputs (league settings, budgets, etc.) and assumptions (projection system). Like any model, the outputs of the Auction Calculator (AC) are neither inherently good or bad, but a reflection of those inputs and assumptions. If you get them right, you can export a spreadsheet that can drive your auction strategy; get them wrong and things get ugly.

Ottoneu players haven’t always viewed the Auction Calculator as an effective tool, but mostly that comes down to the challenge of finding the right settings. Today, we have updated the preset settings for Ottoneu on the Auction Calculator, making it easier to use and more effective for Ottoneu leagues. The preset settings might look a little odd, but they all serve a purpose.

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Ranking starting pitchers is probably harder than any other position. There are so many names to rank and there is so much to rank them on. Do you trust projections? Was that second half surge because of that new pitch? Or should we remember that correlation does not imply causation? And so I always struggle with this list. This year, I found the top of the list relatively straightforward, but really struggled with a huge swath of names from about 20-70.

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Every fantasy format plays a little differently and, as a result, every fantasy formats has a unique way to measure value. In points leagues, we tend to look at points per game (P/G). This seems logical enough. When you draft or add or trade for players and when you set your lineups, you want to pick the guys who will score the most points when they are in the lineup. So you try to max out P/G. Easy peasy.

Except P/G isn’t actually the right measure of player value. You do want a ratio with points scored in the numerator, but the “games” is the wrong denominator. The correct denominator depends on whether you have daily or weekly lineups, and that can have a real impact on who you target in drafts and who you plug into your lineup.

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This one always leads to a bunch of questions, since I typically drop util-only players into the 1B/Util list and those guys fall into three camps. There are the true util-only types. There are guys who we expect to earn eligibility elsewhere sometime soon. And then there is the camp of one: Shohei Ohtani.

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After getting started with middle infield last week, this week we move on to outfield. Why start with those two spots? Because they are huge lists and I want to get them done. Rock solid logic, there. Outfield is also an interesting position over the years, as it has varied between feeling deep and feeling shallow. This year, between the emergence of guys like Kyle Stowers, Tyler Soderstrom, Roman Anthony, and James Wood and the re-emergence of guys like George Springer and Cody Bellinger, it feels like it is trending back towards “deep” and that makes it a fun position to think about for auctions.

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This list might have caused me more consternation than any other (important note: I haven’t looked at SP yet and that one is always painful). There are question marks up and down the rankings and the number of players who look like they could be sure-fire, high-quality starters but could also be high-risk busts is really high. Is the position deep? Is it shallow? Is it going to be easy to find a third basemen or will we all be dreading lineup decisions by May?

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As we move into the final weeks before the keeper deadline, it’s time to get our Ottoneu rankings out. Over the next three plus weeks, you’ll get regular rankings articles from me and from Jake Mailhot, as discussed in my rankings preview in December. I will post my 4×4 tiered rankings position-by-position, and follow up that day or the next with rankings for FanGraphs Points league. On the 4×4 articles, I’ll give some overall thoughts on the position, while in the FanGraphs Points articles, I’ll offer thoughts on how the position looks different for 5×5 and Head-to-Head leagues. Jake’s FanGraphs points rankings will come out the day after my 4×4 rankings. We’re starting with middle infield.

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As we continue our race against time (gotta get these in before you need to make final cut decisions!), Jake and I will turn our attention to catcher today and tomorrow. Catcher has been a weird position the last few years. Traditionally a weak fantasy position, it has gotten a lot stronger. But every year around this time, I feel like it is deeper than ever and every September, I look back at a slew of disappointments. And yes, it is deeper than it used to be, but that doesn’t mean it is all that great.

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With the Ottoneu keeper deadline on January 31, it is possible for auctions for established leagues to start as soon as February 1. In practice, they rarely do, but there are a few auctions either underway (slow auctions taking some time to finish up) or completed, and that gives us a chance to learn quite a bit.

Earlier in the offseason, there were some mock auctions and some first-year auctions for new leagues, but those don’t behave like keeper auctions. Now that we have a few keeper auctions, we can start to get a sense of how your keeper drafts – whether they are Ottoneu auctions or drafts in another format – might behave.

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