As we come down to the final weeks of the season, auctions shift from being primarily about this year to, at least for some teams, a full-on 2023 focus. That makes the bidding less straight-forward and for some of the players being auctioned right now, contenders and rebuilders will have very different values.
If you haven’t seen it, in 2023 there will be a change to how Ottoneu treats two-way players. You should read that post, but the summary is this: if you have a two-way player who is both hitting and pitching on the same day, you will have the option to use that player that day as a hitter, as a pitcher or both. And this has implications for the Ottoneu value of Shohei Ohtani.
With the Ottoneu trade deadline a week away, buyers are running low on time to find the pieces that can swing a league in their favor. Finding the right players to buy usually comes down to “the most expensive players on the worst teams” but there are a few players I am very specifically targeting to buy this year.
It has been a few weeks since we have done one of these, but there are some fun names up for auction right now, so let’s take a look. There are four players with more than 25 live auctions as I write, all of them young, talented, and exciting.
The key currency for bats in Ottoneu is points per game (P/G). You have 162 games to fill at each position and you need to maximize the points you get from those 162 games. Total points and points per plate appearance have their value, but at the end of the day, filling 162 games with the highest P/G you can will maximize your team’s score.
But there is a caveat: since most managers bench players on days they don’t start, points per game started (P/GS) is what really matters. When you go to the Ottoneu search and look at free agents or when you consider a trade offer and look at a player page, you see points per game, but that isn’t telling the entire story.
Ever since the opener became a thing in MLB, I have been wondering if I should be aggressively targeting openers among my RP corps in Ottoneu. I typically like to carry 6-8 RP on a roster, and having the option to extend my bullpen by locking in an opener on occasion seems like a nice way to get some extra pen innings. But opener innings aren’t exactly relief innings. Yes, they are pitched by relievers, and they are short-burst outings like relief appearances, but they don’t offer any hope of a save or hold, and they are often not as short-burst as they would be from the pen.
With the Ottoneu Prestige League knockout rounds starting today, OPL is now a spectator sport for all but the 27 players who manage or co-manage at least one of the 32 remaining teams. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good data or lessons to be learned from what those teams are doing. And looking at changes made to those rosters might help the rest of the Ottoneu world make smarter choices starting as soon as today.
With the Ottoneu Prestige League about to hit the knockout rounds, there are about 40 teams still scrambling to figure out what to do ahead of the final OPL snap for the season. There are another 200 teams wondering what went wrong this year and thinking about next year. And perhaps there are many other managers looking forward to their first foray into OPL in 2023 and wondering how to prep.
One of the most debated topics among OPL managers is what changes to make ahead of each snapshot – do I bail on this injured player? Do I hold this prospect? Should I drop this underperforming player? I want to look into some of these questions over the next few weeks and into the off-season, but today we’ll start with a quantitative question: how much should my team turn over round-to-round?
I thought about making this a special Joey Gallo edition of Cold Right now. Gallo has been cut in 11.75% of leagues over the last week and in nearly a quarter of leagues over the last month. And while there are some other players who have been cut more, none offer the potential of league-altering production the way Gallo does. But rather than focus on just Gallo, I want to take a quick look at some other names before figuring out what to make of Gallo.
Ottoneu never rests, even for holiday weekends, and extra time off often serves as an opportunity to catch up on cleaning up rosters, filling gaps in the lineup, or just making interesting trades and pickups. As we wrap up 4th of July weekend, there are five players who are up for auction in 25 or more leagues.