While the 2023 season is still months away, planning for your 2023 Ottoneu season is well underway. On the Ottoneu community forums, you should check out Niv Shah’s “End of Season Megathread,” which is really an off-season megathread and includes updates on what is coming, when it is coming and more.

Now that you have read that thread (you read it, right?), you’ve noticed that a number of things have already happened, including positional eligibility updates. And that has implications on your off-season planning.

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Writing my ten bold predictions is one of my favorite things to do each season. Be bold! Be wild! Stake a claim and go out on a limb!

But then, October rolls around, and you have to reap what you sow. Today, I reap.

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With just six days left in the regular season, it’s probably too late to make too many moves in your Ottoneu leagues. You can still pick up a bat to fill in some games, maybe grab a starting pitcher or two to help max out your IP, but for the most the die is cast and you are just waiting to see how it turns up.

But how much can the standings really move in the final week? How much ground can be made up?

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Using Injured List spots is a key part of any fantasy league. Knowing who to stash, when to stash them, how long to wait can have a huge impact on your season. For Ottoneu leagues, like with MLB, the 10- and 15-day IL designations don’t impact roster construction. Those players count against your 40-man cap. The 60-day IL, however, does not count against your roster and that gives you an opportunity to carry more than 40 players at times.

As the season winds down, there is an opportunity to use that to improve your roster depth headed into the off-season.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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