After two straight first place finishes, I landed in second in the FanGraphs Staff League last year, and went into the off-season dead-set on regaining my crown.
I made a few trades, made my cuts and sat down to look at the available free agents…and was stopped in my tracks. I really had no good options.
With the cut deadline behind us, now is the time to start prepping for your auctions. One thing to do is identify your targets, but another is to suss out the competition. Who has cash to spend? How much? Who is building a new roster and who is filling just a couple holes?
I started by taking a broad look at my three leagues to see how much cash was kept and I was intrigued to see how different the three auctions are set to play out.
The keeper deadline for ottoneu leagues is upon us (midnight on the night of 1/31 – tonight!), and that means it is time to start auction prep in earnest. As I have the past two years, I am going to help out with my auction values for all four ottoneu formats.
Also as per usual, I made a couple tweaks to the approach this year.
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Last week, I started a review of the players I am targeting to acquire and trade away, going position by position through the infield.
Today we look 12 more players – outfielders and starting pitchers who will factor heavily in my trade talks.
The ottoneu off-season is well underway and I know many leagues have been wildly active, making the Padres and Dodgers look dull in comparison.
My leagues, however, have had slow developing trade markets, so rather than being able to report on what I’ve done, I am instead going to provide a list of players, by position, who I am targeting (or would be, if I had a need) in trade talks. For good measure, I’ll add in a player I am trying to trade away, too (or would be, if I owned him). We’ll hit the infield today and I will follow up with the OF and pitchers.
We’re almost half-way through ottoneu arbitration and, at least across my leagues, some patterns are forming. A Cleveland pitcher and two Chicago first basemen are proving to be the most targeted players.
That probably is not much of a surprise, but does it make sense? And who else is near the top of that list?
Arbitration allocations and voting off players in ottoneu leagues start this Wednesday. Brad Johnson and I have both shared guides to the process in the past (both for arbitration allocations and vote offs), but this year I want to focus on one point.
Prospects. Every year I touch on this briefly and every year a couple prospects are among the most allocated-to. So this year, I want to explore allocations to prospects/rookies a bit deeper.
So “Yan” and “man” don’t actually rhyme, which makes the title less fun, but has nothing to do with its accuracy. Maybe it’s because I am an Indians fan and see him play almost daily, but I spent much of the last two years wondering why Yan Gomes wasn’t getting more love from the fantasy community. You have to look no further than these very pages, where Gomes was mentioned for fantasy purposes all of twice in 2014.
The first time it was because Brett Talley was covering the Cleveland infield and Gomes was listed there only as a sleeper (and likely only because you can’t just ignore a team’s starting catcher in talking about their infield). The second was when Nicholas Minnix noted, in September, that Gomes was a top five fantasy asset at his position. By the end of the season, he was top four.
I never enjoy this. Every March, we make our Ten Bold Predictions and when predictions are bold, the process of analyzing the results tends to be rather humbling.
But not this year. Well, not really, anyway. I knew I had some stinkers in there (wait’ll you see #10), but I also knew I made some strong bets. And I thought maybe – just maybe – I could make a run at .500. We’ll have to see.
With the trade deadline passed in ottoneu, the only way to improve your roster – for now or the future – through free agent auctions and waiver claims, which means cutting players, rather than trading them. In some cases, this is easy. That $37 Allen Craig you picked up at auction last spring, expecting a bounce back (one which I, myself, expected) is probably not hard to cut loose right now.
But what about the overpriced stars you plan to cut in the off-season but who are still productive? The problem here is that while a $60 Giancarlo Stanton might not be worth a keeping at $62 next year, if you cut him, another owner can start an auction and someone could end up paying him as little as $32 next year.