To paraphrase (horribly butcher?) A Tale of Two Cities, prospects are the best of times and the worst of times for ottoneu owners. At least based on the number of questions I get about them.

The joy of ottoneu is you can sign that Double-A SS with the big bat and hope he develops into a star. The problem is how to find the right prospect. For every Mike Trout, there is an Andy Marte. Actually, for every Trout, there are about a billion Marte’s. And the chances are you, like me, are not a prospect evaluator, which makes it awfully hard to tell the difference.

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Over the next few weeks, my goal is going to be to do my best to help prepare you for the upcoming ottoneu auctions. But today, with the keeper deadline still fresh on all of our minds (I will have nightmares if Matt Moore strikes out everyone in sight this year…), I thought I’d stop and take a look at where we are today.

As of Friday night at midnight ET, every team in the ottoneu universe is (or at least should be) down to 40 or fewer players on the roster and $400 or less in salary spent, and that gives us a chance to see who all of you deemed worthy of keeping.

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The clock is ticking ever closer to the ottoneu keeper deadline and you now have less than a week to make your final cuts. By the end of the day (midnight ET) on January 31, your rosters need to be at or below 40 players and you have to have at least $1 in cap space for every open roster spot.

I know I am still making some hard choices – should I trade a $14 Jason Kipnis for a $32 Paul Goldschmidt? Which of my five $20+ pitchers and three $30+ OF should I keep? – and that is just in one league. So I thought I would take a look at those choices and hope that it can help you make your last cuts, as well.

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Smarter minds than mine have addressed the Indians experimenting with Carlos Santana at 3B, but those minds have looked at things like “defense” and “what the Indians need” and “does this make any sense at all.”

But you and I, we are fantasy players and care not for defensive deficiencies or displaced utility infielders. What we care about is whether or not Carlos Santana playing 3B impacts his fantasy value.

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The Alex Rodriguez news will send a lot of fantasy owners scrambling for a new 3B, but it has other implications on the Yankees infield that may present an opportunity for savvy fantasy owners.

Brad Johnson looked at what the A-Rod suspension means for the Yankees yesterday. Not long thereafter, New York added Scott Sizemore and Ken Rosenthal reported that the Yanks are unlikely to add another MLB IF, which means the in-house options Johnson considered – along with Sizemore – are basically the only options in the Bronx.

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Patrick Corbin has been a regular topic of thought and conversation for me the past few weeks, which tells you one thing about me – that I maybe think and talk about baseball more than I should – and another about him – that there is considerable reason to discuss him. Both are true.

First, Brad Johnson projected a wide range of values for Corbin and offered his expectation that Corbin would fall near the bottom of that range. Then, I had a long (for Twitter) conversation about him on Twitter. Michael Salfino asked why Corbin was so underrated; I suggested that his K/9 might be the problem, Eno Sarris pointed out a scary platoon split, and now I am here to tell you not to be worried about either.

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I spend a lot of time analyzing baseball, but sometimes you need to take a step back and analyze yourself. With New Year’s Eve coming up fast, now is just one of those times.

Between January 1, 2013 and the end of the regular season, I offered a lot of advice in my articles here on RotoGraphs, and thought I’d take a look back at each measurable piece of advice and grade myself.

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I am getting ready to take part in my first weekly-lineup fantasy baseball league. I’ve done this for fantasy football (which I suppose goes without saying) and for fantasy basketball (back in high school when the “find the guy playing five games this week” strategy seemed novel), but never for baseball.

As I try to build a team, I am realizing that I need to completely shift the way I value opportunity.

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A few weeks back, I wrote a piece on taking over a team from another owner, inspired by a new team I had acquired in a 20 team, 45-man-roster 5×5 (OBP, not AVG) league. In that piece, I mentioned three trades I made, moving five pieces and acquiring six.

Since then, I have made two more trades and wanted to take a quick look at how far my roster has come in the two months since I took ownership. I am not ready to calling it a winning (or even better) team, but it is certainly different and is starting to show the values of the new owner.

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The holidays are upon us, and while there is plenty of serious business to discuss, it’s also time to sit back, relax, and have some fun. So this week I thought I would try to answer (or at least glance at) a question I’ve wondered for years – what would happen if Major League Baseball scored the AL and NL like fantasy leagues instead of looking at something silly like “winning percentage?”

The question you are asking yourself right now is probably, “He has really wondered this for years?!” but once you get over your shock and my nerdiness, you’ll want to know why I have been wondering this. When we created ottoneu, one of the things we wanted to do was closely replicate the job of a real GM and that meant, in part, picking a scoring system that reflected what really drives teams to win games or lose them. But, of course, we are still just counting stats. If a player only hits his HR in blow outs, you as a fantasy owner do not care, and the chances are this has little or nothing to do with the player’s value, but it certainly could impact his teams post-season chances. So what happens if we just look at the numbers put up by the real teams?

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