It seems like just yesterday we were talking small sample sizes and trying not to panic about our fantasy teams sitting in 9th place. Or some of us were assuming our early season success was a mirage, masking what was sure to be a brutal year. But now we are coming up on the quarter pole, and it’s no longer time to make cheap excuses.

For ottoneu owners, it is time to evaluate our teams, identify our weaknesses, figure out where we have depth, and decide if this is the year to make a move.

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I spent the last nine days in a baseball-less haze, wandering the fjords of Norway and promising my wife (as those of us with significant others have to do from time to time) that fantasy baseball would not interrupt our vacation the way it does many (okay, okay…all) of our other nights. Sadly, the commissioners of my leagues did not agree to my recommended “everyone takes a hiatus and stats don’t count this week because Chad is out of the country” rule.

Baseball is Summer and Summer is a heavy time for vacationing, which means that most owners will, at some point, have to go a few days without maniacally checking their rosters on a daily basis. How do you go about doing this without suffering a free fall in the standings?

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At the end of the night on April 23, I pulled down all of the standings for all of the ottoneu points leagues that had a full complement of 12 active teams. This being my first year playing in a points league, I wanted to know how my (at the time) third place team stacked up against the rest of the teams out there.

Was my 1,813.4 points a solid number that deserved to be in third? Would my 5.3 points per game and 4.7 points per inning hold up against stiff competition? I still not sure I have clear answers, but at least I have some additional data.

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Last week I provided some notes on a series of players who were most recently added to ottoneu rosters. The methodology was far from scientific (I watched that little scroll bar that lists recent adds on the ottoneu landing page and took notes). This week, we take a step towards the quantifiable and take a look at a better representation of who is hot in the world of ottoneu.

The list below shows the 11 players who are being auctioned in at least five ottoneu leagues as we speak (and by as we speak, I mean “as I type, at approximately 12:15 a.m. ET, eight hours before this thing appears on RotoGraphs”). Among these players, five have been covered by my colleagues in the past few days, so I will focus on those who have escaped our attention, although they have clearly gotten yours.

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Every time I log into ottoneu, I check out that little scroll on the home page. You know the one – right at the top, above your teams, below the player search. This banner shows a constant update on the latest players added across all ottoneu leagues and is one of my favorite ottoneu features. It’s like an instant update on who’s hot right now. Or, I guess, who was hot 48 hours ago when these auctions were started.

Well, we are always telling you who is un-owned in most leagues, but today I am going to look at the most recent additions in ottoneu and see who is being added, why, and who you should be targeting. Some of these guys may still be up for auction in your leagues as we speak.

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Six games into the 2012 season, Kyle Seager has a .333/.360/.417 line and is owned in approximately 40% of ottoneu leagues. And that rate is dropping.

Seager is playing every day right now, but with Mike Carp on the verge of a rehab assignment and Franklin Gutierrez on his way back, the Mariners outfield is about to get awfully crowded, which will push the resurgent Chone Figgins back to third, and Seager to…probably the bench. On top of that, his bat probably isn’t good enough to play everyday at 3B. But I am not ready to sell.

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Last year, Eno Sarris gathered a group of fantasy experts from around the internets and formed the FanGraphs Experts league – an ottoneu league using traditional 5×5 roto scoring – pitting some of the best fantasy minds around (and me) against each other in a battle royale.

This year, we resume the battle.

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As a long-time ottoneu player, I have come to realize that the traditional waiver wire columns are great for leagues with 23-27 man rosters, but don’t quite hold up when you teams all go 40-deep. So from time to time this year, I will try to offer up names of players who are free agents in more than 90% of ottoneu leagues, but are worth keeping an eye on.

To differentiate from waivers, I’ll call them Watchlist Wonders — guys who are worth adding to your ottoneu watchlist and, depending on your team needs, worth starting an auction for.

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For the greater good, I try not to recap every fantasy trade I make. First of all, most of you probably don’t care about every trade I make. Second, I really like making trades (seriously, tweet @ottoneu and ask about Chad’s trades, Niv will tell you all about it), and so I would end up writing nothing but trade recap posts.

But once in a while, a trade happens that I think is worthy of a recap. And in my first trade in the new ottoneu FanGraphs Staff League, I believe I have made one of those recap-worthy trades: Pablo Sandoval and Hong-Chih Kuo for Matt Thornton and Paul Goldschmidt.

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It takes a special kind of overly-obsessed fantasy player to worry deeply about what to do with marginal players over two games in late March before 28 teams have even played a real game. I mean, there are 2,430 games in a season. Two early season games account for a solid 0.08% of the MLB season.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that this morning I found myself wondering, “What do I do with Mike Carp in Japan?!” And I figured if this is keeping me awake at night, I can’t be the only one.

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