In the (very, very early) Rotographs mockdraft on Sunday night, Bryce Harper went in the third round. Dustin Ackley went in the fourth. Neither of these players has a Major League track record – Harper doesn’t even have a strong track record in Double-A – yet they went before Matt Holliday or Ben Zobrist, both of whom have solid track records and seem quite likely to outperform the youngsters this year.

Now, this is a dynasty league draft, and clearly having that youth on your roster will pay off in future seasons. But the focus on youth in these drafts leaves some great values on the board much later than you’d expect.

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C.J. Wilson is headed from the 2011 American League Champs to the 2011 American League West Division Runners-up (somehow, I don’t think they will be raising that last banner in Anaheim any time soon). This has huge implications for the division – the Angels finished 10 games out in 2011, with Wilson producing a WAR of 5.9. Move those 6 wins off the Rangers and put even half of them on the Angels, and you have yourself an awfully tight race.

But there are rather large implications for fantasy owners, as well. Wilson’s ERA, WHIP, K, and Wins — the traditional Roto stats — will all be impacted by the move, as will stats like HR, 2B, 3B, and BB, which impact many leagues, including most ottoneu leagues. There are a few things a fantasy player should look at in evaluating this type of change, and Wilson to LAA presents a unique change where some of the changing factors are easier than normal to isolate. Of course most of you can probably predict that a move to Anaheim will help Wilson’s value, but that isn’t really the point — this is also a chance to look at how to evaluate the impact of a scenery change on a pitcher.

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The past couple weeks have been the start of hot stove season in the original ottoneu league, with not one, not two, but seven trades going down, involving seven owners and 21 players, some of whom changed teams multiple times.

Towards the end of the article, I will post a couple charts showing all the deals for any interested parties, but what was most intriguing was the approach taken by Gerbils on Speed. The Gerbils were involved in three of the seven deals and almost all of their moves were focused not on preparing for 2012, but on 2013.
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In Part I, I looked at the offense on my FanGraphs Experts League team using the new ottoneu Roster Organizer tool. Today, I’ll finish up by reviewing my pitching staff and seeing where my team sits heading into trade season.

The pitching discussion should be interesting – I have choices to make on a legit ace (Roy Halladay), a bounce back candidate (Ryan Dempster), and more.
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A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that one of the first things you need to do in the off-season is set your roster for the next year and figure out who you should or should not keep. I am getting ready to do just that for my FanGraphs Experts League team, and I get to do it using a fun new toy.

For the past few years, I have been doing this in Excel, but today ottoneu released a new tool that will help players look at their roster and make tough calls in the off-season. It’s called Roster Organizer and you can find it on your league home page. I’m going to use it to evaluate my team and, along the way, explain why some tough calls are going the way they are.
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I hate closers. Despise them. Maybe this is a result of being an Indians fan. Jose Mesa tricked me into thinking he was lights out, then imploded at the worst possible time (although we all know Tony Fernandez deserves more of the blame). Maybe it is the endless stream of closing mediocrity I have had to watch since then. But since you are reading this on Rotographs and not an Indians blog, you have probably guessed that this really stems from fantasy baseball.

Before I dive too deep, let me begin by saying that if you are playing in a traditional 5×5 league, you can probably ignore this. If your league counts Saves but not Holds, you probably should not hate closers. I finished 4th from the bottom in saves in the lone 5×5 I played last year, and that is not where you want to be. However, if you are not playing in a league that places an extraordinary value on saves, this may be for you. It is mostly written from the perspective of the ottoneu FanGraphs Points scoring, but applies to any league where holds and saves are relatively equal (or both worth nothing).
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Almost everyone who played in an ottoneu league got some upsetting news last week when arbitration results were posted. I, for one, was pretty unhappy to discover that Eric Hosmer was no longer on my FanGraphs Experts League team.

But I can take solace in the fact that I am far from alone, particularly when it comes to Hosmer – nearly 43% of Hosmer owners found themselves without their young first basemen as of November 1. And he isn’t the only player whose owners should be starting a support group.

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Most fantasy leagues are either already in or are headed to hibernation, but ottoneu, as those of you who played this year have already learned, is a little different. With arbitration voting behind us, we are onto the ottoneu hot stove season, and there are a few things you should know as you prepare for a 4 month period that will be surprisingly important to determining your 2012 league champion.

Some of what happens in the off-season is going to be similar to your other leagues – reviewing projections, putting together rankings, valuing players, preparing for the auction – but some of it will be quite different, and that is what I want to focus on here.
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My original intent for this highly anticipated (you were anticipating it, right?) sequel was to use the the findings from Part I to identify players who might have under- or over-performed in 2011, and I will still do that (feel free to skip the next five paragraphs if that is all you are looking for).

However, after posting part I, I got some great feedback, both in the comments and via email and decided to re-do some of the analysis, so I am going to start by recapping a couple of the changes I made and what I found.
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Back in September, Bill Petti at Beyond the Boxscore took a look at the year-to-year correlations of a set of hitting metrics. Some of the stats you’d expect had no year-to-year staying power (AVG, BABIP); some you would think are skill based turned out to vary greatly (Line Drive Rate); while some metrics proved to be remarkably consistent (Contact Rate, Swinging Strike Rate).

What jumped out to me was that First-Strike Rate had only a .56 year-to-year correlation for batters, while all of the stats I’d expect to directly impact First-Strike Rate (Swing Rate, Contact Rate, etc.) were quite consistent. First-pitch strikes make a huge difference in any at-bat, and the high year-to-year variation in this stat suggests that, over the course of a season, some hitters may have very good or very bad luck in this area. After looking at Petti’s analysis, I looked deeper into the phenomenon of F-Strike% and have three posts coming – starting with this one looking at my methodology and the basic information I found.

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