Last week, we received our first set of 2013 projections, and Jeff Zimmerman presented 5×5 rankings based on three cuts of that data.
By now, many of you have probably noticed a pattern forming this off-season – 5×5 rankings come out, and Chad follows with the ottoneu edition. Sure enough, here three cuts of linear weights points rankings of the top 20 hitters for 2013, based on the Bill James Handbook Projections.
After a brief Holiday respite, Zach Sanders continued his end-of-season positional rankings by posting his OF rankings on Monday. With far more players than at any other position (103 players qualified for the OF rankings) the differences between where a player falls in 5×5 vs. linear weights can be more drastic.
In fact, instead of talking a few spots here or there, there were six players who “fell” at least 20 spots when we shifted to linear weights, and six who “rose” at least 20. We’ll see a couple old friends on this list and once again OBP and SB go a long way towards explaining the differences.
A few weeks back, the RotoGraphs staff covered the RotoGraphs Fantasy Awards, our look back at 2012 and a chance to recognize the guys who made or broke your fantasy season by being really good (or really bad) or by being really good and then being really bad (or being really bad and then being really good). When we voted, I think everyone looked at 2012 in a vacuum, focusing on price and production, but I would also guess that almost all the voters were in the mindset of a traditional 5×5 league when they voted.
Well, I wouldn’t be the ottoneu guy if I did that! Instead, I based my votes on the unique world that is the ottoneu FanGraphs Points format and, as a result, often found myself voting against the grain.
Catcher is a bit of an odd position in fantasy. Very few players accrue enough PA to be full-time starters – only three cracked 600 and only eight more broke 500, meaning that in a 12 team league, every team needs a legit backup and at least one team is going to run a full-fledged platoon.
So with a 350 PA cut-off on Zach Sanders’s end of season rankings, it should come as no surprise that six of the top 30 ottoneu catchers didn’t even crack the 5×5 rankings. It makes it a bit more difficult to identify ottoneu’s feelings on players, as some guys “fall” in the rankings only because a player who did not qualify in 5×5 made some noise in linear weights. But we can identify some studs and some duds.
It turns out, I maybe should have done a MI Edition instead of both a SS and 2B Edition of this series. Of course, I didn’t know that until Zach Sanders posted his 5×5 SS rankings and I found that a couple of flames from a couple weeks back were reappearing in ottoneu’s little black book this week.
Ben Zobrist and Martin Prado, both of whom were covered in the 2B Edition were two of the five biggest SS climbers when you leave 5×5 and move to linear weights. And Everth Cabrera, who warranted but a brief mention in the 2B piece was the farthest faller at SS. But four of Sanders’s top 10 made meaningful moves when we switch the scoring format.
The past couple weeks, we have seen a few players that ottoneu and other linear weights formats feel very differently about than the traditional 5×5 format. This week…not so much. Third base appears to be a position where ottoneu, in general, doesn’t have too many problems with Zach Sanders’s end of season rankings.
In fact, the top six in Zach’s rankings were the top six in ottoneu points. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few players who stand out.
In last week’s edition, we saw a couple first basemen who made pretty large jumps when we looked at them through the prism of ottoneu, rather than Zach Sanders’s rankings. Well, ottoneu doesn’t love any second basemen as much as it loves Joey Votto and Paul Konerko, who were ranked 11 and 7 spots higher in ottoneu points than they were in the 5×5 rankings.
In fact, when Sanders posted his 2B rankings yesterday, I was surprised to see that no one was ranked more than five spots lower in 5×5 than in ottoneu, with only a couple relevant players ranked even six spots higher. But a couple of players moved from borderline top-10 to the top-4, while two others dropped from 4th and 6th to 10th and 12th.
ottoneu is now officially ready to provide you with something baseball-related to do on post-season off-days or less-than-tense games. You may have noticed in the last 24 hours or so that ottoneu arbitration has begun. Every league homepage has an arbitration tab (some say “Arbitration Allocations” and some say “Arbitration Voting”) and owners are now free to go in and allocate or vote.
I’ve provided some details on these processes in the past (an outline of the new allocation rules, strategies for arbitration voting, a look at the process I used to determine my votes), but there are two things I haven’t covered yet: How the Arbitration Allocations tool works and strategies for how to handle your allocations.
Bright and early Monday morning, Zach Sanders dropped the first of his End of Season Rankings, looking at how first basemen fared during the 2012 fantasy season. The rankings are based on what actually happened on the field and use the traditional 5×5 roto categories to establish values for the production of each player.
While some of you ottoneuvians are playing a 5×5 format, many more are using the FanGraphs Points scoring system, and that type of linear weights scoring (as well as other OBP-based systems, particularly those that lower the weight on stolen bases) does not always value the same players that 5×5 leagues do. So each week, after Zach posts his rankings, I will follow with a look at where ottoneu FanGraphs Points rankings differed.
I was feeling pretty good about the 17,377.6 points my She’s Just Not that Shin-Soo Choo squad put up to win the FanGraphs Staff League, especially after predicting that a strong finish would carry my team to the top of the table.
And then I started looking around at other leagues and saw many champs up over 18K or even 19K (no one over 20K so far as I have seen) and it got me wondering – if an owner REALLY played their cards right, what was the best team money could buy?
