You often hear fantasy analysts discuss the shares they have of a particular player, reducing them to the fantasy baseball equivalent of a financial instrument. The benefit of being in as many leagues as I am is that I can try to diversify my portfolio- owning at least one share of as many players that I like as possible, while limiting my risk of overexposure to any one hitter or pitcher. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the players I own the most shares in across the ten ottoneu leagues that have already completed their auction drafts. These names represent the intersection of players I believe are primed for big seasons along with an auction price that I felt offered a good discount.

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1) Travis d’Arnaud will be a top-3 catcher in all formats

This prediction relies on d’Arnaud being healthy this season, but if he is I think we could see 25 home runs with 70+ runs and RBI with a .270 average. In 268 plate appearances last season d’Arnaud had a .355 wOBA, not far behind what Kyle Schwarber did (.364 wOBA) in his 273 plate appearances.

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Episode 3 of OttoGraphs is here and we have a special guest- Chris Mitchell, creator of KATOH! We discuss the development of KATOH and the types of players the prospect model prefers, and Chris was also gracious enough to answer some questions we had about some specific prospects including Alex Verdugo, Clayton Blackburn, Blake Snell, and Joey Gallo.

Feel free to comment with any questions or suggestions you may have about this episode or future topics, and we can be reached individually on Twitter:

@OttoneuTrades

@JustinVibber

@TomHasOpinions

@Fazeorange

Lastly, special thanks to Treemen who provided our intro and outro music. If you like what you hear, please check out their other work at http://treemen.bandcamp.com/

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For our second episode we discuss ottoneu auction tips and strategies.

Feel free to comment with any questions or suggestions you may have about this episode or future topics, and we can be reached individually on Twitter:

@OttoneuTrades

@JustinVibber

@TomHasOpinions

@Fazeorange

Lastly, special thanks to Treemen who provided our intro and outro music. If you like what you hear, please check out their other work at http://treemen.bandcamp.com/

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Episode 1 of “OttoGraphs”, the ottoneu-centric fantasy baseball podcast, is here! This weekly (or possibly more frequent) podcast will cover all things ottoneu, from auction strategy, valuation tools, in season tips/tricks, and offseason trade/keeper strategy.

The first segment of this episode serves as our introduction, and touches briefly on what the four of us (Joe, Justin, Tom, and Trey) love about ottoneu and how we got our start with it.

We apologize in advance for the untimely nature of our second segment’s content, but even though the Keeper deadline in ottoneu has come and gone we thought it would still be instructive to keep this segment away from the cutting room floor.

Feel free to comment with any questions or suggestions you may have about this episode or future topics, and we can be reached individually on Twitter:

@OttoneuTrades

@JustinVibber

@TomHasOpinions

@Fazeorange

Lastly, special thanks to Treemen who provided our intro and outro music. If you like what you hear, please check out their other work at http://treemen.bandcamp.com/

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The answer to the question posed in the headline is yes, but with some caveats. Last month I wrote about the Ottoneu Surplus Calculator, and one of the takeaways at the end of that article was that post-keeper deadline the calculator could be used to calculate inflation. What I’ve done is gone through every Fangraphs Points league in ottoneu and ran those leagues through the Surplus Calculator to gather data on keepers and inflation, in an attempt to get a general sense of how auction keeper leagues (like ottoneu) evolve over time with respect to inflation. Before I present that data, though, I want to explain what inflation is and why you should care about it.

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As mentioned last week, ottoneu is a deep fantasy game that comes in a variety of formats (5×5, 4×4, and two flavors of linear weights based total points), but one thing that all ottoneu leagues share is the $400 salary cap and keeper process. While ottoneu may not be a dynasty league in the literal sense, it does function as a very flexible auction keeper league, where the only limit on how many keepers a team can have is the need to stay under the salary cap and 40 man roster limits.

History of the Surplus Calculator

Even before I started playing ottoneu, there was a process I went through for every auction keeper league I was in. With every team in the league entering the auction with keepers that theoretically are worth more than their salary, I wanted a way to compare my keepers against my competition. In order to do that I would go through each team’s roster and determine the players I expected to be kept, and using dollar values I created for the league I could tally each team’s projected keeper salary and keeper value. Ranking teams by how much surplus (total keeper value less total keeper salaries) they had would allow me to identify who had the best selection of keepers, and therefore went into auction with the best chance to build a strong team.

As I played in more and more ottoneu leagues, I quickly realized that I needed a way to automate my keeper ranking process, and that automation is what led to the creation of the ottoneu Surplus Calculator. Ottoneu is uniquely suited to making this calculator easy for everyone to use, as ottoneu owners can go to their league page and download a rosters.csv file that includes their entire league rosters by team that includes salary info and Fangraphs IDs. Having that exported roster file means not having to manually assign players to teams, and makes tying the player values to the rosters a simple matter of a vlookup function.

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