The Ottoneu keeper deadline is quickly approaching. There’s about a month and a half left to make your roster decisions before the January 31 cut deadline. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going through a handful of difficult keep or cut decisions at every position group. I’ll start with the four infield positions this week and move on to the outfield and pitchers next week.

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Bryce Harper, 1B
Salary: $49, $42
Average Salary: $45
2025 P/G: 6.25
Projected 2026 P/G: 6.45

While Bryce Harper probably isn’t going to hit like he’s one of the top 5 batters in baseball again, he’s still extremely productive as he enters his age-33 season in 2026. A wrist injury in June cost him about a month of the ‘25 season and he’s averaged a little under 130 games played per season over the last five years. While he might not be an iron man, he’s been productive while he’s on the field, putting up a 146 wRC+ during that same five year period. His batted ball peripherals all looked in line with his career norms; his 47.5% hard hit rate and 12.3% barrel rate both look good and his .368 xwOBA was right in line with his actual results on the field.

While his strikeout and walk rates look good on the surface, there are a few yellow flags in his underlying plate discipline stats. His chase rate has significantly jumped over the last few years and it was up to 36.0% in 2025, the second highest mark of his career. He’s being forced to hunt for pitches out of the zone because pitchers simply refuse to give him anything to hit. Since winning his MVP award in 2021, he’s seen the fewest pitches in the strike zone of any batter in baseball by a pretty wide margin. This year, his zone rate was just 42.9%, the lowest in the majors and three points lower than the guy right ahead of him.

Steamer is predicting a bit of a bounce back season for Harper in 2026, though it’s mostly fueled by a jump in BABIP. He’s at the age where power starts waning a bit and the projections see him essentially holding his power numbers steady next year. I guess that’s what worries me. Harper has already slipped a bit from his peak and he’s not getting any younger (no matter how many weird blood procedures he wants to try). If you’re paying a premium in the hopes that he’ll get back to his MVP caliber seasons, you’re likely going to be disappointed.

Keep or cut?

I think Harper’s current average salary of $45 is reasonable for the projected production you’re hoping to get from him in 2026. Like with any aging slugger, there’s some risk involved in paying that much for the downslope of a career. I’m keeping at $42 and I’m shopping my $49 Harper, hoping to pass the buck for that decision to someone else.

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Willson Contreras, 1B
Salary: $15, $14
Average Salary: $14
2025 P/G: 5.24
Projected 2026 P/G: 5.14

Now that Willson Contreras finally lost his catcher eligibility, he’s lost a ton of his fantasy value. A catcher who can put up 5.2 P/G is quite useful — just six other catchers surpassed that mark in 2025 — but a 5.2 P/G first baseman is quite another matter. Fifteen other first basemen surpassed that mark this year and eighteen are projected to be better than that in 2026. Instead of being a top tier option at catcher, Contreras is now a third or fourth tier option at first base.

To be fair, his batted ball peripherals all looked good during his first full season out from behind the plate. The biggest reason why his overall value took a hit in 2025 was because his walk rate dropped nearly five points, down to 7.8%. There was nothing amiss in his underlying plate discipline metrics; his chase rate, contact rate, and swing rates all looked normal. The biggest difference, then, was a higher rate of pitches seen in the zone — the highest zone rate of his career — and a corresponding increase in called strikes seen.

Steamer sees a bounce back in walk rate next year, but his BABIP takes a hit, leading to an overall projection a little worse than what he accomplished in 2025. I don’t have any qualms with the projection — it seems like it’s pretty reasonable — so my issue is with his positional eligibility. Right now, I’ve got him ranked in the same tier as Kyle Manzardo, Spencer Torkelson, and Christian Walker. Each of those players is useful in their own way, but I wouldn’t be comfortable with any of them as my primary first baseman in 2026.

Keep or cut?

I’m cutting both of my shares of Contreras. Paying up to $10 for him in next year’s auction is probably reasonable, but getting up to the mid-teens seems like an overpay.

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Alec Bohm, 1B/3B
Salary: $11, $9
Average Salary: $11
2025 P/G: 4.66
Projected 2026 P/G: 4.90

An abysmal first month of the season is bringing down Alec Bohm’s overall numbers from 2025. From May 1 through the end of the season, he posted a .308/.356/.453 slash line, good for a 124 wRC+ and 5.4 P/G.

That’s the kind of production we’ve been expecting to see from Bohm since his exciting debut back in 2020. The unfortunate thing about his excellent finish to the season is that it wasn’t really fueled by a change in any underlying batted ball metrics. He was the same hitter he’s always been, just really unlucky for the first month of the season and then a little luckier than normal over the next five months.

So which version of Bohm can we count on in 2026? Probably the same one we’ve come to know over the last few years — the same one who posted around 5.0 P/G in 2023 and ‘24. That’s a useful corner infielder, but not necessarily a high quality starting option. That’s what Steamer sees as the most likely outcome. If there’s one thing to latch onto as a source of hope, it’s that he ran the highest contact rate of his career this year. With his above average hard hit rate, putting the ball in play more often should lead to more positive results. Unfortunately, his ceiling is capped by how often he puts the ball on the ground and his correspondingly low barrel rate. Unless he can make a significant adjustment to start lofting the ball more often, his hot streak from the second half of this season will likely be the best version of Bohm we’ll see.

Keep or cut?

I’m really on the fence about Bohm. He fits better as a third baseman where the pool is a lot shallower than at first base but the roster where I have him rostered for $9 already has third base covered by José Ramírez. I’m not sure I want to keep him at $11 either, but that’s probably about what he’s going to be auctioned for if I end up cutting him. I think it’ll ultimately come down to my salary cap situation on both teams — if there’s room to roster a premium bench CI, then Bohm seems keepable. If not, he’ll end up a casualty of being good enough without a high potential ceiling to boost his value.

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Adley Rutschman, C
Salary: $30
Average Salary: $21
2025 P/G: 3.79
Projected 2026 P/G: 5.03

I have no idea what to do with Adley Rutschman. To be fair, I don’t think the Orioles know what to do with him either. He had such a promising start to his career and then suddenly collapsed partway through the 2024 season. There was some hope that an offseason would help him get healthy for this year and he’d find a way to bounce back. That obviously didn’t happen. He suffered through two separate oblique strains, and even when he was healthy, he wasn’t producing at the plate.

The weird thing is that his underlying batted ball metrics aren’t out of whack, his plate discipline is still excellent, but he simply isn’t seeing the results that he enjoyed during his first two seasons in the big leagues. Some of that is a dramatic drop from his BABIP but it’s also a deterioration of his plate approach. His strikeout and walk rates aren’t affected, but his ability to hunt for pitches to do damage against has diminished over the last two years — his SEAGER dropped from 21.1 during his rookie campaign to 11.6 in 2025.

Steamer sees a pretty significant bounce back from Rutschman in 2026, but the projection has hedged against his ceiling based on his struggles these past two years. Like I mentioned with Contreras above, just seven catchers crossed the 5.0 P/G threshold this year. If Rutschman can get back to that level of production, he’ll be one of the best hitting catchers in baseball. There’s so much risk in paying for that projection knowing that he’s been a below average catcher for a season and a half now.

Keep or cut?

I’m obviously cutting at $30. That’s simply far too expensive for any catcher unless his name is Cal Raleigh. I’d be open to keeping Rutschman around $15, but even at that high a salary, you really need him to figure things out next year and hit his projection.

This one should be pretty quick. Chad has done all the heavy lifting analyzing how Ottoneu players handled the arbitration deadline last month; he presented a high-level recap and broke down arbitration by position. I was interested in taking a different approach: I wanted to confirm what my gut assumed to be true about which teams get allocated the most dollars during arbitration.

When I start the process of allocating dollars during the arbitration period, I usually begin by allocating a dollar to every team. You have to allocate at least a dollar to every team anyway, so I get that out of the way first. It’s also a good first step because I’ll often be torn between a number of players which tells me those roster deserve more dollars when I come back to allocate the rest of my funds. After that’s complete, I take a look at the final standings from the season and start allocating dollars to the top teams. Logically, the teams who finish higher in the standings should have rosters filled with players who have plenty of surplus value and need the help of the market to correct their salaries.

Do other Ottoneu players share this same inclination? The data says yes!

The shape of that scatter plot shouldn’t be all that surprising. The best teams in every league get allocated nearly $28 on average (with a maximum of $33) while the worst teams in every league get allocated more than $10 less. There are some clear breaks between third and fourth place and sixth and seventh place, and the placement of those gaps makes sense too. The top three teams in every league are probably loaded with talented players with lower than market value salaries and the top half of every league should have competitive teams while the bottom half of every league is likely filled with teams who are building for the future.

Is there anything actionable you can do with this knowledge? Probably not. If you’re finishing in the top three of your league, you’re probably expecting to get hit with a bunch of arbitration dollars at the start of the offseason. It might be a handy guide for planning if you’re trying to work out what your offseason budget is going to look like during the summer — you could toss in an expected allocation amount into your projected budget based on where you think you’re going to finish.

What if we flip the question around and ask if league standings tell us how many dollars a team will allocate.

Again, not many surprises. The best teams — probably the most engaged teams in your league — allocate the most dollars to other teams during arbitration. This data really isn’t actionable, it’s more a reflection of league engagement. The better your team performs, the more incentive you have to ensure your team retains every ounce of competitive advantage over your rivals. That means making sure every one of your arbitration dollars are allocated to their maximum impact.

So this might not have been the most exciting dive into arbitration, but it’s good to have my instincts confirmed by the data.

The theme of this offseason for the Ottoneu wing of RotoGraphs is self-reflection and accountability. I’ve already gone through some of the lessons I learned from the big mistakes I made this year and reviewed my bold predictions. Last week, Chad Young reviewed his weekly Hot/Cold Right Now column to see if the advice he was giving throughout the season was useful and actionable.

Following in Chad’s footsteps, I’d like to review my semi-regular Ottoneu Drip articles. The goal of this column is to identify under-rostered pitchers who might be able to help your team in both the short- and long-term. By its very nature — limiting analysis to pitchers owned less than 60% across all Ottoneu leagues — the hit rate on my advice is pretty low. These pitchers aren’t rostered for good reasons. Still, I was able to uncover a handful of very valuable pitchers who produced excellently over the long-term and there were a few more short-term wins that could have helped throughout the season.

I wrote eight Ottoneu Drip articles during the season with a bonus article written for the final weekend of the season that I opted not to include in my analysis. I identified 64 pitchers in these articles — 54 of them unique — and I graded my advice along the same 1–5 scale that Chad used in his Hot/Cold review:

1. Bad advice, this pitcher was bad over the short- and long-term.
2. Didn’t work out, but there might have been some short-term value there.
3. Neutral, there might have been some short-term value or the possibility of long-term value if you squint.
4. Good advice that had some strong long-term value or extended short-term value.
5. Solidly good advice that had excellent long-term value.

Here’s what I found:

• My average score was 2.53. If you ignore the article posted after the first weekend of the regular season on April 1, the average is slightly boosted to 2.70.
• That April 1 article was a disaster. All eight of the pitchers were busts; the average rest-of-season FIP in that group was 4.85 and the average rest-of-season P/IP was a ghastly 2.91. Two of pitchers identified in that article — JP Sears and Mitchell Parker — returned some slight short-term value over the next few weeks but they eventually turned into pumpkins. I guess the lesson there is to not jump to any conclusions based on a single start and wait for a bit of a bigger sample before making any recommendations.
• It shouldn’t surprise, then, to see that my average score from June through August was 2.74, half a point higher than it was in April and May. Making recommendations with a larger body of work to reference is a lot easier than taking a shot in the dark.
• There was one outlier article in April posted on the 16th. In that piece, I identified Tyler Mahle, Matthew Liberatore, Randy Rodríguez, Phil Maton, and Gabe Speier as pitchers with plenty of short- and long-term value. Mahle and Liberatore eventually succumbed to injury and fatigue, respectively, but they were solid pitchers for most of the spring and early summer. Rodríguez was one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this year but Tommy John surgery will keep him from providing any value next year unfortunately.
• I had a lot more success identifying relief pitchers (3.0 average score) than starting pitchers (2.3). Along with the trio above, I also called out Will Vest, Brendon Little, Garrett Whitlock, Louis Varland, Reid Detmers, and Seranthony Domínguez as helpful relievers before they were snatched off the waiver wire. My most successful starting pitcher recommendations included Trevor Rogers, Ryne Nelson, Ian Seymour, Chad Patrick, Quinn Priester, Mike Burrows, Mahle, and Liberatore.
• If you had somehow managed to follow every single one of my recommendations, you would have added 3.28 P/IP over the following 30 days after the article was published. And you would have added 3.46 P/IP over the rest of the season.

I have no idea what any of these results mean in context. That amount of analysis will have to come next year with this year as a baseline. I do think I need to be a bit more careful about recommending players so early in the season. It’s easy to take one strong start with some interesting velocity readings and assume the pitcher is about to breakout — I’m looking at you Jordan Hicks. I also think I need to follow Chad’s lead and evaluate fewer players more deeply. A deeper dive into some of these early season picks would have likely revealed that nothing under the hood had really changed.

What’s your feedback? Is this column useful? Is my 60% rostered threshold too low (or too high)? Any changes you’d like to see?

Just like it’s important to learn from our mistakes, reviewing bold predictions serves a similar purpose. By their very nature, I shouldn’t be getting many of these predictions right, but it’s a good practice to go back and figure out if there are any lessons to be gleaned from my hubris. And it’s fun to gloat about the ones I got right!

1. Cristopher Sánchez is a top-10 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ✅
2025 P/IP: 5.82 (6th overall)

Let’s start things off with a bang! Sánchez followed up his breakout season in 2024 with an even better season a year later. The velocity jump that he showed off during spring training stuck around all season long, though the cutter that he was tinkering with never showed up in the regular season. Evidently he didn’t need that fourth pitch; his changeup and slider were more than good enough on their own. It was those two pitches that convinced me that he could take a big step forward when making this prediction at the start of the season; they were both elite offerings in ‘24 and indicated to me that he had some untapped potential to take a step forward. Sánchez has the perfect profile for Ottoneu: an elite groundball rate and corresponding low home run totals and he just added a ton of strikeouts this year.

Based on the same process that led me to pick Sánchez in 2026, here’s a small spoiler for my 2026 bold predictions: Ryne Nelson’s four-seam fastball was the second most valuable pitch in baseball by total run value and Janson Junk’s sweeper was the seventh most valuable pitch in baseball by RV/100.

2. Reese Olson is a top-25 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ❌
2025 P/IP: 4.89 (N/A)

The same process that led me to pick Sánchez above also led me to pick Olson here. Unfortunately, his injury history was a factor I opted to ignore which wound up sinking this prediction. After suffering a shoulder injury in 2024 that led to a two-month stint on the IL, that same issue popped up again this year in late July. He also dealt with a finger injury that cost him a month and a half of the season. Between those two injuries, he only pitched 68.2 innings in ‘25, though they were high quality innings. His changeup and slider — the two pitches that give him such a high ceiling — were just as good this year and give me some hope that he could see a breakout if he could ever stay healthy for a full season.

For what it’s worth, his P/IP would have ranked 26th among starting pitchers with at least 100 IP if he had hit that threshold. The process for making this prediction was solid, but his shoulder just didn’t allow it to hit.

3. Eduardo Rodriguez is a top-50 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ❌
2025 P/IP: 3.08 (108th overall)

This prediction was banking on a healthy season from Rodriguez. Well, he only had a short three-week stint on the IL with a minor shoulder injury and ended up throwing 154.1 innings this year. Unfortunately, they were extremely poor quality innings. The interplay between his fastball and changeup has deteriorated to the point where both pitches returned negative run value in 2025. At this point in his career, he’s simply too hittable even though his strikeout-to-walk ratio looked okay. He had some good stretches during the season, but the profile is far too volatile to rely on.

4. Max Meyer scores the most total points among Marlins starting pitchers ❌
2025 Total Points: 210 (7th on Marlins)

Meyer had an exciting spring training after debuting a sinker and sweeper to bring his pitch mix up to five. He actually started the season off with five solid starts and his ERA and FIP were hovering around three through the end of April. May was rough and then he hit the IL with a hip impingement in June and was lost for the season. The two new pitches he introduced to his repertoire weren’t the huge difference-makers that he needed them to be, though his peripherals weren’t terrible across his 12 starts in 2025.

As if Meyer’s struggles and injuries weren’t enough, the Marlins ended up holding onto Sandy Alcantara for the whole season, and no surprise, he wound up leading the team in total points.

5. David Festa scores the second most total points among Twins starting pitchers ❌
2025 Total Points: 180 (7th on Twins)

The process behind this prediction was sound. I saw a bunch of risk in Minnesota’s starting rotation and figured that Festa would be the beneficiary of some of that risk. Joe Ryan was brilliant and easily led the team in total points, but Pablo López lost three months to a forearm injury, Bailey Ober took a huge step backwards, and Chris Paddack and Simeon Woods Richardson were both as mediocre as ever. Where I got things wrong was thinking that Festa could emerge from this mess as a key contributor. His peripherals were solid during his debut season in 2024, but injuries derailed any progress he hoped to make this year. He was diagnosed with a mild form of thoracic outlet syndrome in September and his future as a productive major leaguer is very much up in the air.

6. Brent Rooker is a top-3 OF (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ❌
2025 P/G: 5.7 (16th among OF)

Rooker earned OF eligibility by mid-May but instead of repeating his huge breakout from 2024, he merely settled in as a very good hitter with a .349 wOBA this year. That was good enough to return $38.7 in value according to the Auction Calculator, but nowhere good enough to appear in the top 3 OF in Ottoneu, let alone the top 10.

The process was decent here. Rooker crushed the ball at home in Sacramento’s minor league ballpark (.372 wOBA at home), but he took a significant step back on the road (.326 wOBA on the road). The good news is that his plate discipline numbers were better than ever and his batted ball peripherals didn’t take a nose dive.

7. Anthony Volpe is a top-12 SS (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ❌
2025 P/G: 3.6 (34th among SS)

I believed a significant jump in bat speed during spring training would help Volpe breakout in his third big league season. The bat speed improvements stuck in the regular season, resulting in career bests in average exit velocity, maxEV, Barrel%, ISO, and SLG. Unfortunately, his BABIP fell back to where it was during his rookie campaign and his plate discipline didn’t improve. His overall wOBA actually fell a point from where it was in 2024, and to make matters worse, his defense absolutely cratered as well.

8. Maikel Garcia is a top-15 2B (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ✅
2025 P/G: 5.4 (4th among 2B)

A breakout! Garcia significantly improved his plate discipline last year and his batted ball peripherals painted a much better picture than the .270 wOBA he posted in 2024. I predicted that he’d see a rebound with his batted ball luck to push his wOBA back up to around .300. I didn’t expect him to significantly improve his plate discipline again and start hitting for power by getting the ball off the ground more often. The result was a .347 wOBA, easily the best of his career, and a massive breakout season. What makes Garcia even more valuable is his position flexibility: he’s eligible at four different positions and everything about his improvements this year look sustainable into the future.

9. Miguel Vargas scores the most total points among White Sox hitters ✅
2025 Total Points: 609 (1st on White Sox)

All Vargas needed was an opportunity for full-time at-bats. The White Sox obliged and he delivered a solid, if up-and-down, season in 2025. He had a huge slump during the three weeks before the All-Star break, and two minor IL stints derailed the second half of his season, but he wound up with a .314 wOBA at the end of it all. That was good enough to eke out Lenyn Sosa for the team lead in total points. His excellent plate discipline metrics and solid batted ball peripherals give him a bit of room to grow as he continues to develop in the big leagues.

10. Neither Roman Anthony (❌) or Kristian Campbell (✅) will be starting-caliber options at their respective positions in 2025
Anthony 2025 P/G: 6.1 (10th among OF)
Campbell 2025 P/G: 3.6 (37th among 2B)

I’m giving myself half credit for this one. Campbell made the Red Sox’s Opening Day roster but really struggled in his first taste of the big leagues and found himself optioned back to Triple-A by mid-June. His huge minor league breakout in 2024 was impressive, but it came in just his second professional season. The jump from the high minors to the big leagues is extremely difficult; Campbell had just 85 plate appearances in Triple-A and 255 in Double-A before making his major league debut. The talent is undeniably there, but I think Boston rushed him to the big leagues.

As for Anthony, his talent and track record were a little more well established, but I didn’t think he’d find enough playing time to make an impact in the big leagues in 2025. The Rafael Devers trade opened up an opportunity for Anthony and he ran with it. He only accumulated 303 plate appearances in the big leagues but he absolutely made the most of them.

Overall score: 3.5/10

Pretty good for my first rodeo.

Following in Chad Young’s (and my daughter’s) footsteps, it’s time to look back on some of the mistakes that I made managing my fantasy baseball teams this year. It’s not easy to look back on some tough decisions, especially ones that had a big impact on the standings, but it’s an important part of growing and learning as a fantasy baseball player. I’m sure there are plenty of other mistakes I made along the way this year, but here are five that will haunt me until next season.

9th Place

On June 9, my team in League 13 was in ninth place in the head-to-head standings but fifth place in overall points. There had been a number of unlucky weeks that had sunk my head-to-head record, but I was confident my team would be better over the course of the summer. That week, I spun up a trade with Chad Young and Niv Shah’s team: I got Francisco Lindor and Alec Bohm and gave up Kyle Stowers, Bubba Chandler, Ronny Mauricio, and Connor Norby.

It was a good trade. Lindor directly addressed a need I had at shortstop — Carlos Correa had been my shortstop to start the season but he had largely disappointed up to that point in the season — and Bohm was a solid bat that I could plug in at either corner infield spot. I’ll probably regret giving up Stowers and Chandler, but neither Mauricio or Norby look like they’ll be making an impact in the big leagues anytime soon.

After making the trade, I sort of sat back and waited to see if my team would start rising up the standings. At the All-Star break, I was up to sixth place in the head-to-head standings and still fifth place in overall points. A couple of weeks later when the calendar flipped to August, I had fallen one place in the head-to-head standings, but I continued to sit on my laurels. I wasn’t really looking to make a move and I continued to believe that my team would eventually start playing up to its place in the overall points. A few weeks later, I had fallen another spot in the head-to-head standings and by that time, it was too late to fix anything. I made a trio of sell-off trades at the August 31 trade deadline, feeling pretty disappointed I wouldn’t get a shot to make some noise in the league playoffs.

Mistake: I made a buy-now move early in the season and then didn’t follow up with more additions.

Lesson: I think my position in the head-to-head standings was too dire back in early June despite the rosy outlook my overall points indicated. I tried to straddle the fence between going for it and not giving up too much of my team’s future value. The result was exactly what you could have guessed: a mediocre team not good enough to make a run down the stretch.

0.75 P/G-P/IP Differential

In League 32, I had the best team offense by a pretty wide margin; my team had put up 5.80 P/G through the first two months of the season but my pitching was at just 5.05 P/IP (9th in the league). I knew I needed a few key upgrades to my pitching staff to really challenge for the league championship and I figured I could deal from my deep pool of talented hitters to address that need. On June 2, I swung a trade to try and address that need: I got Willson Contreras, Bailey Ober, and Michael Conforto for Jarren Duran.

At that point in the season, Duran had put up 5.25 P/G, a pretty significant step back from his breakout last year. Ober was mired in a pretty rough start to the season, but I believed in his talent, and Contreras was a pretty big upgrade for me at catcher. It wasn’t a disaster, but the trade definitely didn’t accomplish my goal.

Granted, Contreras did outperform Duran over the remainder of the season, and he was a pretty big upgrade for me at catcher, but Ober was a disaster and he was off my roster just a month later. I actually wound up including Ober in a trade for Christian Yelich to fill the hole in my outfield made by the departure of Duran. I finally made a trade for Max Fried in mid-August, but that was too late to really help my pitching staff. I wound up in second place in the league.

Mistake: Prioritized need over talent.

Lesson: I went into that Duran trade looking to address a few specific needs. My team was doing fine but I knew it was a pretty unbalanced roster. I rushed into the trade without looking for a better offer or another target because it checked two boxes, a pitcher and a catcher. When dealing from a position of strength, you don’t need to take the first reasonable offer you see. Take the time to really figure out if it’s the right move for your team.

15 points

In League 1588, I was chasing down the third place team for pretty much the entire summer. First and second had already been decided by August, but third — and a money finish — was just within reach. My team had been lagging behind the IP pace for pretty much the entire season. I started off the season with eight pitchers on the IL and I just couldn’t keep up the pace through the summer.

Entering the final week of the season, I identified 12 pitchers who had good matchups for the final weekend that might make good waiver wire pickups. My team was really tight up against the salary cap, but two or three of those pitchers would have been extremely helpful as I approached the end of the season. I wound up picking up just one of those pitchers for the final weekend — AJ Blubaugh — and then didn’t even start him on Saturday because I wanted to try and hit the soft IP cap on Sunday when I had three pitchers lined up to start. One of those three starters was scratched from his Sunday start which meant I wound up with 1499.2 IP and fell just 15 points shy of third place.

Mistake: I didn’t plan out how and when I would cross the soft IP cap properly.

Lesson: The 48-hour auctions in Ottoneu make streaming starters particularly tricky, especially when you’re counting on those waiver wire pickups to start on certain days. I should have tried to add a handful of pitchers for that final weekend, knowing that I could sit some if needed. Having all the options on my roster would have been much more preferable to the despair I felt when Gavin Williams’s start on the final Sunday of the season was scratched to keep him fresh for the playoffs.

$61 for two SPs

Let’s go back to League 13. I entered the draft with a pretty hefty amount of money to spend and I was looking for three frontline starting pitchers to round out my roster. Within the first five auctions of the draft, I had spent $61 on Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($30) and Roki Sasaki ($31). That was a little more than half of my budget on two players who I assumed would lead my pitching staff in 2025. Yamamoto turned out to be a fantastic value — the Auction Calculator says he returned $39.5 in production this year — but Sasaki was a pretty big disappointment.

Our auction was held in early February, before pitchers and catchers had reported. The hype surrounding Sasaki was pretty high still, even though there were some warning signs from his up-and-down season in Japan in 2024. I wound up ignoring my own advice that I wrote in my pre-season SP rankings: “I get the hype [surrounding Sasaki], but there are enough concerns about his fastball shape, his injury history, and the transition from Japan to the US that I’m pumping the brakes just a little bit.” I had ranked Sasaki in my fourth tier, valued around $15-$20, but paid for him in this league like he was a second tier pitcher.

Mistake: I bought into the Roki Sasaki hype leading me to overpay for him at auction.

Lesson: It would be easy to say “don’t buy into the hype” but it’s hard to stay completely rational in the middle of an auction when bids are flying left and right. Maybe the bigger lesson is to stick with the research and preparation you’ve done ahead of the draft. If I had stuck with the rankings I had put together, I probably would have passed on Suzuki and could have bid on a $11 Kevin Gausman much later in the draft. Even a $20 Zac Gallen or a $20 Luis Castillo would have been better values than Sasaki. Hindsight is 20/20 on those alternatives, but I needed to listen to reason when Sasaki’s salary jumped 50% over where I had him ranked.

43 HRs

This one is a bit of a bonus mistake since it happened in a 7×7 homebrew league, not an Ottoneu league. On May 27, I was in second place in the league and I received an unsolicited trade offer in the inbox: Cal Raleigh for Cole Ragans. I already had Willson Contreras as my catcher and was pretty pleased with him despite his slow start to the season. At that point, Raleigh had clubbed 17 home runs with a 166 wRC+. On the other hand, Ragans had just been placed on the IL with a minor groin strain and his ERA was more than two and half runs higher than his FIP. I considered the offer, but wound up rejecting it, thinking that Ragans’s luck would eventually turn once he returned from his injury.

In the end, Raleigh wound up blasting 43 home runs over the remainder of the season while Ragans would be sidelined for three and half months with a serious shoulder injury. I regret everything.

Mistake: I’m not sure there’s a specific mistake here beyond simply regretting not recognizing the historic season Raleigh was putting together.

Lesson: I’m also not sure there’s any specific lesson here either. Hindsight obviously makes this trade offer look pretty lopsided, but at the time, Raleigh was sixth in baseball with a 166 wRC+ and I thought he might be a bit out over his skis with that offensive line. Ragans was on the IL, but his peripherals looked so good that I figured everything would be fine once he was healthy. I couldn’t have predicted that shoulder injury that he suffered in his first start after being activated off the IL in early June.

The search for pitching help is never ending. Between injuries and ineffectiveness, fantasy players are always on the lookout for pitchers who are performing well who can provide some reinforcements. The final week of the season is upon us. Hitting your innings pitched cap in Ottoneu leagues is one of the most important ways you can maximize your roster to its fullest extent. And because it’s a soft cap, you can stack as many starters as you can on the day you’ll hit the cap, and you’ll receive all the points from those pitchers.

If you’re planning ahead, you might want to think about adding one or two of the following under-rostered pitchers for their start during the final weekend of the season if you can line everything up correctly. Here are 12 starters who are rostered in less than 60% of all Ottoneu leagues who have a good matchup this weekend.

Atlanta might have one of the easiest matchups this weekend as they host the punchless Pirates. Joey Wentz has been serviceable while eating up innings on Atlanta’s injury depleted pitching staff. He isn’t pitching deep into games but over his last two starts, he’s run a 4.0 strikeout-to-walk ratio with 12 Ks in nine innings.

Now that Payton Tolle has been shifted to the bullpen for the remainder of the season, Kyle Harrison has taken his place in the starting rotation. He looked excellent in his first start with Boston on Saturday, pitching six innings of one-run ball against the Rays while striking out five. His scheduled start this weekend comes against a struggling and desperate Tigers ballclub.

The Cardinals have posted a .289 wOBA over the last 14 days, 22nd in baseball. They’re pretty punchless with both Willson Contreras and Masyn Winn sidelined for the rest of the season. Colin Rea and Jameson Taillon have had their ups and downs this year but the matchup looks good enough to think about streaming them for their final starts of the season.

Like the rest of the Guardians pitching staff, Slade Cecconi has been excellent over the last few weeks. He’s allowed just two runs in 20.2 innings across his previous three starts with a 3.0 strikeout-to-walk ratio. Cleveland will be fighting for a chance to sneak into the playoffs this weekend and the Rangers offense hasn’t been very good in September.

The Giants-Rockies series in San Francisco this weekend looks like it’s ripe for plenty of pitching points. Neither team has been very good offensively and the ballpark is a haven for pitchers. For Colorado, Kyle Freeland is probably the one starter worth looking at unless you want to risk starting Germán Márquez. For San Francisco, the options are two rookies in Kai-Wei Teng and Trevor McDonald. Neither has an impressive track record, but the matchup might be too juicy to pass up.

AJ Blubaugh has bounced between the rotation and the bullpen for the Astros down the stretch but he’ll likely get an opportunity to start against the Angels this weekend. He hasn’t allowed a run since a four inning bulk relief appearance back on August 23, a stretch of 17 scoreless innings. During this scoreless streak, he’s posted a very impressive 7.5 strikeout-to-walk ratio and has allowed just five hits.

Chad Patrick was a critical piece of the Brewers starting rotation earlier this year while they dealt with numerous injuries on their pitching staff. Once the team got healthy, Patrick was relegated to the minor leagues, but the injury bug has struck again and he’s now back with the team providing solid innings out of the rotation and the bullpen. Since being recalled in mid-August, he’s provided a 3.72 FIP in 21 innings while posting a very good 3.4 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Walker Buehler’s season has been a disaster but he’s at least looked serviceable with the Phillies since joining the club in September. You’ve really got to trust that Philadelphia identified and fixed whatever issues were plaguing him in Boston. At least the matchup against the Twins doesn’t look too bad.

Mike Burrows has been a frequent recommendation in this column this year. After some struggles in July and early August, he’s been absolutely fantastic down the stretch. Across his last six outings — two four starts and two bulk relief outings — he’s posted a 1.60 FIP and allowed five runs in 21.1 innings. His strikeout-to-walk ratio during this stretch has been an absolutely fantastic 6.0. He’s been piggybacked with another one of Pittsburgh’s young pitchers in each of his last three starts so he’s not getting very deep into games, but the high quality of his innings means he’s racking up the points in September.

Welcome to the final Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner of the season. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence. I should also note that I’ve updated the way I’m calculating the park factors for the two new minor league stadiums that the Athletics and Rays are playing in this year; I’m taking the one-year park factors from Statcast and regressing them towards neutral, with the one-year factors increasing in weight as more games are played in those stadiums (those series are still marked in yellow below).

Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence. I should also note that I’ve updated the way I’m calculating the park factors for the two new minor league stadiums that the Athletics and Rays are playing in this year; I’m taking the one-year park factors from Statcast and regressing them towards neutral, with the one-year factors increasing in weight as more games are played in those stadiums (those series are still marked in yellow below).

Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence. I should also note that I’ve updated the way I’m calculating the park factors for the two new minor league stadiums that the Athletics and Rays are playing in this year; I’m taking the one-year park factors from Statcast and regressing them towards neutral, with the one-year factors increasing in weight as more games are played in those stadiums (those series are still marked in yellow below).

Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence. I should also note that I’ve updated the way I’m calculating the park factors for the two new minor league stadiums that the Athletics and Rays are playing in this year; I’m taking the one-year park factors from Statcast and regressing them towards neutral, with the one-year factors increasing in weight as more games are played in those stadiums (those series are still marked in yellow below).