Last week I tried to create benchmarks for what should be considered a replacement-level player in a few of my FanGraphs points leagues. Here’s what I came up with for middle-infield players:

2B Replacement Level: 3.71 P/G
SS Replacement Level: 3.51 P/G

The actual MI position is a tricky one to nail down, so I’ll just separate the two positions out for now. This replacement level mark is not an exact science. Maybe your league mates have been stock-piling shortstops for some reason and that would change the way you calculate a replacement-level player. Regardless, if you have a sense of what kind of player you can typically find on the waiver wire throughout the season, you can make decisions on whether a player is worth keeping in 2024 or not. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few of my middle-infielders and analyze their keepworthiness for 2024.

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Tommy Edman, 2B/SS/OF
Salary: $11.00
Average Salary: $11.98
2023 P/G: 4.17
Proj 2024 P/G: 4.50

Edman’s projected 4.50 P/G according to Steamer places him in Tier 5 among all players who played in over 75 games last season. Steamer expects Edman to take a step forward in 2024, increasing his P/G mark by over 0.30 P/G. What’s the reason for that? Well, his BABIP was at a career-low .248 in 2023 and Steamer took notice, bumping it up to .264 in 2024, which is aiding increases in his slash line:

2023: .248/.307/.399
2024: .264/.321/.407 (PROJ)

Though Edman did lose some time to injury in 2023, he still reached 528 plate appearances. Steamer has bumped that up to 536 in 2024 and FanGraphs Depth Charts is even higher at 581. No one seems too concerned that Richie Palacios will be taking over either 2B or SS playing time from Edman in 2024. Unless something unexpected happens this offseason, Edman seems like a very good lock at everyday SS. Edman’s speed is still an asset and though FanGraphs points leagues reward power and slugging percentage more, speed still plays and I’m banking on a positive hitting regression for Edman.

Keep or Cut?
I am keeping for 2024. If I were rostering him for $12, I would cut him and take my chances trying to get him back for less at the auction. Cuts have not been made in this league yet, and when I look at the players who are not rostered at the 2B/SS positions who played more than 75 games in 2023, the best I can find is 4.35 P/G (Jeff McNeil). That makes me feel pretty good about where I’ve set the replacement level considering McNeil ended the year on the IL.

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Andrés Giménez, 2B
Average Salary: $9.11
Salary: $6.00
2023 P/G: 4.39
Proj 2024 P/G: 5.15

Giménez’s slash line took a hit in 2023 compared to 2022:

2022: .297/.371/.466
2023: .251/.314/.399
2024: .265/.328/.427 (PROJ)

If that’s not an example of a projection system regressing to the mean then I don’t know what is. It would be easy to say that he was BABIP’d in 2023 (.289) and move on. But Giménez is still only 25 years old and I do think there is another gear in his game. His power skills took a hit in 2023, but he played in a career-high 153 games. Could there be an aspect of fatigue involved? Take a look at some of his power skills between 2022 and 2023:

Barrel% 2022: 6.2 -> 2023: 5.5
HardHit% (Statcast) 2022: 37.6 -> 2023: 27.0
xwOBA 2022: .326 -> 2023: .300
EV: 2022: 87.8 -> 2023: 84.8
MaxEV 2022: 109.9 -> 2023: 108.8

He also started to pull the ball more with less power:

There is a disagreement between his statcast HardHit% and his SportsInfo measurements. Regardless of which you believe in more, the bump in 1% in the graph would need to be a whole lot higher in order for the pull-the-ball-in-the-air approach to help Giménez’s power. Though the table below is not adjusted for batted ball events, it does indicate that Giménez is generating the most power from line drives:

He seems to find himself in this place where he needs to add a little more power to his pull-the-ball-in-the-air approach, or he needs to simply focus on making hard contact and plate discipline to increase his BB%. His 30 stolen base potential is at risk and declines further from the .314 OBP he showed in 2023.

Keep or Cut?
Last season’s 4.39 P/G was well above what I’ve marked as replacement level (3.71 P/G) and Steamer likes a positive regression in 2024. The upside is there, stolen base potential and perhaps he finds a way to add power to his new approach. If not, and he reverts back to a harder-hit ball, not in the air, then I still like what he did in 2022. Most second basemen with over 75 games in 2023 at 5.00 P/G were rostered, on average, between $5-$12. I’m keeping anywhere below $8 and might even go a few dollars higher.

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Brice Turang, 2B/SS
Average Salary: $4.30
Salary: $3.00
2023 P/G: 2.51
Proj 2024 P/G: 3.87

Turang’s projection places him above the replacement level at 2B in 2024, but just barely. He came very close to a full season in 2023, playing 126 games and recording 546 plate appearances. Steamer projects a step forward when looking at his slash line:

2023: .218/.285/.300

2024: .246/.319/.370 (PROJ)

Steamer also thinks his six home runs and 26 stolen bases will turn into 10 home runs and 20 stolen bases next season. Turang is not being rostered in Ottoneu leagues due to his ability to provide a P/G mark above that of any replacement-level player. Managers are rostering for his future value and upside potential. The question is, will it come? For now, he seems good enough defensively to stay in the 2B position, and depending on what happens to shortstop Willy Adames in 2025 when he hits free agency, it could be a few more seasons before we really get a sense of what Turang will become. His contact rates from 2023 looked a little troublesome and he really struggled to hit the fastball. While rookies walked 8.1% and struck out 25.8% of the time in 2023, Turang did better, walking 8.5% of the time and striking out 21.0% of the time. However, he did not hit the ball hard very often, only barreling the ball 2.9% of the time. The league average among rookies is 7.6%.

Keep or Cut?
This is my last season holding Turang for upside and it might not last long. He hasn’t shown the skills necessary to be a rosterable hitter, yet. That is in a points format, however. Any player who can hit 10 home runs and steal 20 bases at a very low price should probably be rostered in roto formats. In points formats, anything over $3 is a cut for me.

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Jonathan India, 2B
Average Salary: $12.13
Salary: $16.00
2023 P/G: 5.20
Proj 2024 P/G: 5.23

India found himself in Jeff Zimmerman’s “Hitters Who Played Through a 2023 Injury” report at the end of the season, but the difference between his projected OPS and final OPS was a tiny .003. Regardless, Zimmerman’s research has determined a decline in performance while players play through injury, and with an injury like plantar fasciitis, the one India suffered through in 2023, you can hope that India will improve with health in 2024. Even with the injury, he was above replacement. Players who earned around the 5.0 P/G mark in 2023 with over 75 games have an average salary between $5-$14.

In 2023, India’s BB% increased, his K% decreased, but his overall slash line declined, except for SLG. His wOBA was also up over his 2022 mark. His BABIP was at a career low, .281. His power metrics and batted ball profile have roughly stayed the same, but he’s hitting the ball in the air more. The problem is that his fly ball increases did not correspond with his power increases throughout the season:

His swing percentages tell a story, I’m just not sure what the story is. It looks as if his swing decisions have improved. He has swung outside of the zone less often, swung inside the zone more often, and become more selective overall. None of that really helped against left-handed pitchers, though, he hit .207 against them. That’s the second-worst mark in front of Alan Trejo among second basemen with at least 100 plate appearances against lefties. That’s worrisome when you look at the Reds RosterResource page and see India lined up in the DH spot. He feels dangerously close to finding himself platooned.

Keep or Cut?
I think the $10 or $11 dollar mark is appropriate. Anything over $12 feels like a cut.

Did you roster any 4.33 points-per-game outfielders last season? Better yet, did you roll that 4.33 P/G outfielder into your starting lineup on a regular basis last season? If you did, you were straddling the line of replacement level. Last week I placed offensive players into ranked tiers based on their final P/G achievements and 4.33 P/G is a tier-five player at best. Here’s a reminder of the points spread between tiers:

Offensive P/G tiers for all position players who played in more than 75 games in 2023:

Tier 1 range: 9.1 P/G – 6.0 P/G

Tier 2 range: 5.9 P/G – 5.5 P/G

Tier 3 range: 5.5 P/G – 5.1 P/G

Tier 4 range: 5.0 P/G – 4.7 P/G

Tier 5 range: 4.7 P/G – 4.3 P/G

Remember that represents all players clumped together. 4.33 P/G is actually pretty good if we’re looking at only catchers. The tiers above are independent of position and therefore, flawed. Today, I’ll dial in what should have been considered rosterable in 2023 by position, making note of what a replacement-level player recorded in points per game. Let this serve as a starting point as you may play in a different league format than I do, which would create different-sized player pools. You should be able to easily copy and paste the table in this article and edit the inputs accordingly. Before the table, I need to set the parameters:

– This is representing a 12-team, FanGraphs points league
– I am considering players on my bench above replacement level and am being somewhat arbitrary about it. Each league has 40 roster spots, but I’m leaving 10 of those roster spots for minor leaguers and below replacement-level players. If you add up the “Starters” and “Bench” columns, that is what I’m marking as each team’s number of above-replacement level players. Again, copy and paste the table and make edits if you wish.
– I have excluded players whose “Level” was anything but a major league team at the time of the data pull, eliminating minor leaguers.
– If a player is eligible for that position, they were included in the analysis for that position.

If you take all outfielders in your league, rostered or unrostered, and you sort them by points per game, you simply check the points per game mark of the 73rd-best player. But wait, isn’t a replacement-level player the player with the highest P/G mark available on the waiver wire? Well, yes and no. Let’s now put this system to the test with that 4.33 OF I mentioned in the intro. First, I’ll start by going into my league’s free-agent player pool, isolating outfielders who are currently free agents and played in more than 75 games last season. That last 75-game qualifier is not a part of the table above, but since I’m using end-of-season data, I want to show the players who accumulated playing time and kept a high points per game mark. Here’s what I see:

Andrew McCutchen – 5.24 P/G

Jeff McNeil – 4.35 P/G

Luis Rengifo – 4.34 P/G

Edward Olivares – 4.33 P/G

Willi Castro – 4.11 P/G

So, in theory, this mark works for my league. McCutchen, McNeil, and Rengifo were all hurt toward the season’s end, so in reality, the first available player eligible for the OF spot is Castro. To really prove this out, I’ll do the same exact thing in a second league. Here are OF eligible players available as free agents with over 75 games played:

Tommy Pham – 4.73 P/G

Harold Ramírez – 4.63 P/G

Jose Siri – 4.42 P/G

Ok, so it’s not perfect, but it’s close. I rostered Cedric Mullins all season and he finished the year at 4.37 P/G. Should I have dropped Mullins for Siri? Tough to say. Hindsight is 20/20. I still prefer Mullins for 2024. For now, this may help inform you of where you need to make cuts this offseason. Stay tuned for next week’s post where I work through this same exercise for points per game projections in 2024 and begin converting those projections into dollar values.

pVals are a topic of debate among pitch-level data masterminds. One side may consider them useless. Good pitches get hit and bad pitches get taken for strikes and pVals don’t explain any of that. On the other side, people like to know what actually happened. If a splitter left in the middle of the zone gets a called third strike when it probably should have been mashed for a home run, then pVals still credit the pitcher. The strikeout is what actually happened.

Keep in mind as you peruse this season’s best fastballs just that; pVals aren’t perfect. You’ll read about Chris Bassitt’s sinker and think, Chris Bassitt is a clear candidate for being drafted, but read on and you may back away from that stance. pVals help us understand what occurred, but take caution when using them to predict what will happen. Confused? Let’s just watch some GIFs.

Part one of this installment looked at four-seam fastballs and cutters. Part two will focus on sinkers and splitters.

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It’s important to know what a good points per-game mark is and what kind of price points are attached. In this post, I’ve taken all offensive players and isolated down to those who played in more than 75 games in 2023, an arbitrary cut-off. Then, I placed them in decile groups according to their points per game marks in 2023, creating tier groups. Each decile contains 32 or 33 players. I chose to only present the top six deciles, bringing the player totals to 196. That doesn’t necessarily cover a full league of rostered offensive players, but it gets close. Here’s a look at the spread of tiers one, two, and three:

Tier one shows us the largest spread due to outliers like Ronald Acuña Jr.‘s 9.11 P/G season, Corey Seager’s 8.31 P/G season, and the Dodgers combo Mookie Betts (8.14 P/G) and Freddie Freeman (8.1 P/G). Those were the four offensive players who held P/G marks above eight in 2023. The crazy part is that there’s no qualifier involved beyond the 75-game cutoff, meaning, the best players in 2023 stuck around and accumulated their way to the top. Each of these top of tier-one players played in at least 119 games. The spread of games across these top three tiers doesn’t differ much. However, the average price certainly does:

Average Games Played and Cost by Tier:
Tier 1: 138 G, $29
Tier 2: 141 G, $18
Tier 3: 129 G, $10

These prices are specific to my league but still give a good sense of what a top-tier player should cost. Once we get into Tier two, the price goes down and we’re left with very good everyday players who aren’t going 70-40, but are still contributing daily. Tier three is where I’d like to live. Here are max, min, and median players by P/G within each tier:

Let’s move on to tiers four, five, and six, where a tight four to five points per game range is the norm:

Now, we get down to the player pool where the really tough decisions get made. Does the player have more to give? Or, will they forever be a tier six player who you swap between bench and starting position? Are they likely to fall out of tier six and drop down into the dungeons of lower tiers? These are the questions that we’ll be asking ourselves all off-season as we click them back and forth between “cut” and “keep” on our “Roster Organizer” tab:

This analysis does not take into consideration the players who showed up for 75 games or less and crushed. Players like Davis Schneider, Royce Lewis, Evan Carter, and Zack Gelof are omitted from the box plots above. However, a big takeaway for me is how similar players in tiers four, five, and six are from a points-per-game standpoint.

Having a solid handle on what a good points per game mark is for full-season players is important and hopefully, it will give you some benchmarks for your offseason decisions. Next week, I’ll take a look at the distribution of position eligibility across tiers to get a sense of how valuable, for example, a tier one shortstop is over a tier four shortstop. See you then.

There are all kinds of ways to measure the effectiveness of a pitch. Pitch Values (pVals) or “Pitch Type Linear Weights” give us a sense of, from the glossary, “…the changes in average run expectancy from one count to another”.

while the changes in run expectancy between an 0-0 count and a 0-1 or 1-0 count are obviously very small, when added up over the course of the season, you can get an idea of which pitch a hitter was best against.

pVals are not predictive and they don’t explain the true talent or raw characteristics of an individual pitch the same way Stuff+ or other pitch models can, but it does tell us what actually happened. Now, imagine that! You can dig into the specifics of pVals on the glossary page but for now, let’s celebrate this season’s greatest pVals.

Part one will look at four-seam fastballs and cutters. Part two (coming soon) will focus on sinkers and splitters.

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Have you ever found yourself paying for something that you just knew you couldn’t afford? At the store, you talked yourself into it. You over-exaggerated how much “extra” you had in your budget. You convinced yourself that you needed this shiny, beautiful thing and that, heck, you even deserved it. But when you got home, thoughts started to creep in. How am I going to afford this?  My butt doesn’t look as good in my home mirror as it did in the store. Maybe I can get a second job. Maybe I can make cuts in other areas. Do I really need this? Eventually, after a week’s worth of instant mac n’ cheese dinners, you decide that it’s not worth it, that it’s time to come to reality, and that the high-priced item needs to go back to the store. In the case of Ottoneu fantasy baseball, managers are watching their arbitration dollars pile up and are asking the same questions. Can I really afford Adley Rutcshman now that the market has caught up? How much is too much for Ronald Acuña Jr.? Why is everyone picking on me?

During arbitration, your league mates will increase your players’ salaries, tightening the screws on your overall budget, but you get to do the same to them. Maybe the best thing to do is to simply force them to take their own high-priced items back to the store or, dropping the metaphor, cut the player. Let’s take a look at each team’s most expensive player in the FanGraphs Staff League II:

I’ve gone into experimental mode and added $3 to every player’s salary. In yellow, I’ve highlighted the players who were brought up above the average salary due to my adjustment. In red, I’ve highlighted players who were already rostered above the average and are now well over that limit. This helps visualize which teams I could have the biggest impact on with my arbitration dollars alone. That’s all well and nice but keep in mind that you wouldn’t be able to give each team $3. That would put you well above your $25 spending limit in 12-team leagues. No, you’ve got a healthy $25 to dish out and not a penny more. So, let’s create a different scenario.

I’ll take each team’s best two players and I’ll divvy out at least $1 to each team as required, focusing on teams that have players just about to tip over the average edge of the cliff. Here goes:

Once again I’ve highlighted players in yellow who I brought above the average. In red are the players who were already rostered for a price above average, and I’ve really started gouging. Muahahah! Take that! Can’t afford to pay!? Too bad! Ok, Aaron Judge is safe. So are Shohei Ohtani, Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, and Kyle Tucker. But it would take a concentrated effort to bring those players up to or above the average. You could very well do the opposite of what I’m suggesting here and give those players all of your focus, but I would imagine other members of the league will concentrate some inflation firepower in that direction. The rest of the players in the white cells, Goldschmidt, Bieber, and Snell, are already rostered above the average and don’t need any scale tipping to be done.

This is the way to keep the stars in each year’s draft and part of the reason, like baseball, Ottoneu is a very difficult game to play. Of course, this is only one strategy to use, but it can be very effective. Now, just imagine a world where every member of your league reads this article. Stay with me here. Each owner in your league adds just a dollar or more to each team’s top players. Now that would make for some interesting keeper deadlines, wouldn’t it?

One of the very best aspects of Ottoneu fantasy baseball is that you are involved all year round. As October hits, stats are no longer accumulating, points are no longer being totaled and performance measurements remain locked in the past. But arbitration begins and the business side of baseball is front and center. Would you believe that someone, somewhere, in an Ottoneu points league is rostering Ronald Acuña Jr. for only $26? It’s true. If he’s not a candidate for arbitration allocation in that league, I don’t know who is. This is a pure example of why arbitration matters. If the person rostering Acuña for only $26 doesn’t have that salary adjusted, they would go into the draft with Acuña and the additional dollars to auction another big name. Oh, the humanity!

You can find all kinds of interesting situations like the Acuña one by downloading average salary data right from your league page and in this post, I’ll take you through the details on how you can use it to generate insights and strategy specifically for your league.

Step 1: Download average salaries and make it specific to your scoring format

If you click on the “Players” tab at the top of your league page, the sub-menu has a link all the way to the right titled, “Average Salaries”. You can also click here. The drop-down menu in the top right corner of the page allows you to specify salaries based on your scoring format. Choose the option that matches your league and then click “Export as .csv”.

Step 2: Merge average salary data with your league’s roster data.

If you followed Step 1 above, then you have your “average salary data”. Now, back on the “Players” tab, simply click “FanGraphs Sortable Stats”. This will take you to a FanGraphs leaderboard. Make sure the drop-down menu reads “All Teams” so that you are being given salary information for your league-mates rosters. Lastly, merge the two data sets on “Name” and subset it to “Player Name”, “Average Salary”, “Last 10”, and “$”, which represents the actual salary the player is currently rostered for in your league. Here’s an example:

You’ll notice a few things in the table above. First, I’ve also included “Last 10” which gives an average of the most recent 10 completed auctions for that player. You’ll also notice that I calculated the difference between the player’s average salary and what they are actually rostered for. From here I can start to make some decisions. For example, I’m not worried at all about the roughly $4.00 difference between the average salary and the actual salary for Benintendi and Kelenic. If you look at Benintendi’s “Last 10” you’ll notice he’s trending down anyways. By 2024, he may be worth less than the $5.00 he’s actually being paid. Yordan Alvarez, however, needs some adjusting. He’s worth more than $34, just try and change my mind.

Step 3: Group your new data set by team to determine who has the most “surplus value”

You can eyeball this process by simply going to your league’s “Arbitration” page and looking at the comparison of “Curr Salary” versus “Proj Salary” by team. Remember that you must give each team in your league at least $1. Note that this process does not provide a true “surplus” value for each team because each team is also overpaying on players. However, you won’t know who is being cut for a number of weeks, and that probably shouldn’t factor into your allocation strategy. It’s important to take stock of who in your league seems to have all the riches. There are a few different ways to do this but I like to take a simplistic route and isolate the league to players who are rostered lower than the average salary. Then, I sum the difference (Avg Salary – Actual Salary) by team and end up with something like this:

Right away I can see that there are two teams who have a big discrepancy between what they are paying and what other teams are paying on average. That could be a difference between two or three players, or it could be that a team is rostering a handful of players for a few dollars less than average. Let’s take a look at team F to see what is going on:

Team F looks a little less scary when you see that the value difference is spread out. Again, Yordan Alvarez needs to be adjusted. But, who else on this list should I allocate arbitration dollars to? Well, that’s the fun part. It’s not necessarily as easy as just tossing dollars on Yordan and Devers. Even if at the end of arbitration, Alvarez’s salary increases to $50, I’d probably still be inclined to keep him on my roster if I were the Team F manager. If that is the case, what does that actually do? Well, it limits the amount Team F will take into next year’s draft, but it doesn’t free up Alvarez for me to draft. That’s where the real strategy comes into play and over the next few weeks, our Ottoneu team will be writing more about arbitration strategy.

Bigger bases in 2023 allowed for more stolen bases overall this year. More players reached the 20+ stolen base mark than ever before in the Statcast era. In fact, the 51 players who reached 20+ SBs in 2023, more than doubled last year’s mark of 24. The increase in stolen base output is explainable, MLB changed a rule. The flux of home runs in the past few years, however, is not as explainable, though many have tried to explain it with an analysis of the make-up of the actual baseball. But, both of those statistics are up individually and in combination.

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To qualify for this totally made-up award, a player must have earned positive value by the season’s end (2023) and show the largest difference in projected value versus end-of-season value. Simply put, I subtracted earned value from projected value, called it ‘Diff’, and sorted descending. It should be noted ahead of time that these three players were negatively valued due to very low plate appearance projections.

2022 Finalists: Jon Berti, Brendan Donovan, Brandon Drury

2023 Finalists: Josh Lowe, Jake Burger, Nolan Jones

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To qualify for this totally made-up award, a player must have earned at least $5 by the end of the season and accumulated at least $5 more than expected. This query logic allows for players who we already knew would be good but just didn’t know would be this good.

2022 Finalists: Aaron Judge, Paul Goldschmidt, and Freddie Freeman

2023 Finalists: Matt Olson, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Corbin Carroll

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