Now that you’ve gone through the keep or cut process, are you ready to draft? Do you have a big board on your wall with your targets? Do you know how much you’ll pay and how much you won’t? The FanGraphs auction calculator will tell you what a player is worth based on your league and whichever projection system you prefer, but which players do you need to get to fill out your roster? In this post I’ll detail my process for targeting players in an Ottoneu FanGraphs points league re-draft auction.
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At the start of the new year, I was invited to participate in an Ottoneu mock draft with other industry people and I was excited to take on the challenge. We mocked a 12-team, FanGraphs points Ottoneu league. Each team had a $400 salary and a 40-man roster to fill. Chad Young tweeted his analysis of each pick and you can follow each piece of valuable insight here. But, he was being polite when he wrote:

55) Edwin Diaz $25 @DrEephus

Like, within $2, maybe less? Sure. Diaz is the top pen option and if this is top pen price, that makes sense.

BTW, intrigued by what Lucas is doing here. Diaz, Clase, and Hendriks – that is an elite, elite pen. very curious how that would play out.

— Chad Young (@chadyoung) January 6, 2023

The truth is, I didn’t really mean to do it, draft three top closers, that is. I won’t make excuses, but if I did make excuses I’d say that I’ve never actually participated in an Ottoneu first-year draft, both of my Ottoneu teams were inherited and that I had also never participated in slow draft before. I had a hard time keeping track of where I placed bids. Insert emoji of person with hands up in the air here. Yes, I made a rookie mistake and I am not a rookie, I swear. But, mock drafts are mock drafts and if you go into one without some kind of planned experiment, then what’s the point? My experiment? Come out with guns blazing! Pay top dollar for top dollar players. What ended up happening when it was all said and done? Let’s dig in a little and find out.

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Hypothesis: Cornering the closer market will add value to my team.

The elite pen that Chad was intrigued by is projected by Steamer to be worth 1722.6 points. This draft took place prior to the unfortunate news that Liam Hendrick was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, so I used his 2022 points in this calculation. Here’s a pricing break-down:

The crazy part about this is I technically got a discount on Diaz and Clase when assuming FanGraphs auction calculator values. But, what happens when you corner the market? You end up with a surplus of stats and while that’s valuable, it means that you valued it more than everyone else. If this were a real league, I’m sure it would be difficult to trade away one of these closers and get a return that I was happy with. Add to that the fact that Hendriks has more important things to fight through than the bottom of the ninth, and you can see that I’ve placed too many eggs in one basket. Larry Schechter wrote about this exact issue in his book, “Winning Fantasy Baseball”. I’ll change some of the things Schechter wrote to fit my situation, but the idea is the same:

“Suppose [Lucas]…goes over-board on closing pitchers because there are too many great deals (in his opinion) to pass up. Later he needs to try to trade a pitcher for a hitter. He has several [relief] pitchers he can trade…When he offers these pitchers for a trade, he will be offered hitters more in line with the auction price, not his value. In other words, nobody else thought [Clase] was worth more than $23, so he’s not going to receive more than a $23 hitter for [Clase]. He will be forced to trade [Clase] for a $23 hitter, thus negating the gain he thought he had by buying [Clase].”

Lastly, suppose I still was aggressive with closers and took both Clase and Hendriks, but used the $23 I spent on Díaz on a starting pitcher. In hindsight, which is 20/20, I would spend that $23 on a pitcher who actually went for $22. Maybe the bidding would have gone further up, but for this exercise, this logic is all I have. Here are the starting pitchers who went for $22:

Just the points boost alone is enough to show how trading out that third closer for a more dependable stater at the same price makes more sense. Had I drafted Darvish instead of Díaz, I would have had an additional ~200 projected points to add to my total.

Conclusion: Drafting three elite closers is not the way to go, but drafting two and a good starting pitcher seems like a good strategy.

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Hypothesis: Being aggressive and paying for top talent is better than waiting and spreading your money more evenly.

In addition to locking in closers and cornering the market like a savage, ruthless entrepreneur who walks out of his apartment building, onto the streets and screams, “Cash rules everything around me! C.R.E.A.M.! Get the money!”, I dove straight into top-tier hitter bidding:

Having a roster with Vlad, Adley, J-Rod, and Soto made me giddier than a Canadian woman at a Shania Twain concert. But, that’s a lot of money spent early on. What we have here is a real “Stars and Scrubs” approach. The roster image above showed what I would consider my starting lineup, but just take a look at my bench:

That’s a long list of $1 players, but there are a few that I believe in. Regardless, how would things have looked had I passed on just one of my top targets, let’s say Julio Rodriguez at $47? Using the same logic as before and adding $1 to a few middle-of-the-pack players, I could have turned Julio Rodriguez into Seiya Suzuki and Jazz Chisholm, for example:

Obviously, the combination of these two players means I get more points, but who would have not been drafted? Well, that would have clearly been Adam Frazier. Here’s a breakdown:

J-Rod (rPTS 952.7) + Frazier (rPTS 445.8) = 1398.5 rPTS @ $48

or

Seiya (rPTS 773.9) + Jazz (rPTS 726.1) = 1500.0 rPTS @ $47

Conclusion: While there are a lot of assumptions being made here, the two middle-of-the-road players look better on paper. I’m saving $1 and generating 100 more points.

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Hypothesis: I can still get a lot of playing time out of $1 players.

Last week I wrote about the value in keeping, or not keeping, prospects on your roster, especially if they are being paid more than $1. This is a tricky part of Ottoneu. First, Ottoneu points leagues have 162-game maximums for all positional players, so you have to be careful with how often you’re setting a full lineup. Maximums can sneak up on you when you least expect it. Having a solid bench is very important, but how much do you want to pay for players who will rarely be plugged into your starting squad? It’s a difficult thing to balance, but I tend to rely on plate appearances when stocking my bench. It’s terrible when you need to plug in a couple of substitutes, but everyone on the bench is in AAA or rarely starting. Here are all my $1 players’ projected plate appearances by steamer:

While many people target upside with their $1 bids, as they should, I chose to go with players who were still available and who can be counted on for plate appearances. I forced myself into this situation because of my aggressive spending from the outset, but I’d rather have players who I know I can plug in when I need to instead of players whose playing time may not be very reliable. The aggravating part about this strategy was that I was out of the bidding for players like J.D. Martinez ($3), Juan Yepez ($3), Jean Segura ($3), Gavin Lux ($2), and Brandon Drury ($2). These players were all taken at great value and I missed out.

Conclusion: Spending early and going after high-value players early forces you to fill your bench with $1 players, but $1 players can still carry playing time.

All in all, I’m happy with my lineup, I think I put together a decent rotation and I locked in the two best closers in the game. Things would have to go right for me to work into the top three at the end of the season, however. I would need a Giolito bounce back, a Morton-like Morton season, Tyler Anderson’s 2022 to be the real deal and for my players to stay healthy. That’s a lot to ask for, but if it all goes wrong, I can always start a re-build, tear down. That’s the fun part of Ottoneu.

Last week I detailed my late-round starting pitcher recipe, “Thinning the Herd”. I wrote about the first six pitchers on this list and this week I’ll continue with the bottom six. As a reminder, here’s my ingredients list:

• A SwStr% in 2022 of at least 11%. (2022 MLB SP average – 10.7%)
• A K/9 projection (steamer) of eight or better. (2022 MLB SP average – 8.18)
• Positive pVals (Pitch Info) on at least two pitches in 2022.
• An ADP greater than 100.

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Sticky metrics refer to statistics that are highly correlated from year to year. Here’s an example. Among all qualified pitchers in 2022, Jordan Montgomery ranked 11th with a 12.9% swinging strike rate (SwStr%). Bringing the innings-pitched threshold down to 150 in 2021, he ranked ninth with a career-high 13.7%:

In every season except 2018, he’s had an above-average SwStr%. Projections don’t predict SwStr%, but if they did you could imagine that Montgomery would easily be projected above 12%.

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If you are rostering a player in the minor leagues who has yet to debut, how are justifying it? I don’t write that to be critical, I’m rostering a few myself and I ask myself the same question whenever I look over my roster. If your answer is something like, “They could be really good in the future!”, then you are also thinking like me and everyone else who is rostering young, yet-to-debut minor leaguers. Who are some of these players? Here are just a few hand-selected examples with high average salaries in Ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues:

Hitters
– Marco Luciano, $5.08
– Anthony Volpe, $4.88
– Jasson Domínguez, $4.37

Pitchers
– Jack Leiter, $5.52
– Grayson Rodriguez, $5.47
– Eury Pérez, $4.29

A player like Grayson Rodriguez can be found on the auction calculator because he is expected to join the O’s rotation either out of camp or early in the season. Using Steamer projection and the auction calculator’s FanGraphs points pre-settings, Rodriguez projects as a $1 player. Technically, he’s not worth rostering with a projected value of $-13.4, but you can usually treat any player with negative value as a $1 player. Regardless, he’s not expected to be worth the $5 plus he’s averaging in Ottoneu leagues, but his rookie season is not the reason you would roster him. You would roster him in hopes that he will be worth much more than $1 in 2024, 2025, and on. If you’re paying $5 now, he’s worth $1 now, but you’ll be paying him $7 next year when he’s worth $10, and maybe you’re doing alright. That statement probably deserves a much deeper dive, but for now, I’ll stay out of that rabbit hole.

This is the fun part of rostering yet-to-debut minor-league players. It’s literally prospecting. It’s fun to do with Bowman autographed baseball cards and it’s fun to do in fantasy baseball leagues. This prospecting becomes more exciting as the player gets closer and closer to success. But, what about a pitcher like Jack Leiter? Technically he edges out Grayson Rodriguez ever-so-slightly in average salary, but here’s a bold prediction; Jack Leiter will not return $5.52 in FanGraphs points leagues this season. Ok, maybe not so bold. No one can predict the future, but this one seems like a gimme. Last year (2022), Corey Kluber returned $5.70. If Leiter were to do the same in 2023, he’d have to be around Kluber’s 2022 numbers:

First of all, Kluber only walked 21 batters in 2022!? That’s the lowest total among all starters with at least 160 innings pitched and seven less than second-place Kevin Gausman. That’s what you can or should get for around $5.00 in FanGraphs points leagues. Kluber’s current average Ottoneu salary sits at $6.66. Second, I included Leiter’s Steamer projection tongue in cheek, he basically has no projection. His player page does have a 2023 MLB ETA, but who knows? So, we can’t realistically project Leiter’s 2023 value. I suppose we could compare his minor-league stats. That’s also unfair but at least it gives us some semblance of what he can do. Luckily, Dan Szymborski does the good work of projecting player performance a few years ahead with ZIPS:

I tossed in the HBP projections myself, thinking that maybe Leiter will gain a little more control over time, and I projected no holds, the rest is provided by ZIPS. Before you start going crazy over this projection remember that volatility in projections for players who have never played in the major leagues is very high. So, let’s get even more volatile! Let’s imagine that ZIPS is being very conservative and that Leiter’s 2024 season looks more like a combination of 2023 and 2024. This is a big assumption, I know, but stick with me. Here’s where Leiter would be in 2024:

I tweaked the HBP and BB totals to reflect a more realistic total, but the other categories are the sum of 23′ and 24′ ZIPS. If this turned out to be true, what would his value be in 2024? In FanGraphs points leagues, this projection would be worth approximately 725 points (rPTS on the table below). Now, we have something to work with. The auction calculator has the following pitchers in that realm for the 2023 season:

Remember my bold/not-very-bold prediction from earlier? I’m prepared to apply that to the 2024 season as well. Jack Leiter’s current average salary of $5.52 may not be what he’s worth until beyond 2024 even if he ends up being Nestor Cortes, which is a huge if. Up until this point, I have written nothing about arbitration, but it’s very possible that someone in your league could bump his salary up a few dollars and you would no longer be making smart decisions by rostering him. Could I be wrong about all of this? Yes! I have no doubt that Leiter will be a successful major league pitcher, but Ottoneu FanGraphs points fantasy leagues roster-able? Now? No. Why did I write all of this? Well, because I’m rostering a $6 Jack Leiter and had a theory about why that was a bad decision. Finally, just before the January 31st keeper deadline, I’m ready to let him go. Farewell my friend. I hope to pick you up for $1 in the draft and start this prospecting process all over again, but at a much more reasonable price.

It has always been difficult for me to understand pitcher volatility. Well, the volatility part isn’t hard to understand, actually, it’s very simple. Pitching in the big leagues is incredibly difficult and one tiny little element of a pitcher’s game could be off to make the whole outing unravel. But, what is hard to understand is what little element that is. Did a 1 mph drop on a four-seamer really make it all go south? Or, was it a matter of half an inch of location? Is it even measurable? Like, what if it was just bad gas from the previous night’s chimichanga that threw things off? Do you see where I’m going? I want to know why a pitcher does so well one day and so poorly the next. For my first round of this, I’ll start slow and focus on only one pitch, narrowing the question down to, why does one pitch perform well one day and bad the next? In today’s investigation, I’ll analyze and compare Robbie Ray’s July 3rd 2.6 wSL Pval (Pitch Info) with his July 24th -3.4 wSL pVal. Let’s have some fun.
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It is always odd to me how fantasy drafters come up with their auction values. “Oh, he’s a $10 SS at least!”. Ok, but, where did you come up with that number? If you load up the FanGraphs auction calculator with your league settings and Steamer projections, you will see exact dollar values that you can use to aid you in auction drafts. I write the word, “aid” because you will very rarely get the player you want for the price the auction calculator spits out. Sometimes you are lucky and get the player for under what the auction calculator thinks he’s worth, and sometimes you push the “Outbid By $1” button a little too much.

Regardless of whether your bid falls below the mark, above it, or right on the mark, the amount you paid cannot be evaluated until the end of the season. But, looking back at last season’s projections versus last season’s actuals can teach us a few things and if we were operating our fantasy team like we were operating a business, we’d all be sitting in the conference room drinking bad coffee and going over the fiscal year. Hopefully, someone brought in donut holes. In this post, I’ll look at 2022 steamer preseason projection values (hitters only) versus 2022 end-of-season values and make comparisons.

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If a player hits the ball in the air often with power, it should go out for a home run often, right? Sure, certain ballparks, weather, and environmental conditions will add unpredictability to that statement, but we can generally follow the guideline of “hit ball hard in air, ball go far”. The first step to hitting the ball far would be to get the ball up in the air more often. This is nothing new. While a hitter can, and has, done damage with hard hit line drives (Juan Yepez, 2022) and even hard hit ground balls (Chris Taylor, 2022), in the air is better.

Take a look:

2022 MLB wOBA on Hard Hit…

• ground balls .377
• line drives .633
• fly balls .867

That cute wee stanza shouldn’t excite readers too much, clearly, it doesn’t even necessitate the clean look of a FanGraphs table to hold it up. But, if a hitter puts the ball in the air, it doesn’t mean he will automatically do damage. If we take away the Hard Hit part of the splits above, it’s clear how important the Hard Hit aspect is:

2022 MLB wOBA on…

• ground balls .215
• line drives .685
• fly balls .354

As we prepare for drafts, it may be worth our while to look at players who have started to both put the ball in the air more and hit those fly balls out more often. That combination is key. While that combination does contribute to increased home run totals, it may also lead to increased strikeouts. A single season’s K% and HR/FB% don’t necessarily have strong correlations, but when we break down HR/FB into percentile groups and aggregate K%, we see some pattern:

The bar chart above simply points out that targeting hitters with high FB and HR/FB rates could make you draft a player like Keston Hiura (2022: K% 41.7%, HR/FB 29.8%). But, even with a .226 batting average he did hit 14 home runs in only 266 plate appearances last year. While there are many more than five players who qualify under this analysis, I’ve cherry-picked the five I find most intriguing. If you want to see all the players who I’m analyzing you can merge hitters who accumulated at least 100 PAs in both 2021 and 2022 and make comparisons between their fly ball rates and their home run per fly ball rates. There were 354 hitters total who accumulated 100 PAs in both 2021 and 2022, but 75 of them increased their FB% and their HR/FB% from year to year. Here are five that I am particularly interested in:

Jazz Chisholm Jr.
When I went to see how Jazz’s back was recovering, I found that he also had knee surgery? I’m not sure how I missed that but regardless, he’s penciled in as ready for Spring Training. One of the biggest knocks on young prospect Chisholm was his high K% which remains high, yet decreased in each of his three major league seasons:

30.6% (20) –> 28.6% (21) –> 27.4% (22)

While his K% has been going down, xwOBA, SLG, Barrel%, HardHit%, and launch angle increased. He is a pull-power hitter, so I wouldn’t expect him to keep dropping his K%. In fact, with a full season it may increase closer to his career by 28.4%, but if it comes with the steamer projected 28 home runs and 26 stolen bases, I personally would be willing to bump him up a few spots on my rankings.

Gleyber Torres
Is he really only 26 years old? Does he really have back-to-back stolen base double-digit seasons? He’s projected to be a 20(hr)-10(sb) player, Paul Sporer gave a hot take on his power for 2023, and he’s putting the ball in the air more often. What made his power dip so much in 2020/2021? It’s hard to say. But he did clearly start hitting the fastball again from a Pitch Info Pitch Value perspective:

-3.1 (20) –> -9.5 (21) –> 8.8 (22)

Those numbers are backed by Baseball Savant’s Run Value on the 4-seamer. Do you want a really quick glance theory? I think in 2020 and 2021 he tried to change who he is and he tried to get on base more often by swinging less. In 2022, he swung more often, and struck out more often, but hit the ball harder with a higher launch angle.

Luis Arraez
A few weeks ago I wrote about Arraez’s pull power, or, lack there of. While the contact-king isn’t likely to hit 20 home runs, he could add a lot of value if he were to first, sell out just a little more and second, hit the ball harder. Their is no doubt in my mind that Arraez has the batted ball skills to change his approach slightly. The real question is does he have the skills to add more power?

Rowdy Tellez
Some fantasy managers seem to be pretty high on Tellez this offseason and it makes sense. Like most of the players that hit fly balls with power, they strike out a lot too. But, Tellez’s ~20% K% the past two seasons isn’t all that bad. His batting average, however, is. A sultry .219 in 2022 should regress closer to his career average of .236, but steamer has it doing even better in 2023 at .247. But, it’s not average you’re after here, it’s power and steamer thinks that will increase as well. Rowdy finished 2022 with a slugging average of .461 and steamer pegs him at .485 for 2023. However, steamer also projects his home run totals to come back down from 35 in 2022 to 30 in 2023.

Anthony Santander
A healthy Santander is a good Santander. His 647 PA’s in 2022 marked a career high. Let’s go down the list of good things that happened for the O’s outfielder in 2022:
– Increased BB% (…and a better OBP because of it)
– Decreased K%
– Increased slugging
– Career-high home runs (33)
– Increased launch angle and barrel rate
All of those gains coincided with a slight increase, though a career high, fly ball rate. Steamer believes in the skills as well, projecting him for 30 dingers next year.

Bonus Round:

I intended to write about these two players before I saw an excellent, full-blown analysis on both in Nicklaus Gaut’s 2023 sleeper article. Both Cal Raleigh and Anthony Rizzo could be great power targets in 2023, Rizzo being more of a sleeper than Raleigh. Here are some quick notes on both players but I encourage you to read Gaut’s piece as well:

Rizzo
A change of approach to take advantage of Yankee Stadium’s short porch?
– 2023 tied career high homeruns (32) but he’s hit that exact mark (32) in four separate seasons.
– OBP is down, SLG is up
– pulling the ball more
– higher launch angles
– hitting it harder
– striking out more

Raleigh
– A young catcher with great power
– Max EV of 114!..and a launch angle above 20
– High, high K%, but could be improved on
– Projected for 521 (FGDC) PA’s in 2023

You need a little holiday gift for yourself, don’t you? Sure, you’ve probably received your copy of the Forecaster by now and you still have that racy romance novel to finish, but you should add a little more baseball analytics to your que. Go ahead, buy yourself a copy of FanGraphs’ own Mike Podhorzer’s Projecting X 2.0. I recently did and was not one bit disappointed. Many fantasy baseball touts refer to their “projections” often. You’ll hear pundit A say they are working on their projections and pundit B say their projections are vastly different than others, but it’s not always clear what that work entails or how they got those very different projections. Projecting X gives readers a better understanding of how projections should be created and empowers them to take on the task themselves. Regardless of who’s cooking your dinner, it’s always important to know the ingredients.

When writing about K% projections, Podhorzer sites his own research and some of Jeff Zimmerman’s research to identity three plate discipline metrics that help evaluators assess changes in hitter K%. Those three metrics are Z-Swing%, Contact%, and Zone%. Taking it one step further, Zimmerman’s age-curve research showed that hitter K% typically declines through age 24. Podhorzer’s e-book motivated me to take a look at these three metrics among young hitters from the past two seasons. Here are the hitters who accumulated at least 75 plate appearances in both 2021 and 2022 and finished 2022 as a 24-year-old:

If you look at how I’ve calculated these year-to-year differences you’ll see that I’ve made it so the numbers make sense from a positive/negative standpoint. In this case, Luis Robert saw the ball in the zone less often (-4.2%) and made contact more often (1.7%), but swung in the zone less often (-1.7%) while lowering his K% (-1.4%). Scanning the rows will show you that nine out of 12 players “did what they were supposed to do” and lowered their K% in their 24-year-old season.

While we see a few established, elite players listed in the table above, there are certainly a few intriguing players from a sleeper standpoint as well. Taylor Trammell lowered his 2021 K% of 42.1% down to 28.2% in 2022. While 28.2% is still significantly over the 2022 MLB average of 22.4%, it’s an improvement. It’s nice to see the likes of Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Brandon Marsh on this list and it’s also important to remember that some of these players were ONLY 24 for most of the 2022 season! If we kick it into experimental mode and drop the PA threshold down to 20 in each season, we see a few more interesting players:

I rostered Bruján in a few deep leagues and was tremendously disappointed, but he’s a young player who is still developing. Yes, he dropped his K% between 2021 and 2022, but like Trammell, he finished 2022 with a K% that still needs to come down (22.8%). Use caution when seeing those decreases in young players and be sure you don’t just assume they’ve figured it out. Hopefully, these two tables give you threads to pull on, rankings to adjust and perhaps, a little itch that can only be scratched with learning how to project player performance on your own. When the 2023 winter cold winds blow, download a copy of Podhorzer’s book and find yourself little gems like this to occupy your off-season hours.

How would you define Jeff McNeil as a hitter in just a few words? If you had to place him in his own “group” of hitters, who else would you place him with? Last week, I used a cluster analysis to find a player that might compare to Luis Arraez and in turn, help provide some approach recommendations for increasing his power. This week, I’ll use that same cluster analysis, with just a few tweaks, to determine what combination of Statcast and plate discipline metrics increases roto value on average. Let’s start with a refresher on my process.

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