It can’t all be cut, cut, cut. You need to roster at least five outfielders in this game and once the season gets going, it can be challenging to find good ones to fill the gaps. Trust me, the gaps will appear. Sure, you can pick up an outfielder from auction anytime you need one, but will they perform anywhere near my calculated 4.14 replacement level points per game (P/G) mark for the position? Probably not. Go ahead, give it a shot. Go to the players page in your Ottoneu points league and see how many free agents who played in at least 20 games last season with a P/G mark higher than 4.14 are available. That makes it all the more important to make good keep/cut decisions. So let’s go. Read the rest of this entry »

The year was 2023, the MLB season was ending, and Elehuris Montero was on a tear Read the rest of this entry »

The points per game (P/G) mark drops when it hits the middle infield position. In fact, players lined up at second and short hold the lowest P/G replacement level marks among defensive positions. Even Catchers do better. It’s hard to find power-hitting middle infielders and easy to find quick, speedy base-stealing ones. Analyzed below are three who emanate young potential and one who pulsates nostalgia. Each of them bring their own challenges to the keep/cut decision-making process. Read the rest of this entry »

Salaries can inflate as the season goes on. A player that makes you think pass as the auction price heads above $2 in March may look more like an easy $4 in the middle of July. Ben Rice is that player. But what do you do with him once the season is over? Check RosterResource? Follow the offseason beat? Or, take matters into your own hands and head to the winter meetings to ask the brass some hard-hitting questions? Whatever you choose, you can also incorporate a plethora of statistics to make your decisions more informed. Join me as I grapple with my own keep/cut decisions at the corner-infield position.

Replacement level 1B (24 rostered): 4.55 P/G

Replacement level 3B (24 rostered): 4.36 P/G

2024 Keep/Cut: C – CI – MI – OF – SP – RP

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I am lucky enough to once again rank players at third base this season. The prep work begins now. First question; who is new to the list? Who will I rank this year that I didn’t rank last year? To answer that question, I loaded up the auction calculator, prioritized the “3B” position, and edited the “Starts to Qualify at Position” way down to five. That means all players who played five or more games at 3B in 2024, get placed in the same pool, on the same scale, and valued based on their Steamer projection. Who did I find that wasn’t around last season? To explain it, a poem:

New to 3B

On these keys I will pound,

on this list Jazz Chisholm Jr. can be found.

And if you please, Joey Ortiz.

While Junior Caminero may drive a Camero,

Vladimir, Jr. Guerrero is instantly a top numero.

Connor Norby likely won’t hit forty,

but with twenty he may be sporty.

–

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Reader beware:

A human wrote this article. Some humans’ caffeine levels can fluctuate in predictable patterns and correlate strongly with “time of day” data points. Yet, there’s no telling how many milligrams were present in the author’s typing fingers at the various stages of writing this article. It was an iterative process that took the author much longer than he had originally expected. While a human wrote this article, a machine wrote and generated many sections, namely ChatGPT’s “gpt-4o” model. From here on out, anything written or output by the very friendly and human-helping artificial intelligence (be careful…they’re listening…) will be italicized.

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Assuming each team in your Ottoneu points league rosters two catchers, and you are playing in a twelve-team league, the replacement level points per game (P/G) mark for catchers in 2024 was 3.4. That means in most leagues, you should be able to find a catcher who can match somewhere around that mark at any point in the season on the waiver wire. In this example, we would set the rostered catcher mark at 24. But that’s not always the case. For example, if only five teams are rostering two catchers (10) while everyone else is rostering one (7), we would decrease our number of rostered catchers from 24 to 17, bringing up the replacement level mark to 3.9 P/G. For the point of this article, let’s set it at a hard 3.6 P/G and move on. In this article, I’ll list some of the catchers I am rostering and analyze whether they should be kept on my roster.

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In the 30 plate appearances leading up to the playoffs, Harrison Bader had gone three for 25 with four walks. His 13-game slash line was .120/.233/.120 heading into the Wild Card Series against the Brewers. Bader was slumping. Though he was brought in as a defensive replacement in that series against the Brewers, Bader did not record a plate appearance. His next at-bat came against Tanner Banks in game one of the NLDS against the Phillies when he was brought in as a pinch hitter in the top of the ninth.

Bader swung on the first pitch:

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Arbitrary (ar·bi·trar·y)

1. based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

My Ottoneu arbitration strategies have varied over the past few years. I’ve been overly analytical, downloading .csv after .csv, splicing and merging and concatenating until there was more data than I cared to actually do anything with. I wrote last year about measuring salaries against the average and tipping the scales on already overpriced players. Sometimes it can be more fun to simply add a few dollars where it feels right. That’s what I did this year. Here are a few notes and thoughts I recorded as I dished out my dollars Read the rest of this entry »

Writing about fantasy baseball twice per week typically comes with a self-inflicted expectation of actually being good at playing fantasy baseball. I had some “W’s” this season (also known as dubs) and plenty of “L’s”, as the kids like to say, but being right in the middle feels worse. You can be the derelict, the scummy sewer rat who dwells at the deepest depths of the league standings. Or, you can be the king, looking down upon the peasants who hunger and thirst. But, being in the middle? It doesn’t lend itself to much insightful advice or analysis. “Write something actionable!”, I hear in the deepest REM parts of my sleep. Well, here I now hover, attempting to write something of the sort. In four parts, I’ll help you understand your options, if, like me, you are stuck in the metaphorical bathyal zone, swishing your dorsal fin back and forth hoping to make it up a few levels.

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