For those following along, Ottoneu is at it’s busiest during these winter months leading up to the start of the next baseball season.  It’s designed that way, and the year-round activity of Ottoneu is one of the features that help set it apart from other fantasy platforms.  As Joe mentioned recently, there are plenty of reasons why you should give Ottoneu a chance this year, but today I want to assume you’ve already seen the light and are ready to sign up.  So, what’s next? Here are a few practical ways to get started once you plug into this great game.

Select Your Game Type

First things first: you’ll need to decide which scoring format suits your interest. Ottoneu offers a nice range of scoring options that include:

Classic: This is rotisserie-style 5 x 5 built into the basic foundation of Ottoneu, which (like all formats) includes 40 man rosters, $400 salary caps, daily lineups, off-season arbitration, and auction-style economics.  If you’ve been playing traditional Roto for years and have interest in Ottoneu, this is a great place to start.

Old School: This is considered the original Ottoneu  (4 x 4) format, and was designed with a sabermetric bent and geared toward power hitters and power pitchers (OBP, SLG, HR, R and ERA, WHIP, HR/9, K).  You can find an example of 4 x 4 standings here.

SABR & FanGraphs Points: Based on linear weights scoring, these two sabermetrically-inclined options are very popular, and it isn’t uncommon to see owners playing in multiple points leagues. Tons of resources and tools are available if you decide to try your hand in one of these advanced scoring leagues.  Standings for a points league look like this.

New: Head to Head is coming to Ottoneu in 2018!

ICYMI, head-to-head will be an option in @ottoneuBaseball in 2018. https://t.co/UsTO21a9kE

— Ottoneu Fantasy Sports (@Ottoneu) December 18, 2017

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The growing game of Ottoneu has a ton of great features that set the fantasy platform apart from the masses, but few are more unique than the annual arbitration process.  Now concluded across all leagues, arbitration (a 30 day process) unofficially launches what is a very busy off-season for Ottoneu owners.

As a quick reminder, Ottoneu arbitration enables each league owner to “correct” the market value of players whose salaries appear too low.  It’s an economic counter-balance to traditional dynasty rules that often let owners dominate a league for years if they amass the right players at the right prices.  Here is the actual arbitration rule:

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In 2015 Manny Machado finished the season as the #1 overall shortstop with 1,040 points, and it wasn’t really close, as Xander Bogaerts finished a distant 2nd with 787 points. But raw points aren’t everything, and since all Ottoneu leagues are auction leagues, true player value has to be measured as the result of production and cost (salary).  So which players were the most valuable to their owners in 2016?

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With 2016 leagues in the books, I’d like to present some league-wide season-ending stats to see what kind of conclusions we can draw about success in the very data-driven game of Ottoneu.  The focus here is one of the more popular scoring formats, FanGraphs Points (FGPTS), and the numbers you see in each of the first two charts represent the average standings data for all teams/all leagues by final 2016 finish.

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The fantasy baseball season has closed, but the game of Ottoneu continues long into the off-season (one of the hallmarks of its year-round appeal).  Following Justin’s take on what happened with some of the best teams in Ottoneu this year, I’ll focus today on how one team mastered this game, presenting you with an interview from the of the 2016 Ottoneu Champions League winner, Brent Daily.

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It’s that time of year again where we look ourselves in the mirror and admit defeat.  Some of these predictions are pretty ugly.

Disclaimer: these projections are were bold (at least they’re supposed to be), and most are made in the context of Ottoneu fantasy baseball.

1) Yangervis Solarte will outscore Rougned Odor in 2016.

From a Roto standpoint, Odor was the better player in 2016, breaking out for a .271 AVG with 33 HR and 14 SB’s.  This prediction was made in the context of Ottoneu however, and it’s wOBA-weighted scoring format didn’t love Odor nearly as much.  Looking back, this prediction now just appears to be poorly worded, since Odor (818 points, 150 games) outscored Solarte (570 in 109) by nearly 250 points, almost entirely with the benefit of a healthier season.  Solarte (2.5 WAR, 118 wRC+, .346 wOBA) was the superior player to Odor (2.1 WAR, 106 wRC+, .336 wOBA) in almost every other advanced offensive metric, so this one was kinda close.

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On Wednesday I lamented about how my year-long infatuation with prospect Nick Williams blinded me from seeing offensive value in other places that would likely have put my team in a better position during a rebuild.  Today I’ll take the same approach, focusing on the pitching side, and will use Jose Berrios as my prospect scapegoat.  Like Williams, I’ve owned Berrios since well before the 2016 season began, and invested fully into the scouting reports of a potential #2 starting pitcher. Better yet, I was convinced Berrios was more “polished” than most prospect pitchers, and that his strong command would quickly smooth out the inevitably bumpy transition through MLB lineups. Fast forward now to mid-September and Berrios has a 9.27 ERA in 44 IP, which includes 28 BB’s and 2.0 HR/9.  And yet, I still own him…

Using Ottoneu ownership and average salary data as of September, I limited my filter to all players currently owned for $3 or less, and then hand-selected a few pitchers who (using FIP and P/IP as quick standards for YTD value) appear to have enough future value to be at least as interesting as Jose Berrios once was to me so long (not really) ago.

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I have owned Nick Williams in a very competitive Ottoneu league since mid-January.  Effective today, I am cutting bait on Nick Williams.

Actually, Nick Williams is really just a proxy for all those glossy prospects we fall in love with. Exiting the 2015 season, I was coming off a championship but knew I’d be staring headfirst at a very difficult rebuild.  So, entering the spring of 2016 I did exactly what I usually advise new fantasy owners to avoid: stock up on a bunch of prospects and let hope fill in the strategic gaps.

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I’m going to do something a little different today and step away from fantasy analysis and try to leave you with something that is simple, very practical, and hopefully helpful.  With a shout out to my fellow commissioners out there, I’d like to give you a template for creating a fantasy league charter.

I’ve been playing fantasy baseball for 20 years now and I’ve had the honor of commissioning for most of that time too.  It can be a fun job but for those that have done it you know that it can also be a little rough sometimes.  No one enjoys stepping into the middle of heated league debates, trade meltdowns, or finding replacement owners, but if you’ve commissioned a league in the past odds are you’ve dealt with a few issues here and there.  While there’s no way to foresee or avoid every issue that can derail a fantasy league (and since there’s no substitute for having great owners as your foundation), a rock solid league charter can go a long way in setting both the tone and direction of your league long term.  In my opinion, it’s a must-have.

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“The trade deadline is fast approaching.” – Hard to believe that time is here.  This season has flown by, hasn’t it? With just one week before rosters solidify for the final stretch, now is as good a time as ever to ensure new Ottoneu owners are fully prepared for the future, which is now fast becoming the off-season.  Joe recently outlined the mindset that’s needed to approach the trade deadline strategically, depending on your place in the standings, but since it’s also my job to cover Ottoneu on these pages, I’ll take a more mechanical look at what happens at this critical point in the season.

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