If you sort last season’s starting pitchers by average velocity and set a filter for 50 innings pitched, you’ll find Nathan Eovaldi at the top of the list with a 96.2 mph fastball. He shares that distinction with Danny Salazar, who has already had his day in the sun. Elite skills, especially velocity, are the things to look for in an undervalued asset. Eovaldi might be a good late round target based on that velocity alone, but let’s go through the exercise of evaluating him all the same.

Last year was the best of Eovaldi’s career, which spans parts of three seasons. He pitched to a 3.39 ERA and 3.59 FIP, although his xFIP was a less robust 4.15. That’s because he held home run rates well below average. His stinginess with long balls (7.1% HR/FB over 260 career innings) could be his related to his home park, part of his skill set, luck, or a combination of those factors.

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The 2013 postseason included some of the best young pitchers in recent memory. Alex Cobb battled Danny Salazar in the AL Wild Card game and emerged victorious. Sonny Gray twice faced perennial Cy Young candidate Justin Verlander, and he outdueled him the first time. But Cardinals youngster Michael Wacha stole the show with his five postseason outings. He earned the NLCS MVP along the way by allowing zero earned runs over 13.2 innings in that round.

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Prospect analysts generally ranked Danny Salazar between the fourth and tenth best prospect in the Indians farm system heading into 2013. That was a big swing and a miss. Salazar broke out last season and posted gaudy strikeout totals at every stop along with a 96 mph heater and a stingy walk rate. In a ten start, 52 inning sample in the majors, he pitched to a 3.12 ERA and 2.75 xFIP, neither of which appears suspicious in any way. His season culminated in a playoff appearance against Alex Cobb of the Tampa Bay Rays. It should have been the kind of noisy breakout experienced by Stephen Strasburg, but it’s quite possible that Salazar will be undervalued in fantasy leagues this spring.

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One of my favorite things about Ottoneu is that owners generally have to do their own leg work when identifying players to target and how to value them. With the $400 auction budget and 40 player roster, traditional price guides are only really useful for the purpose of ranking. The extra dollars and roster spots greatly affect a player’s value. Like in real baseball where Shin-Soo Choo is more valuable to the Rangers than the Astros, the dynamics of Ottoneu ensure that certain players have different values to different owners – even if the owners agree precisely about the player’s expected performance.

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We statheads like when we can put things into tidy boxes. Pitcher X posts Y peripherals for expected result of Z. Buy or don’t buy accordingly. But not every pitcher is polite enough to reveal his true nature to us. That doesn’t mean we can’t leverage him for fantasy purposes; it just means that it’s hard to know how to leverage him.

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In 12 appearances including 10 starts, Sonny Gray did all the things you want to see out of a potential fantasy workhorse. He struck out over a batter per inning (9.42 K/9), kept the walk rate under control (2.81 BB/9), and threw ground balls over 50 percent of the time, all while wielding a 93 mph fastball. His ERA, FIP, and xFIP all stood below 3.00, which is about as sure a sign of dominance as there can be.

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In 2013, Lance Lynn came in like a lion and out like a…well he actually his final four starts were rather lion-like. But throughout the middle of the season he definitely played the part of the lamb, much to the chagrin of his fantasy owners. Lynn did manage to provide over $6 of value according to Zach Sanders, mostly because he won 15 games and struck out 198 batters. His 3.97 ERA and 1.31 WHIP certainly weren’t helping anyone.

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Fellow RotoGrapher Chad Young recently posted on the value of playing time as it pertains to weekly vs. daily leagues. The first commenter, Kris, asked a great (and difficult) question – “what is a roster spot worth?” Basically, how many dollars did an owner forgo to roster, say, Oscar Taveras last season?

The easy answer is, it depends. While I could sit here, reconstruct a standard league, make a handful of assumptions, and come away with a rough estimate as to the value of the last roster spot, such an analysis would miss too many factors. Instead, I will take the rest of this article to highlight some of the things you’ll want to consider when deciding how to deploy your final roster slot.

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I have a H2H league with my old college teammates that’s a little bit…funky. It’s a 6×6 league that includes K/BB with the usual five pitcher categories. We also roster about 1.5 times more pitchers than position players. In most leagues, it’s typical for owners to spend about 70 percent of their budget on position players. But for my league, the optimal split favors pitchers.

I ran my own models, used the tools available at Last Player Picked (currently defunct) and Baseball Prospectus and kept coming away with the same result – Cliff Lee was the most valuable player in the league with a suggested auction price in the upper $50’s. While I had my doubts about the valuation, I happily selected him for $34. According to Zach Sanders, he returned over $25 in normal leagues last season and I have every confidence that he blew away the $34 I paid for him in my league.

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Last season, John Lackey was selected as the 244th overall player in Yahoo! leagues according to Fantasy Pros. He wasn’t auctioned frequently enough to show up on their auction values report, so we can safely say that he cost $1 or wasn’t drafted in nearly all leagues. Lackey rewarded the few owners who took a flier with a $8 performance according to Zach Sanders. Owners were slow to buy into Lackey as a viable option. As late as September 6th, his ownership rate was at just 61 percent in Yahoo! leagues and that may have been his season high.

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