Bounty From The Ottoneu User Community

One of the things I love most about ottoneu is the robust user community on Slack. Contrary to more widely used platforms like Yahoo or CBS, ottoneu is just small enough to bring all of its users together on one forum. This leads to helpful services like leagues wanted, trade reviews, and freely available analysis tools.

If you play ottoneu and would like to join the Slack community, please say so in the comments. I’ve asked one of the admins to come collect anybody who wants to sign up. If you’re not in an ottoneu league but want to join one, the community is a good place to find the right group of players. Now, onto the bounty.

A couple days ago, community member Justin released a Surplus Value Calculator into the wild. The purpose of the tool is to help you determine which players are valuable keepers and which might be overrated. Expected dollar values for every rostered player are compared against their actual price. The tool uses Steamer projections to form the expected values.

The tool is extremely easy to customize for your league. The instructions page explains everything in detail. In short, you download a rosters.csv from your league page, copy/paste, uncheck a couple filters, and you have default values and keepers.

The “Team Totals” tab has some interesting descriptive statistics. For my league, FanGraphs Staff Two, Steamer thinks we should keep a total of 136 players. They cost $1,756 and are worth $2,674. That tells us teams have $3,044 to spend in the draft, but the remaining players aren’t worth that much. The result is an expected 43 percent inflation rate.

The default tool can be edited. You can manually change a players’ keeper status in Column M on the “Rosters” tab – which I’ve done here for my league. In this example, I’ve marked yes for every player I considered keepable. I include expected inflation in my keeper values. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my keeper selections produced a negative 3 percent inflation rate.

I kept a few more players than I should have according to Steamer. And it’s true, our league is not going to keep 345 players. However, the inflation reads as negative only because Steamer has a few quirks that require manual adjustment. If I were to tinker with some of the marginal players, i.e. Ryan Madson ($3 to keep, $0 value), I think we’d get back to zero percent inflation.

You can also change the expected value of a player if you have custom values different from Steamer. I did not take that step in the above listed example. Prospects are listed as $0 assets, so they require some adjustment too.

I have only one critique of the tool – it’s inflexible about the total value in the player universe. Owners have a total of $4,800 to spend. Theoretically, that means there are $4,800 of players in the league. Reality is a little sloppier. An ability to arbitrarily increase total value in the league would be informative.

However, if you did want to increase total value in the league to say $5,200, all you need do is make some adjustments to the “Steamer $ Values” tab. You’ll have to manually select the X players beyond 480 to add into the positive asset pool. Hence why I’d prefer an automagical method of adjustment.

Justin’s surplus value tool is helpful both in preparation for the keeper deadline and the draft. Once you know who has actually been kept, you can quickly update the tool to calculate inflation.