This past week, in the ottoneu Slack Community, (check this out if you are interested in joining, which you should be if you play ottoneu) there was a heated debate about paying for top RP, particularly in points leagues. One side was arguing that the elite RP put up a Pt/IP score that few other players can manage. That if you are willing to pay $35 more for Mike Trout than Ryan Braun (projected to have a 200 point gap between them), why not pay the same premium for Aroldis Chapman over a guy 200 points below him – Santiago Casilla?

The other side argued that spending $30+ on a relief pitcher would be crazy – there are always solid RP options on the wire, so why not just wait and see who will be the next Wade Davis?

Both sides are right.

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Last Sunday, the FanGraphs Ottoneu League #2 did our auction. Chad Young, Brad Johnson and Scott Spratt have each given their thoughts on it. It was a unique auction (most are in some way) and by making a few early adjustments I was able to come away from it better than I expected.

To begin with, I hate to start any fantasy season in complete rebuild mode. I want to have a chance to win if everything goes right. Before last season was half way over I had about zero chance of winning so then I started a rebuild. I had the most free agent dollars, I picked up some $1 players (Harrison, Petit, Boxburger, House) and waited for a team to drop a high dollar player to free up some cash. The plan worked great by getting Joey Votto and Brian McCann. Also, I like prospects, even if they have limited upside, near the majors and picked up players like Matt Wisler, Carlos Rodon and Ty Kelly.

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On Sunday, I participated in the FanGraphs Staff Two Ottoneu auction. One of my favorite things about Ottoneu and auction drafts in general is the ability to compare their results to the greater market. If you trust crowdsourcing as a fair representation of a player’s value, then the team that came away from the auction with the most surplus value relative to player average prices across all Ottoneu leagues is the best team entering the season. You can find those total surplus dollars listed for each team below, as well as best and worst values by the same criteria. To see Ottoneu market prices, click here.
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After two straight first place finishes, I landed in second in the FanGraphs Staff League last year, and went into the off-season dead-set on regaining my crown.

I made a few trades, made my cuts and sat down to look at the available free agents…and was stopped in my tracks. I really had no good options.

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The baseball community — owners, scouts, fantasy analysts et al. — is slowly learning how Cuban hitters plucked from the Cuban National Series (CNS) perform in Major League Baseball. Unfortunately, the sample size is not increasing very quickly. The common fantasy owner is helplessly resigned to rely on a) scouting reports, and/or b) his or her own eyes, probably via a batting practice video uploaded online. Ideally, a Cuban hitter’s salary would serve as a proxy for what one could expect offensively and defensively from his imported bat and glove, but the market, and the information that defines it, is far from perfect.

The market for Cuban hitters is a pendulum, but rather than coming to rest, it is in full swing: hitters such as Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Jose Abreu, who are all but locks to fulfill the value of their modest contracts and then some, have plumped up the market for international signees. The Diamondbacks’ Yasmany Tomas, therefore, should not be compared to Abreu simply because the average annual values (AAV) of their contracts are almost identical. The dynamics of this particular market are nebulous, changing with every transaction.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t compare Tomas and Abreu statistically. Comparing the CNS and MLB performances of hitters more recently signed out of Cuba can still give us at least a faint idea of how we can expect Tomas to perform. This is my hope, at least. I’ll be the first to admit the analysis that follows is not as rigorous as I wish it could be, as the sample of contemporary, fantasy-relevant Cuban hitters who recently played in the CNS simply lacks breadth.

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With the cut deadline behind us, now is the time to start prepping for your auctions. One thing to do is identify your targets, but another is to suss out the competition. Who has cash to spend? How much? Who is building a new roster and who is filling just a couple holes?

I started by taking a broad look at my three leagues to see how much cash was kept and I was intrigued to see how different the three auctions are set to play out.

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The keeper deadline for ottoneu leagues is upon us (midnight on the night of 1/31 – tonight!), and that means it is time to start auction prep in earnest. As I have the past two years, I am going to help out with my auction values for all four ottoneu formats.

Also as per usual, I made a couple tweaks to the approach this year.
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If you’ve been wishing current Steamer projections were turned into fantasy values, wish no more, as I have done the work for you.

Below you’ll find the top 100 players for next year based on current Steamer projections, calculated using the evaluation system explained and updated on this site some time ago. The valuations are built for $260 budgets and standard 5×5 roto fantasy leagues, where only one catcher is started. Players are listed at their primary positions from 2014. The “obp$$” column in what the players are worth in an OBP format, in case you’re more interested in that sort of thing.

If you would like to view the rankings for all 7334 players projected by Steamer, please peruse this spreadsheet, for it is far too large to be posted on these hallowed pages.

Both the top 100 and the spreadsheet were updated at 10:55a ET to reflect a previous error.

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*Updated 10/23/2014 with Position Tiers ($5.00 USD).

The 2015 Steamer projections are up on FanGraphs! “Steamer” uses playing time projections from our depth charts, but right now there are important players (Dustin Pedroia and Jon Lester for examples) missing actual projected playing time. I therefore went into mensch-mode and manually updated Plate Appearance and Innings Pitched projections – very manually, but at least somewhat rational. What I did for these players was go into their “Steamer 600” projections and took their HR, R, RBI and SB per Plate Appearance projected rates (W, SV, SO per Inning Pitched for pitchers) and outputted associated counting stats connected to the quantity of Plate Appearances/Innings Pitched.

*To see which players I manipulated, go into the “P” and “H” tabs in the below embedded file: click on the “…” tab to the left of the current depicted tab. I highlighted all names and counting stats per plate appearance or innings pitched that I edited in Yellow so that I can associate some accountability with the end-rankings. I edited a few catchers’ PA totals even though Steamer already had totals for them (Lucroy, Mesoraco, etc.). I also edited Troy Tulowitzki‘s and Carlos Gonzalez’s PA totals, because…well, you know. I could spend all month editing the PA totals, but I’m not that much of a mensch.

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Every auction is different, but the one constant in any given auction is that things can go careening off the rails in an instant. Last night, I participated in an experts’ auction along with a group of writers from Yahoo, RotoWire, Razzball and more. It is a 14-team rotisserie league with 27-man rosters, an innings cap of 1,450 and a standard $260 auction budget, with on-base percentage instead of batting average, and saves plus holds instead of saves. You can check the league out for yourself right here.

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