Today, I’ve prepared for you a fantasy roster served two ways. The first is a reduction of ottoneu with a head-to-head sauce. For the second, I took advantage of the manager’s special on expiring meats to plate a premium meal on a budget. Enjoy.
Ottoneu auction leagues are drafting furiously to finalize rosters prior to the start of the regular season. Earlier this week Justin touched on the best way to build out a roster. Head-to-head is also coming to Ottoneu in 2018. The Ottoneu community is buzzing with prospect junkies and interested owners looking to join new leagues.
Needless to say, Ottoneu is now in full swing, so if you’re still on the fence about trying out the game this year, now is the perfect time to jump in with both feet. With so much activity in March, most of our Ottoneu content is geared toward helping new owners learn the basics of the game. However, today I want to detour and offer a few tricks of the trade that veteran owners have figured out over time that might benefit those who are trying to take their Ottoneu game to the next level this season.
Trading for players you intend to cut…for cap space.
No matter how good your pre-auction plan, it’s not all that uncommon to exit an Ottoneu draft with less cash that you had hoped to save for future transactions. While a good rule of thumb is to keep about $10 in cap space, it’s easier said than done when some of the better bargains find their way into your hands at the end of a long draft night. What do you do when you’re up against a tight salary cap to start the season?
The NFBC Main Event is different. In case you’re unfamiliar, the National Fantasy Baseball Championship is a series of 32 individual 15-team leagues that also functions as its own super league of 480 teams. It’s a no-trading format, too, so balance isn’t just a strategy, it’s a must. It’d be great to win your individual league, but you’re playing to win the Main. It’s also loaded with some of the best fantasy players in the entire game. There’s something about a $125,000 dollar prize that brings out the best of the best!
This is my second year in the Main, but my first time doing a live draft. It paired perfectly with my trip to NYC for Tout Wars (more on that team on the podcast) making for a brilliant double-draft weekend. Tout Wars on Saturday and the Main Event on Sunday with my co-manager and friend, Dusty Wagner.
The ADP movers over the past two weeks can generally be group into several specific categories. Others are off on an island. I’ll examine the outliers and place others into their obvious groups (full top 245 at the article’s end).
Billy Hamilton (60 to 62)
I’m not sure why Hamilton has fallen a bit as the draft season has moved on. One theory I can make up is that owners are drafting with a more balanced approach and they don’t need to reach for Hamilton. The problem with Hamilton is he is a complete sink on your team in every other category besides steals. I have him as the 61st ranked hitter so he’d be lower with pitchers added so I can understand the drop.
Justin Turner (85 to 83)
I don’t think he’s moved as much as everyone else around him started moving. The talent curve begins to flatten at this point and small value changes can lead to bigger jumps.
In a few days, the Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational will begin drafting. The invitational is the combination of 13 different 15-team leagues full of the industry’s best and brightest (and Howard Bender). We’ve been given our draft positions and I got the third pick. After Arizona installed the humidor and dinged Goldschmidt’s value, the pick has no easy options. Instead of focusing on the first-round pick, I’m going to dive into my second and third round options to hopefully make a better choice with the first one.
With any draft or auction in which my draft pick is known, I plan my first two to three picks. Beyond that point, the variables increase, plan is out the window, and owners need to target values and needs.
The Screw Cancer league drafted last night. It’s an ottoneu FGpts format put together by former FanGraphs kingpin Dave Cameron. He – and some others – were forced to leave the league due to new commitments. It’s my first season in Screw Cancer, and it was my first draft of the season.
Since joining the league, we’ve raised $1,283 for cancer-related charities. If you’d like to participate, please contact me directly.
I’ve been prepping for two AL-only leagues, so the today’s thoughts only involve mainly AL hitters but can be extended to either league. While working on my evaluations here are some observations.
Create a plan for the injured X-factors
The two hitters who could carry a fantasy team, if healthy, are Michael Brantley and Miguel Cabrera. If (BIG IF) they get a full season of healthy plate appearances, I’d not be surprised if they were top-20 hitters. Owners aren’t showing a ton of faith since Cabrera’s ADP is at 95 and Brantley’s at 245.
No one knows for sure how they’ll perform so owners need to know before the draft where they feel they can gamble on rostering them. Owners need to make this decision ahead of time, not on the fly in a draft or auction. Come up with a plan you can live with and stick to it. Their evaluations can be adjusted as detailed reports become available from spring training on their health.
Most Fantasy drafts embody a sort of Calvinist view of the world: your draft position is a matter of predestination, where you wind up is arbitrarily determined, and there’s nothing you can do to alter the outcome. But drafts in the National Fantasy Baseball League are more Lutheran: there are things you can do to affect your position. To determine draft order in snake drafts, the NFBC uses what it calls the Kentucky Derby System, because it resembles the way post positions get chosen for the Derby. NFBC owners can indicate their draft position preferences beforehand by ranking them. If the owner doesn’t bother, the default ranking for that team is what you’d expect: 1 through Whatever. The NFBC computer then randomly picks the order in which each owner’s preferences are consulted. The first owner gets her first choice, the second owner gets his first choice unless it’s already gone, in which case the computer moves on to the next owner and doesn’t come back to Owner Number Two until everyone else’s first preferences have been consulted. And so it proceeds with second preferences, third preferences, and so on. Thus, it’s theoretically possible that the last owner in the KDS sequence gets the first draft choice.
The question is, does she want it? And that’s what we decided to find out: are there any differences at all, this year, among draft positions? If so, how big are the differences and which positions are best? And how can you go about getting those positions? Read the rest of this entry »
Since NFBC ADP (average draft position) data has been available here at FanGraphs, I’ve kept the weekly values. Here are some biggest ADP movers over the past three weeks who started or ended up in the top-250 picks.
A note to remember is that a move at the top is more important in the steep section of the talent curve instead of later with the talent levels off.
Justin Verlander +2 (37th to 40th)
Zack Greinke +2 (44th to 46th)
Robbie Ray +3 (44th to 47th)
Yu Darvish +2 (50th to 52nd)
The second-tier starting pitchers are dropping in ADP. This drop is not surprising as my podcast mate, Rob Silver has noticed this spending trend away from starters in previous seasons.
I usually find it closer to 68/32 or 69/31 by March.
— Rob Silver (@RobSilver) January 25, 2018
I don’t see either of these pitchers as dropping in value, just the overall hitter-pitcher mix.
Alex Bregman -2 (34th to 32nd)
Owners are liking Bregman more and more. I think he’ll eventually be going in the second round regularly as owner have a “fear of missing out” with him
A few days ago, many of the best fantasy baseball minds got together for the 15-team mixed LABR draft. While several storylines existed with it, the running joke in the draft chat was it if Mike Podhorzer or Scott Pianowski would blink first and draft a pitcher. Mike did and took Jake Arrieta in the 7th round while Scott held out until the 12th. While these two owners obviously took accumulating hitters to an extreme level, other owners took a more balanced approach or bought into pitching. Finding a hitter-pitcher balance, especially in a draft can be tough to calculate on the fly. The following a simple tool to help with that in draft confusion.
The first concept to understand is that the talent is not evenly distributed. I went over this concept earlier this week showing the non-linear talent drop using auction prices. Using concepts from this analysis can help create a simple framework by giving each round its own auction value. This can be done by going to our auction calculator, entering your league settings, and downloading both the hitter and pitcher values.
Read the rest of this entry »
