So, you’ve made the difficult decision to start rebuilding in your dynasty fantasy baseball league. Maybe you’re coming off a competitive window but salary inflation and arbitration have conspired to prevent you from running the same roster back again this year or you had a really unlucky season and need to tear everything down. Whatever the case may be, you’re here now and need to start somewhere. Last week, I walked through that decision-making process and how to start evaluating your roster, now you need to start making things happen.

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The process. Taking a step back. Tanking. However you put it, nearly every team in Major League Baseball has been faced with the decision to rebuild at some point in the recent past. Sometimes it’s a quick retool lasting a year or two or maybe it’s a full tear-down with a multi-year cycle before sniffing the playoffs again. Dynasty fantasy baseball — and Ottoneu in particular — is no different, where the decision to build for the future is one of the core experiences of the format.

When Ottoneu was established, it was designed to try and emulate the job of an MLB general manager as closely as possible within the confines of a fantasy baseball setting. That meant deep rosters, access to the full minor leagues, and the ability to truly build for the future. I’ve played fantasy baseball for over 20 years and have been playing Ottoneu since 2011 when it was first established. It’s my favorite format I’ve played in all those years, and luckily, I’ve managed to avoid a major rebuild in any of my leagues until now.

My very first Ottoneu team was in League 32 – Fantasy Field of Dreams and I’ve held onto this team ever since. I’ve finished as high as second in this league and never lower than sixth until 2021. The prospect of rebuilding was never really all that appealing to me. I preferred to draft and wheel and deal my way into contention every year even if that “always compete” strategy never resulted in any championships. I thought it was more fun to try and push for that top-three finish than to “waste” a year (or years) rebuilding. Unfortunately, without a strong foundation to stay competitive every year, the tank has finally caught up with me.

I thought it would be helpful and instructive to walk through this rebuild to impart any lessons I learn to you, dear reader. My hope is that a guide to rebuilding in Ottoneu should be different enough thanks to the quirks and nuances of the unique format while still having some value for those of you who don’t play Ottoneu. Perhaps it’ll make your decision to start rebuilding a little easier or help you along the way if you’re already knee-deep in your own step-back cycle.

Making the Decision

I finished the 2021 season in seventh place and foolishly tried to run it back again last year. There were tons of holes on my roster but I thought I had enough pieces to be competitive with a good draft. It didn’t work. I quickly fell into last place once the season started as injuries and poor talent evaluation both dragged my team to the bottom. By May, the writing was on the wall — this team stunk and I’d need to do a lot of work to turn it around.

And that’s one of the first lessons I should have learned: you need to be brutally honest with your position. From 2017–‘19, I finished in sixth place for three straight seasons. That should have been a huge warning sign that my strategy of trying to compete every season wasn’t working. Those teams had some nice pieces like MVP-era Christian Yelich, Coors-era DJ LeMahieu, Whit Merrifield, and J.T. Realmuto. What they didn’t have was any sort of keepable pitching what-so-ever. That should have been evident in the final points-per-game (P/G) and -per-innings-pitched (P/IP) each season but I (arrogantly) thought I could overcome that hindrance.

To be fair, I did a pretty good job of building a competitive offense (thanks to the juiced baseball!) but I just couldn’t figure out an answer for my pitching staff. It regularly sat in the bottom half of the league by points-per-innings-pitched and was the downfall of those offensive powerhouses in 2018 and ‘19. A more honest evaluation and reflection after each of those years could have resulted in a decision to start rebuilding a lot sooner.

Evaluate Your Roster and Develop a Plan

These next two steps really go hand-in-hand. Once you’ve decided to start rebuilding, laying out a rough roadmap towards contention is your next step. A rebuild without an exit strategy hews too close to how the Marlins approach each season in the big leagues. It’s too easy to push the goalposts back each year if you’re not making progress so having a concrete plan in place helps you break out of that cycle.

You can’t really build that timeline until you’ve evaluated your roster and figured out who is coming along for the ride and who is dead weight. Rebuilding teams aren’t just deciding to keep players for next year, they have to take into account their timeline back to contention. Because of salary inflation and arbitration, the players you keep today will be that much more expensive down the road. If you’re looking at a quick one- or two-year retool, keeping a player with $1–$5 of surplus value makes a little more sense than if you’re looking to rebuild for multiple years. Those borderline keepers should turn into easy cuts if their salary in a few years prices them out of your roster.

Players with tons of surplus value — $10 or more — make sense as long-term keepers because they’re the players that will be contributing on your next competitive roster down the road. These are your centerpieces to your team — usually young major leaguers who have already established themselves but who have a cheap salary right now.

For my team in League 32, those centerpieces are probably these four guys:

Even though Wander Franco doesn’t necessarily have a projected surplus value in 2023, the potential in his bat is off the charts. Even if he ends up not hitting for as much power as expected, if he’s healthy and continues his upward trajectory, he should be worth the large hit to my salary cap. The other three players all have plenty of surplus value and would likely fit on nearly every roster around the league at their price, even if their projections aren’t that gaudy.

Making those keep or cut decisions with a two- or three-year outlook can be pretty tricky. It’s hard enough projecting for next season, let alone a few years into the future. Luckily, ZiPS projects three years into the future so you can at least get an idea of how your roster might look in 2024 or 2025. Those long-term projections aren’t perfect, but they’re a good baseline to start from when determining which players to keep and which to cut.

On the other hand, if you’re just starting your rebuild, you’ll need valuable pieces to trade off during the season to continue replenishing your roster. This isn’t as important as determining who the long-term core of your team is, but they’ll be a critical part of moving your rebuild forward. Think of them as the MLB veteran signed to a one- or two-year deal to be used as trade bait during the summer. For my roster, that’s someone like my $25 Max Muncy or $21 Teoscar Hernández. Those two are projected to be solid contributors, and if they have a strong season in 2023, they’d both make fantastic trade pieces during the summer for a team looking to upgrade for the stretch run. They’re cheap enough to be keepers in 2023 and good enough to be a significant upgrade for a team during the summer.

Determining which players are long-term keepers and which players are sellable keepers might seem like they’re at odds. It depends on where you’re at in your rebuilding process. Since my team is still towards the beginning, I’ve still got sellable pieces on my roster that I can keep this year with the intention to move them for more valuable pieces later on.

Now we need to talk about prospects. For a rebuilding team, you’d expect that prospects are the bread and butter of the process. While that might be true to some extent, I’m here to argue that prospects are a trap. Yesterday, Lucas Kelly did a great job breaking down much of my argument in his piece on keeping minor leaguers. With prospects, you’re hoping that their development path and introduction to the majors is as smooth as Juan Soto’s while trying to keep them on your roster with a low enough salary if/when they hit snags along the way.

For example, Marco Luciano has an average salary of $5 in Ottoneu right now (and I happen to currently roster him in League 32). His ETA on his prospect profile says 2024, but he hasn’t played above High-A yet. Even if he does hit that ETA, it’s unlikely he’ll make an immediate impact until a year or two later. At that point his salary will be at least $7 and maybe higher if he gets any major league playing time. Will he be worth that salary then? Maybe, but it’s a risk you have to weigh and Luciano’s timeline might not line up with your own cycle. Lucas made the same argument with Jack Leiter in his article yesterday. With prospects that are multiple years away, are they even going to be contributing in the major leagues when you’re aiming to break out of your rebuilding cycle? I’m choosing to keep Luciano at $3 because the salary is low enough I can take the risk to see if he pans out and he might even make an enticing trade piece this summer if his minor league season is more successful than last year.

With that said, there are some prospects who do make sense to try and build around. With the new CBA incentivizing teams to promote their top prospects earlier in the season, it’s easier than ever to figure out which prospects are going to be given a full-season opportunity in the big leagues. These MLB-ready prospects are usually deep into their development process and can usually be trusted to return some modest value now while hopefully bringing back even more value later on. My team in League 32 has four guys like that: George Kirby ($10), Ezequiel Tovar ($3), Grayson Rodriguez ($3), and Shane Baz ($3). I’m betting that these guys will develop enough to become centerpieces on my roster in a few years and they’re close enough to the majors that I can make a call on whether or not they’ve developed sufficiently fairly quickly in my rebuilding process.

That’s it for now. My next installment in this series will examine my opening moves of this rebuild from last summer and dive into a potential draft strategy.

Here’s a shock; Reynaldo López holds the sixth-best WAR and sixth-best FIP (as of games through 9/28/22) among qualified relievers in 2022. If you rostered him from the start of the season until now, which I’m sure you didn’t, you would have accumulated five wins, leveled out your ERA with a 2.84 contribution, and almost certainly lowered your overall WHIP thanks to his career-low 0.93.

In 2022 López lowered his BB% by nearly eight percentage points and increased his K% by over five percentage points when compared to his 2020 season. Just look at how his statcast percentile ranks have changed over that time:

How did he do it? I won’t dance around the answer trying to build tension, I’ll just deliver it up front; he became a reliever and started throwing harder. In 2022, he only started one game and in that start against the Texas Rangers on June, 10th, he only threw two innings, acting as an opener in what essentially was a bullpen game.

At the end of the 2020 season when López was 26 years old and holding a 6.49 ERA, the White Sox didn’t know what to do with the big righty. He started nine games and only threw 57.2 innings. In 2021, he bounced back and forth between reliever and starter roles, and in his reliever roles, he averaged two innings. In 2022, only 14 of his 59 games have gone over one inning. When a pitcher knows he is only going out for one inning, he can put a little more ompfff in his fastball:

It would certainly seem that throwing the ball harder on all of his four pitches used in 2022 has led to overall improvements, but each pitch on its own has improved in Whiff%. In addition, his overall out-of-zone swing % has improved.

So, is it that simple? Throw the ball harder for a shorter period of time and you’ll be better? You’ll double your WAR in a single season and you’ll more than double your WAR from two seasons ago? Decreasing his FIP has gone a long way when it comes to increasing his WAR. If a pitcher limit’s their home run totals while also limiting the walks they give up, they are on their way to an improved FIP.

But the real kicker here is that while he has lowered his FIP, increased his Whiff%, increased his Chase%, lowered his ERA, his WHIP, and his BB/9, López has held an unsustainably low HR/FB rate in 2022. He has only given up one home run on the year. Last year, he gave up 10. It’s not necessarily crazy for a reliever to give up only one home run. So far in 2022, there have been five qualified relievers who have given up one home run and 14 qualified relievers have given up only two home runs. But, scroll back up and look at López’s statcast percentiles and you will see that he still gives up hard contact.

In every year of his career, López has been above the average of balls in play that are fly balls. If he is still giving up hard contact, but in smaller samples as a reliever, and he is still putting the ball in the air more often than the average, yet he is no longer giving up home runs, what will happen?

Steamer projected 13 home runs to be hit off the Chicago righty, but to be fair, he was mostly projected as a starter. Regardless, let’s re-calculate his FIP on the year and throw in five more home runs for a total of six. His FIP is now 2.96 which is more in line with his xFIP of 3.27. Finally, here’s the point: Reynaldo López has gotten lucky this year with home runs. He has limited his walk rate and the home runs he has given up tremendously, but it’s not sustainable.

This may seem like an off-season article, but we’re nearly there. You may be looking through leaderboards and you may notice López’s excellent reliever WAR standing to finish off the year. You may notice his FIP. You may notice his velocity increase, his new role, and his improved whiff rate. Don’t get me wrong, López has had a nice season. It has been a great way to bounce back and become relevant once again. But, hidden under all those improvements, is fly ball/home run luck.

On Monday, September 5th, Labor Day, I sat in parking lot traffic in Baltimore, trying to make it into Camden Yards by the first pitch. This was a first in a long time. I wasn’t clogged in a traffic jam trying to leave the parking lot, I was trying to get in. As a Maryland native, Camden Yards has been the place where I’ve taken in the majority of my live baseball action and I could tell, as parking lot attendants waived me on to the next lot around the block, something was in the air. When I got to the stadium, there was more energy, more talk in the crowd about the actual team, and though the nose-bleed seats in left-field remained empty, there were more fans. Baltimore has always drawn an excellent, engaged fanbase to the stadium. But as you can imagine, the past few years have been a little quieter. On Monday the fans piled in to watch a pivotal matchup against the division rival Blue Jays and in the top of the eighth, the Orioles held the game at a one-run deficit.

O’s reliever Bryan Baker was throwing when this happened:

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The first inning of any spring training game should come with tempered expectations, but I always find myself like the kid in the bleachers whose parents thought it would be a good idea to just get the ice cream out of the way before the first pitch is thrown. With a chocolate-smeared face and wide eyes, I find myself taking in every pitch as if I’ll never see another game again. So, maybe that’s why my reaction to Clarke Schmidt’s first inning against the Phillies motivated me to write about the Yankee righty, or maybe, he’s a pitcher that should be on your radar in keeper and dynasty leagues. Let me preface this article with the mutual understanding that I am not a prospects guy, I’m just a kid watching from the bleachers taking in the sunshine with chocolate on my face, excited to see baseball again.

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Arguing price is something that has been going down since currency was made out of copper coins and some of the coins had holes in the middle. In today’s world, price negotiators say things like, “$3.15 a gallon for gas?! You’re out of your mind!” or “I’m not paying over $3 for a watermelon, I’m just not!” Whether you’re the type to wait for a sale on underwear or the type to just go and pay what you pay because, well, you need it, all of us can relate to the idea of arguing a price. In my last piece on Kyle Freeland, I made the case that he’s worth $4. I was immediately argued with (politely, that is) about that price, and you know what? I may be overpaying. But, that’s the beauty of price! It’s here, it’s there, it’s really up for debate. So, let’s do it, let’s try this: Garrett Hampson is not worth $8 in FanGraphs points Ottoneu leagues. Here’s why:

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I recently took over an Ottoneu team for the upcoming 2022 season. If you are unfamiliar with Ottoneu, it’s keeper league where you get to make trades from mid-November to January 31st. Any players left on your roster after that you keep, using the auction draft to fill in the missing pieces. Taking over someone else’s team kind of feels like moving into an empty office. There are a few cobwebs in the corner, the previous owner left a really cool pen in the desk drawer and there’s a very stinky sandwich in the staff refrigerator that you somehow feel like is your new responsibility.

The fun part is taking stock of what you have and trying to decide what you want to keep (cool pen) and what you want to cut (stinky sandwich). In this series of posts, I’ll write about the decisions I have to make, how I go about analyzing the data before making my decision, and then what decision I plan to make. You too could be doing this kind of thing, all you have to do is take over someone’s abandoned team and search through the desk drawers when you move in.

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There are a number of players who have seen a change in playing time post-trade deadline. Abraham Toro moved into a near everyday role upon Alex Bregman’s injury and was consistently hitting towards the bottom of the order. But, since being traded to Seattle, Toro has found himself hitting in the 5 spot, keeping his everyday role intact, only at second base rather than third. It is likely that Toro would have found himself back on the bench, or worse, as Bregman nears a return from injury. Since moving to Seattle, Toro still does not have the most crystal clear path towards an everyday role, but it’s getting clearer. The Mariners Depth Chart shows a lot of interchangeable pieces and it’s not clear whether or not Toro will continue to fill the 2B spot if his bat begins to go quiet. Regardless, Toro has made an impact with his new club, has begun appearing on many analysts’ waiver wire feeds, and has hit from the leadoff spot in his two most recent appearances. Let’s take a dive down the rabbit hole and see what Toro’s game is all about. 

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The Is It Too Early Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Ian Kahn

Strategy Section

• Is it too early?
  • Is it too early for individual scoring categories to matter?
  • Is it too early to play the matchups based on category standings?
  • Is it too early to punt categories or to alter your pre-season strategy?
  • Is it too early to evaluate how you did at the draft table?
  • Is it too early to cut a player that you spent meaningful draft capital on?

Hot / Cold Starts

• Cold Players
  • Patrick Corbin
  • Luis Castillo
  • Lourdes Gurriel Jr.
  • Francisco Lindor
• Hot Players
  • Cedric Mullins
  • Byron Buxton
  • Jazz Chisholm
  • Matthew Boyd
  • Danny Duffy

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To say the least, the 2020 fantasy baseball season will go down as a one-of-kind. A late start led to a 60 game sprint. Seven-inning double-headers. Weeks of rescheduled games because of COVID-19 positive tests. The National League DH. Twenty-eight-man rosters in September. Each of these on its own would fill the headlines. With the changes coming all at once, they felt overwhelming. I’m hoping to calm everyone if any and hopefully not all of the changes happen again. Here is some advice on how to handle the changes.

The help divided up into league setting and individual manager focus. While I inserted plenty of my own advice, I wanted to make sure as many people as possible contributed so Tweeted out and asked during my chat for input.
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