Hey look, it’s your dad up there!
Freddie Freeman was trying to get Kyle Karros to look at his dad, Eric Karros, in the Dodgers broadcast booth.
Kyle didn’t give in 🤣 pic.twitter.com/cAW4XnHkcl
— MLB (@MLB) May 26, 2026
On the Agenda:
Welcome to the Daily SP Chart, click here if you’re new to get an idea of what I’m doing with these rankings.
The chart includes their performance for 2026, their opponent’s wOBA versus the pitcher’s handedness, and recently added opponent’s K% (also v. SP handedness), my general start/sit recommendation for 10-team, 12-team, and 15-team (or more) leagues – essentially a shallow, medium, deep league setup – and then a note about some, most, or all depending on the day. If a pitcher only has an “x” in 15-team, it doesn’t mean there’s no potential use in 10s and 12s, but it’s a much riskier stream for those spots.
These are general recommendations for standard 5×5 roto leagues, and your league situation will carry more weight whether you are protecting ratios or chasing counting numbers. I usually won’t have much to write about aces who are locked into our rotations. If you want to discuss someone further, please feel free to leave a comment. I usually do a few sweeps of the comments before game time in case there are time-sensitive questions.
Pretty straightforward board of starts/sits. Check back for some notes in the AM.
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Hot Right Now (HRN) is a weekly Ottoneu feature focused on popular players currently being auctioned or players who you should think about auctioning in your Ottoneu leagues. Even if you don’t play Ottoneu, we’ll be highlighting players you should be looking at in deeper and keeper formats. In this feature, we will break down players into two sections:
The RotoGraphs Ottoneu team plans to run this feature weekly, updating fantasy managers on the biggest movers in Ottoneu leagues with an analysis of how these players could or could not help your roster.
Thanks for coming out!! Sorry I forgot to post my goodbye before closing the chat. I just totally brainfarted and hit the end button before enter.
| 1:00 |
: Hey y’all thanks for coming out!! |
| 1:00 |
: Esmerlyn vs Nate Lowe in OBP? |
| 1:01 |
: It’s Lowe for me. Valdez is interesting, but probably peaks as a Lowe-type |
| 1:01 |
: Do you think McGonigle has some Roman Anthony in him in the sense that he’s got great barrel rate and hitting skills but that it might not translate to HR power? |
| 1:02 |
: Yeah, I don’t think he’s a lock 30-HR guy necessarily, but he’s also one of these guys who seems like he’s just going to keep getting better. The Utley comps are lofty but not completely misplaced as a top end |
| 1:02 |
: I’m on the JT Ginn bandwagon, but his next starts are tough. Better to swap out for a reliever (or his new teammate Jump?) or is he now a team streamer in deep leagues? |
With a third of the season in the books, the sample size for certain data and metrics has grown from too small to large enough that it must be taken seriously. The New York Yankees post a wRC+ of 123 against left-handed pitching — the best mark in baseball. The Mariners, another pre-season World Series contender, sit at 75. That 48-point gap between the two elite lineups on paper, against southpaws, is no longer such a small sample that we need to ignore it. Leveraging platoons has long been an important strategic lever for lineups looking to gain an advantage. Using wRC+ through the first stretch of the 2026 season, we can see every team’s offensive production against left- and right-handed pitching to find where the real discrepancies lie, and how we can target these matchups on both sides of the ball as we move deeper into the season, and what trends we should be watching.
This year marks the sixth edition of the Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL), a competition that pits 240 teams from across the entire Ottoneu universe in a best-ball contest for ultimate glory, exciting prizes, a one-of-a-kind t-shirt (the image above is the 2025 t-shirt art), and a fancy bat. Modeled loosely off the UEFA Champions League and other league-spanning competitions in the soccer world, OPL is open to any team that finished in the top half of their league the prior season. Like it’s counterparts in the soccer world, it forces teams to fight on two fronts. You are playing both your regular league and competing in OPL with the same roster, but different competitors and different rules.
The result is a unique roster building challenge. While your standard Ottoneu league will require you to set a lineup each day, OPL is best ball – your top scorer at each position, including up to two starting pitchers and five relievers, each day score points; everyone else doesn’t. Way back in year one, I dug into the data to look at how to build an offense and a pitching staff that could compete in OPL. With round two of the 2026 edition underway, I decided to look back at round one and re-evaluate what I found in 2021.
Welcome to the Daily SP Chart, click here if you’re new to get an idea of what I’m doing with these rankings.
The chart includes their performance for 2026, their opponent’s wOBA versus the pitcher’s handedness, and recently added opponent’s K% (also v. SP handedness), my general start/sit recommendation for 10-team, 12-team, and 15-team (or more) leagues – essentially a shallow, medium, deep league setup – and then a note about some, most, or all depending on the day. If a pitcher only has an “x” in 15-team, it doesn’t mean there’s no potential use in 10s and 12s, but it’s a much riskier stream for those spots.
These are general recommendations for standard 5×5 roto leagues, and your league situation will carry more weight whether you are protecting ratios or chasing counting numbers. I usually won’t have much to write about aces who are locked into our rotations. If you want to discuss someone further, please feel free to leave a comment. I usually do a few sweeps of the comments before game time in case there are time-sensitive questions.
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In this weekend’s chat, I was asked the following question, shared below with my response:
7:37 Beano: So many call ups this week! Can you help with a bid pecking order? Alcantara, Torrens, Garcia, Valdez, Ramirez, Troy …
7:38 Jeff Zimmerman: I’m not really high on any of them. I’m sure one will be useful, but they seem like fill-ins.
I looked through the players and wasn’t interested for various reasons. But valuing recently promoted hitters is a challenge for everyone, so today I want to expand on that short answer by sharing a bit of my process. In addition to the five players above, I included two other recent call-ups: Sterlin Thompson and Colt Emerson. This year’s edition of The Process includes my work on this topic.
If you want to get a hit, trying to square up the ball is a great place to start. But not all squared up hits are created equal. Squaring up your grounders and line drives will likely help your batting average, but won’t do much in the home run department. Squaring up your flyballs, especially at the ideal launch angle, should help get the ball out of the yard.
If you look at the surface level Savant lollipops, you will see a “Squared-Up%” metric, which is represented on FanGraphs by “SqUpCon%”. This describes a batted ball event where at least 80% of the possible exit velocity on a pitch was obtained, given the swing and pitch characteristics, which typically means a ball that was hit on the sweet spot of the bat, according to Statcast.
As explored by Fangraphs’ Davy Andrews, even before we look at the launch angle of a squared up ball, we should acknowledge that not all of these swings result in a ball that’s hit even remotely hard, because a ridiculously slow swing that hits the ball on the barrel can still technically be squared up by the Statcast definition. But for the most part, hitters are swinging relatively hard. And we have ways to see just how fast they swing and how often they unleash their fast swings now, thanks again to Statcast.
With all of this in mind, check out the Fangraphs Squared-Up Explorer. This tool helps you see how often a hitter is squaring up the ball at different launch angles, highlighting the ideal launch angle for home runs and visualizing a given hitter’s profile compared to league average.
Using this tool, you can compare a given hitter’s profile against other hitters and during different periods of time. You can compare Gunnar Henderson’s hot start in 2024 to his 2025 and to his start to this season, as I did last week.
Today, I’ll run through a few examples that demonstrate the possible ways to use the Squared-Up Explorer and try to show you that you can and should use this tool yourself as a starting point for analyzing hitters, whether it be struggling bats you may want to cut or hot streak hitters you’re looking for an excuse to believe in. For the hitters I look into, I’ll provide some recommendations, but really want to invite you to use this exceptionally user-friendly tool yourself.
Let’s start with a particularly frustrating hitter, Fernando Tatis Jr.
I’ll often wonder and speculate on what’s happening and why, without researching the idea. Somehow, most of my interesting ideas tend to happen when I’m driving or doing something where I can’t stop and research the data. One of those ideas was to examine which starting pitchers have lost stuff and command in 2026. compared to 2025. That said, here’s a look at the starting pitchers who threw 20 innings with a three-point decline (we rounded, so you’ll see a difference of 2.5 or more) in their Stuff+ and Location+ in 2026.
Though these pitchers have lower Stuff+ and Location+ grades, they might not remain that way for the rest of the season. Several of these pitchers make sense since they often relied upon command. We can toss out Cole Ragans and Garrett Crochet (injuries). Meanwhile, Freddy Peralta, Parker Messick, and Ranger Suarez have been showing above-average command numbers in both seasons.
Whenever a starting pitcher is struggling or succeeding, we want to understand the why and try to determine whether the results have been sustainable. This is a beefy one, with a deep look into three starting pitchers who lost significant stuff and command in 2026.