Did you roster any 4.33 points-per-game outfielders last season? Better yet, did you roll that 4.33 P/G outfielder into your starting lineup on a regular basis last season? If you did, you were straddling the line of replacement level. Last week I placed offensive players into ranked tiers based on their final P/G achievements and 4.33 P/G is a tier-five player at best. Here’s a reminder of the points spread between tiers:

Offensive P/G tiers for all position players who played in more than 75 games in 2023:

Tier 1 range: 9.1 P/G – 6.0 P/G

Tier 2 range: 5.9 P/G – 5.5 P/G

Tier 3 range: 5.5 P/G – 5.1 P/G

Tier 4 range: 5.0 P/G – 4.7 P/G

Tier 5 range: 4.7 P/G – 4.3 P/G

Remember that represents all players clumped together. 4.33 P/G is actually pretty good if we’re looking at only catchers. The tiers above are independent of position and therefore, flawed. Today, I’ll dial in what should have been considered rosterable in 2023 by position, making note of what a replacement-level player recorded in points per game. Let this serve as a starting point as you may play in a different league format than I do, which would create different-sized player pools. You should be able to easily copy and paste the table in this article and edit the inputs accordingly. Before the table, I need to set the parameters:

– This is representing a 12-team, FanGraphs points league
– I am considering players on my bench above replacement level and am being somewhat arbitrary about it. Each league has 40 roster spots, but I’m leaving 10 of those roster spots for minor leaguers and below replacement-level players. If you add up the “Starters” and “Bench” columns, that is what I’m marking as each team’s number of above-replacement level players. Again, copy and paste the table and make edits if you wish.
– I have excluded players whose “Level” was anything but a major league team at the time of the data pull, eliminating minor leaguers.
– If a player is eligible for that position, they were included in the analysis for that position.

If you take all outfielders in your league, rostered or unrostered, and you sort them by points per game, you simply check the points per game mark of the 73rd-best player. But wait, isn’t a replacement-level player the player with the highest P/G mark available on the waiver wire? Well, yes and no. Let’s now put this system to the test with that 4.33 OF I mentioned in the intro. First, I’ll start by going into my league’s free-agent player pool, isolating outfielders who are currently free agents and played in more than 75 games last season. That last 75-game qualifier is not a part of the table above, but since I’m using end-of-season data, I want to show the players who accumulated playing time and kept a high points per game mark. Here’s what I see:

Andrew McCutchen – 5.24 P/G

Jeff McNeil – 4.35 P/G

Luis Rengifo – 4.34 P/G

Edward Olivares – 4.33 P/G

Willi Castro – 4.11 P/G

So, in theory, this mark works for my league. McCutchen, McNeil, and Rengifo were all hurt toward the season’s end, so in reality, the first available player eligible for the OF spot is Castro. To really prove this out, I’ll do the same exact thing in a second league. Here are OF eligible players available as free agents with over 75 games played:

Tommy Pham – 4.73 P/G

Harold Ramírez – 4.63 P/G

Jose Siri – 4.42 P/G

Ok, so it’s not perfect, but it’s close. I rostered Cedric Mullins all season and he finished the year at 4.37 P/G. Should I have dropped Mullins for Siri? Tough to say. Hindsight is 20/20. I still prefer Mullins for 2024. For now, this may help inform you of where you need to make cuts this offseason. Stay tuned for next week’s post where I work through this same exercise for points per game projections in 2024 and begin converting those projections into dollar values.

We’re approaching the busiest part of the season as teams who have designs on competing are looking to make their moves to bolster their rosters ahead of the final stretch this fall. A few weeks ago, Chad Young wrote up his process of deciding who to keep and who to sell on one of his Ottoneu rosters. I’d like to go through the same effort for my roster in Ottoneu League 32 – Fantasy Field of Dreams. If you’ve been following along with this series, I’ve covered my process of rebuilding this team, from the initial decision to rebuild, to the draft, to the ups and downs of the regular season.

I’ve already made three moves with an eye towards the future:

1. My $3 Kyle Manzardo for $9 Jazz Chisholm Jr.
2. My $6 Michael Conforto and $3 Luis Garcia (2B) for $12 Ryan Mountcastle
3. My $43 Bryce Harper and $21 Teoscar Hernández for $48 Corey Seager and $3 Taylor Ward (I previously wrote up my thought process for this trade)

Seager has been absolutely phenomenal this year and is looking like he’ll be well worth his $50 price tag next year, assuming he doesn’t get hit with arbitration dollars. Ward has also been hitting well recently, giving me hope that his early season slump was just a bump in the road and that he’ll be a solid keeper at $5 next year. Unfortunately, Chisholm has been sidelined with a toe injury and Mountcastle has continued to struggle despite some promising peripherals.

The first step is deciding who is going to make up the core of next year’s team. No one is untouchable but there are certainly players who are more available than others. Going through the process of identifying and sorting your roster with an eye towards next year is an important exercise for any team, even if you’re towards the top of the standings. Here’s how I view my roster shaking out right now:

These nine guys should form the core of my next competitive roster. It would be ideal if Franco was a little cheaper, but his breakout this season and sky high ceiling justify his salary. I didn’t expect to have two catchers listed in this group, but Murphy and Heim are both slugging the ball and both look like they’ve taken a significant step forward this year. I’ve got a solid little group of pitchers here too headlined by Kirby.

I’m a little worried that I don’t have any outfielders in the group above. It’s become increasingly difficult to fill five slots with solid contributors and that was a concern of mine when I moved Harper for Seager. Steer is on track to gain OF eligibility for this year and next but I’d rather use him as a super utility guy rather than locking him into a spot in my outfield.

I’d have to be blown away by the offer to move any of these guys right now.

These five I expect to be keepers but there’s a bit of risk they might not pan out the way I expect. Keeping a $9 Torkelson is probably a bit crazy, but he’s been hitting much better recently and still has his prospect pedigree working in his favor. If he finishes the season strong, he could be a nice fit on my roster. Kelenic’s breakout has slowed down a bit after a very hot start; I think the adjustments he’s made are for real but there’s always a chance he falls back into his bad habits. I thought Ward was a great buy low target at his salary; he should be a keeper if he continues to hit like he has this month.

This group is filled with guys who are fairly priced and I could see myself keeping a handful of them. I’d also be open to moving any of them if the right deal materialized. I’ve already gotten a number of inquiries about Seager but I acquired him for Harper. If I was going to flip him, I’d want to get commensurate value in return which isn’t what other owners seem like they’re interested in giving up. I expect to enter 2024 with Seager and Franco locking down two of my infield positions.

I’ve got a large group of pitchers here who all seem like pretty good values for their salaries. Detmers and Rogers still have something to prove and they’re the most expensive of the bunch. I almost put Gonsolin and Suárez in the top tier of automatic keepers but I think there are enough question marks surrounding them that I left them here.

Here’s where most of my outfielders appear too. Keeping Gurriel at $16 would be pretty tough even though he’s posting career highs in hard-hit and contact rates. De La Cruz and McCarthy have both been up and down during their short careers; if they can finish this year strong, they both become interesting keepers.

If I keep all 26 players in these three tiers, I’d head into next season with $307 in committed salary plus an unknown amount of arbitration that could be as high as $33 or as low as $11. Let’s assume the final total falls somewhere closer to the high end. With 14 roster spots to fill and around $60-$70 of free cap space, I need to move some of these high priced players on the bubble to get my roster in the right shape for next year.

Here’s the list of guys I’d be happy to move or am planning on cutting at the end of the year. Muncy is probably the most valuable player above and I have a standing offer involving him that I’ve been sitting on. I’ve also had a surprising number of inquiries about Baz. At his salary, he wouldn’t be hard to keep, but the injury history is a huge red flag and I think I’d be able to get more value from him in a deal than from keeping him.

Abreu could potentially have some value to a team if his midseason hot streak continues and he’s able to start producing around his career norms over the second half of the season. All of my relievers are listed here too since Romano is really the only one with enough value to realistically keep.

Going through the effort of organizing my roster like this has helped me see that I’ve got too many players on the keep/sell bubble and they’re all a little too expensive to hold onto all of them. I’ll need to find some creative deals to reduce the amount of salary I’m planning on keeping next year to give me more room in the draft to add to my roster. I’ll update my trade block with these guys and hope to move some of them for cheaper pieces.

If you are rostering a player in the minor leagues who has yet to debut, how are justifying it? I don’t write that to be critical, I’m rostering a few myself and I ask myself the same question whenever I look over my roster. If your answer is something like, “They could be really good in the future!”, then you are also thinking like me and everyone else who is rostering young, yet-to-debut minor leaguers. Who are some of these players? Here are just a few hand-selected examples with high average salaries in Ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues:

Hitters
– Marco Luciano, $5.08
– Anthony Volpe, $4.88
– Jasson Domínguez, $4.37

Pitchers
– Jack Leiter, $5.52
– Grayson Rodriguez, $5.47
– Eury Pérez, $4.29

A player like Grayson Rodriguez can be found on the auction calculator because he is expected to join the O’s rotation either out of camp or early in the season. Using Steamer projection and the auction calculator’s FanGraphs points pre-settings, Rodriguez projects as a $1 player. Technically, he’s not worth rostering with a projected value of $-13.4, but you can usually treat any player with negative value as a $1 player. Regardless, he’s not expected to be worth the $5 plus he’s averaging in Ottoneu leagues, but his rookie season is not the reason you would roster him. You would roster him in hopes that he will be worth much more than $1 in 2024, 2025, and on. If you’re paying $5 now, he’s worth $1 now, but you’ll be paying him $7 next year when he’s worth $10, and maybe you’re doing alright. That statement probably deserves a much deeper dive, but for now, I’ll stay out of that rabbit hole.

This is the fun part of rostering yet-to-debut minor-league players. It’s literally prospecting. It’s fun to do with Bowman autographed baseball cards and it’s fun to do in fantasy baseball leagues. This prospecting becomes more exciting as the player gets closer and closer to success. But, what about a pitcher like Jack Leiter? Technically he edges out Grayson Rodriguez ever-so-slightly in average salary, but here’s a bold prediction; Jack Leiter will not return $5.52 in FanGraphs points leagues this season. Ok, maybe not so bold. No one can predict the future, but this one seems like a gimme. Last year (2022), Corey Kluber returned $5.70. If Leiter were to do the same in 2023, he’d have to be around Kluber’s 2022 numbers:

First of all, Kluber only walked 21 batters in 2022!? That’s the lowest total among all starters with at least 160 innings pitched and seven less than second-place Kevin Gausman. That’s what you can or should get for around $5.00 in FanGraphs points leagues. Kluber’s current average Ottoneu salary sits at $6.66. Second, I included Leiter’s Steamer projection tongue in cheek, he basically has no projection. His player page does have a 2023 MLB ETA, but who knows? So, we can’t realistically project Leiter’s 2023 value. I suppose we could compare his minor-league stats. That’s also unfair but at least it gives us some semblance of what he can do. Luckily, Dan Szymborski does the good work of projecting player performance a few years ahead with ZIPS:

I tossed in the HBP projections myself, thinking that maybe Leiter will gain a little more control over time, and I projected no holds, the rest is provided by ZIPS. Before you start going crazy over this projection remember that volatility in projections for players who have never played in the major leagues is very high. So, let’s get even more volatile! Let’s imagine that ZIPS is being very conservative and that Leiter’s 2024 season looks more like a combination of 2023 and 2024. This is a big assumption, I know, but stick with me. Here’s where Leiter would be in 2024:

I tweaked the HBP and BB totals to reflect a more realistic total, but the other categories are the sum of 23′ and 24′ ZIPS. If this turned out to be true, what would his value be in 2024? In FanGraphs points leagues, this projection would be worth approximately 725 points (rPTS on the table below). Now, we have something to work with. The auction calculator has the following pitchers in that realm for the 2023 season:

Remember my bold/not-very-bold prediction from earlier? I’m prepared to apply that to the 2024 season as well. Jack Leiter’s current average salary of $5.52 may not be what he’s worth until beyond 2024 even if he ends up being Nestor Cortes, which is a huge if. Up until this point, I have written nothing about arbitration, but it’s very possible that someone in your league could bump his salary up a few dollars and you would no longer be making smart decisions by rostering him. Could I be wrong about all of this? Yes! I have no doubt that Leiter will be a successful major league pitcher, but Ottoneu FanGraphs points fantasy leagues roster-able? Now? No. Why did I write all of this? Well, because I’m rostering a $6 Jack Leiter and had a theory about why that was a bad decision. Finally, just before the January 31st keeper deadline, I’m ready to let him go. Farewell my friend. I hope to pick you up for $1 in the draft and start this prospecting process all over again, but at a much more reasonable price.

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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Now is that time in the season where you’re probably starting to get a little antsy. Why hasn’t Player A hit any home runs yet? When will Player B steal a base? Do I cut this player? Do I add that player? You may fall into the trap of cutting players on a whim because of a 3-for-31 performance thus far, but then regret that cut when he goes on a home run hitting bonanza in a few weeks. So, what indicators can you look for when trying to decide whether to buy or sell, cut or claim? 

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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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A new Ottoneu league has recently formed with a twist – despite the deep, dynasty-like structure of the platform, our league has decided on a single rule change this year: players without MLB experience (“rookies”) are ineligible for the annual spring player auction.  Instead, rookies may only be added to rosters through an in-season free agent player auction once they have accumulated their first MLB PA or IP.  Yes, this means Luis Robert cannot be owned (48 hour auction waiting period) until he completes his first PA, most likely to come on Opening Day (3/26) against the Royals.

This one simple rule change impacts a tremendous amount of Ottoneu strategy, a discussion for which I’ll reserve a future post.  For now, the purpose of this article is to list the rookies that have at least some opportunity to debut in 2020, and estimate which of these prospects might actually have some relevant fantasy impact this season.

The table below lists 130+ prospects that could potentially make their initial MLB rookie debut in 2020.  All players with existing MLB experience (Gavin Lux, Jesus Luzardo, Dustin May) have been removed.  The three columns to the far right should be the most useful:

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Using a format similar to the one Justin Mason recently posted for 2020 Roto player rankings, below is the 2020 ranking of the Top 100 Starting Pitchers for Ottoneu fantasy baseball.  Ottoneu leagues are auction style, but with no salaries listed (league dependent), think of these lists as simplified “snake draft” rankings (“which player would I take before the next”), or a value ranking of players above replacement level for 2020. Players with multi-position eligibility may receive a slight bump in value (2020 positions listed).  You can reference average Ottoneu player salaries here, but keep in mind these salaries fluctuate throughout the winter as rosters shape up towards today’s keeper deadline for all leagues.

Previous 2020 Ottoneu rankings:

First Base

Third Base

Middle Infielders

Shortstop

Second Base

Outfield

Since a majority of Ottoneu leagues are points leagues (pitching based on linear weights), WHIP and Wins are less of a factor here than in traditional rotisserie rankings.  Even if you don’t play Ottoneu, this list might be a good proxy for sabermetric leagues, so keep that context in mind as you review. “P/IP” represents the projected points per innings pitched from Steamer projections and their estimated innings total.

If I’ve missed an important player, or you believe I’ve wildly over or under-valued someone, please let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to update.

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The Ottoneu keeper deadline is fast approaching (11:59 PM EST), but many leagues use this date to set rosters before the season really begins.  I polled several owners of the Ottoneu community recently for their keeper deadline advice, so hopefully you’ll find some application for the thoughts below. Consider this a keeper Q&A for new players, but even if you don’t play Ottoneu, feel free to post your most difficult deadline decisions in the comments and I’ll do my best to weigh in.

Brad recently covered some specific Ottoneu keeper deadline advice here.

Q: What process do you use to determine the best number of players to keep on your Ottoneu roster?

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Using a format similar to the one Paul Sporer recently posted for 2020 Roto player rankings, below is the 2020 ranking of the Top 75 Outfielders for Ottoneu fantasy baseball.  Ottoneu leagues are auction style, but with no salaries listed (league dependent), think of these lists as simplified “snake draft” rankings (“which player would I take before the next”), or a value ranking of players above replacement level for 2020. Players with multi-position eligibility may receive a slight bump in value (2020 positions listed).  You can reference average Ottoneu player salaries here, but keep in mind these salaries fluctuate throughout the winter as rosters shape up towards the January 31st keeper deadline for all leagues.

Previous 2020 Ottoneu rankings:

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