The theme of this offseason for the Ottoneu wing of RotoGraphs is self-reflection and accountability. I’ve already gone through some of the lessons I learned from the big mistakes I made this year and reviewed my bold predictions. Last week, Chad Young reviewed his weekly Hot/Cold Right Now column to see if the advice he was giving throughout the season was useful and actionable.

Following in Chad’s footsteps, I’d like to review my semi-regular Ottoneu Drip articles. The goal of this column is to identify under-rostered pitchers who might be able to help your team in both the short- and long-term. By its very nature — limiting analysis to pitchers owned less than 60% across all Ottoneu leagues — the hit rate on my advice is pretty low. These pitchers aren’t rostered for good reasons. Still, I was able to uncover a handful of very valuable pitchers who produced excellently over the long-term and there were a few more short-term wins that could have helped throughout the season.

I wrote eight Ottoneu Drip articles during the season with a bonus article written for the final weekend of the season that I opted not to include in my analysis. I identified 64 pitchers in these articles — 54 of them unique — and I graded my advice along the same 1–5 scale that Chad used in his Hot/Cold review:

1. Bad advice, this pitcher was bad over the short- and long-term.
2. Didn’t work out, but there might have been some short-term value there.
3. Neutral, there might have been some short-term value or the possibility of long-term value if you squint.
4. Good advice that had some strong long-term value or extended short-term value.
5. Solidly good advice that had excellent long-term value.

Here’s what I found:

• My average score was 2.53. If you ignore the article posted after the first weekend of the regular season on April 1, the average is slightly boosted to 2.70.
• That April 1 article was a disaster. All eight of the pitchers were busts; the average rest-of-season FIP in that group was 4.85 and the average rest-of-season P/IP was a ghastly 2.91. Two of pitchers identified in that article — JP Sears and Mitchell Parker — returned some slight short-term value over the next few weeks but they eventually turned into pumpkins. I guess the lesson there is to not jump to any conclusions based on a single start and wait for a bit of a bigger sample before making any recommendations.
• It shouldn’t surprise, then, to see that my average score from June through August was 2.74, half a point higher than it was in April and May. Making recommendations with a larger body of work to reference is a lot easier than taking a shot in the dark.
• There was one outlier article in April posted on the 16th. In that piece, I identified Tyler Mahle, Matthew Liberatore, Randy Rodríguez, Phil Maton, and Gabe Speier as pitchers with plenty of short- and long-term value. Mahle and Liberatore eventually succumbed to injury and fatigue, respectively, but they were solid pitchers for most of the spring and early summer. Rodríguez was one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this year but Tommy John surgery will keep him from providing any value next year unfortunately.
• I had a lot more success identifying relief pitchers (3.0 average score) than starting pitchers (2.3). Along with the trio above, I also called out Will Vest, Brendon Little, Garrett Whitlock, Louis Varland, Reid Detmers, and Seranthony Domínguez as helpful relievers before they were snatched off the waiver wire. My most successful starting pitcher recommendations included Trevor Rogers, Ryne Nelson, Ian Seymour, Chad Patrick, Quinn Priester, Mike Burrows, Mahle, and Liberatore.
• If you had somehow managed to follow every single one of my recommendations, you would have added 3.28 P/IP over the following 30 days after the article was published. And you would have added 3.46 P/IP over the rest of the season.

I have no idea what any of these results mean in context. That amount of analysis will have to come next year with this year as a baseline. I do think I need to be a bit more careful about recommending players so early in the season. It’s easy to take one strong start with some interesting velocity readings and assume the pitcher is about to breakout — I’m looking at you Jordan Hicks. I also think I need to follow Chad’s lead and evaluate fewer players more deeply. A deeper dive into some of these early season picks would have likely revealed that nothing under the hood had really changed.

What’s your feedback? Is this column useful? Is my 60% rostered threshold too low (or too high)? Any changes you’d like to see?

Calling people losers seems unkind, but they did, in fact, lose positional eligibility. Is there a better word to use? Position Eligibility Forfeiters? Decliners? I dunno. I am rolling with losers. It was just yesterday that we looked at players who gained positions in 2025; today we turn our attention to players who lost eligibility.

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Every year, some player gains or loses eligibility and I totally miss it. Sometimes it’s because I didn’t have that player on any of my rosters and so I never noticed when they gained a new position. Sometimes it’s because I had a guy locked into a position this year and didn’t realize they weren’t playing their for their real team. To make sure I am caught up, I spend a little time pulling a positional eligibility change report – a list of all players who gained or lost a position (or both) in 2025.

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Over the course of the season, I wrote 17 Ottoneu Hot or Cold Right Now articles. These articles, which Lucas Kelly and I tried to get out weekly, cover players who are being added, being dropped, being auctioned or just performing particularly well or particularly poorly. The goal is to analyze why the player is Hot or Cold at the moment and offer advice on what you should do. I have been writing these for a number of years now, but have never written a recap. That changes today.

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Just like it’s important to learn from our mistakes, reviewing bold predictions serves a similar purpose. By their very nature, I shouldn’t be getting many of these predictions right, but it’s a good practice to go back and figure out if there are any lessons to be gleaned from my hubris. And it’s fun to gloat about the ones I got right!

1. Cristopher Sánchez is a top-10 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ✅
2025 P/IP: 5.82 (6th overall)

Let’s start things off with a bang! Sánchez followed up his breakout season in 2024 with an even better season a year later. The velocity jump that he showed off during spring training stuck around all season long, though the cutter that he was tinkering with never showed up in the regular season. Evidently he didn’t need that fourth pitch; his changeup and slider were more than good enough on their own. It was those two pitches that convinced me that he could take a big step forward when making this prediction at the start of the season; they were both elite offerings in ‘24 and indicated to me that he had some untapped potential to take a step forward. Sánchez has the perfect profile for Ottoneu: an elite groundball rate and corresponding low home run totals and he just added a ton of strikeouts this year.

Based on the same process that led me to pick Sánchez in 2026, here’s a small spoiler for my 2026 bold predictions: Ryne Nelson’s four-seam fastball was the second most valuable pitch in baseball by total run value and Janson Junk’s sweeper was the seventh most valuable pitch in baseball by RV/100.

2. Reese Olson is a top-25 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ❌
2025 P/IP: 4.89 (N/A)

The same process that led me to pick Sánchez above also led me to pick Olson here. Unfortunately, his injury history was a factor I opted to ignore which wound up sinking this prediction. After suffering a shoulder injury in 2024 that led to a two-month stint on the IL, that same issue popped up again this year in late July. He also dealt with a finger injury that cost him a month and a half of the season. Between those two injuries, he only pitched 68.2 innings in ‘25, though they were high quality innings. His changeup and slider — the two pitches that give him such a high ceiling — were just as good this year and give me some hope that he could see a breakout if he could ever stay healthy for a full season.

For what it’s worth, his P/IP would have ranked 26th among starting pitchers with at least 100 IP if he had hit that threshold. The process for making this prediction was solid, but his shoulder just didn’t allow it to hit.

3. Eduardo Rodriguez is a top-50 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ❌
2025 P/IP: 3.08 (108th overall)

This prediction was banking on a healthy season from Rodriguez. Well, he only had a short three-week stint on the IL with a minor shoulder injury and ended up throwing 154.1 innings this year. Unfortunately, they were extremely poor quality innings. The interplay between his fastball and changeup has deteriorated to the point where both pitches returned negative run value in 2025. At this point in his career, he’s simply too hittable even though his strikeout-to-walk ratio looked okay. He had some good stretches during the season, but the profile is far too volatile to rely on.

4. Max Meyer scores the most total points among Marlins starting pitchers ❌
2025 Total Points: 210 (7th on Marlins)

Meyer had an exciting spring training after debuting a sinker and sweeper to bring his pitch mix up to five. He actually started the season off with five solid starts and his ERA and FIP were hovering around three through the end of April. May was rough and then he hit the IL with a hip impingement in June and was lost for the season. The two new pitches he introduced to his repertoire weren’t the huge difference-makers that he needed them to be, though his peripherals weren’t terrible across his 12 starts in 2025.

As if Meyer’s struggles and injuries weren’t enough, the Marlins ended up holding onto Sandy Alcantara for the whole season, and no surprise, he wound up leading the team in total points.

5. David Festa scores the second most total points among Twins starting pitchers ❌
2025 Total Points: 180 (7th on Twins)

The process behind this prediction was sound. I saw a bunch of risk in Minnesota’s starting rotation and figured that Festa would be the beneficiary of some of that risk. Joe Ryan was brilliant and easily led the team in total points, but Pablo López lost three months to a forearm injury, Bailey Ober took a huge step backwards, and Chris Paddack and Simeon Woods Richardson were both as mediocre as ever. Where I got things wrong was thinking that Festa could emerge from this mess as a key contributor. His peripherals were solid during his debut season in 2024, but injuries derailed any progress he hoped to make this year. He was diagnosed with a mild form of thoracic outlet syndrome in September and his future as a productive major leaguer is very much up in the air.

6. Brent Rooker is a top-3 OF (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ❌
2025 P/G: 5.7 (16th among OF)

Rooker earned OF eligibility by mid-May but instead of repeating his huge breakout from 2024, he merely settled in as a very good hitter with a .349 wOBA this year. That was good enough to return $38.7 in value according to the Auction Calculator, but nowhere good enough to appear in the top 3 OF in Ottoneu, let alone the top 10.

The process was decent here. Rooker crushed the ball at home in Sacramento’s minor league ballpark (.372 wOBA at home), but he took a significant step back on the road (.326 wOBA on the road). The good news is that his plate discipline numbers were better than ever and his batted ball peripherals didn’t take a nose dive.

7. Anthony Volpe is a top-12 SS (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ❌
2025 P/G: 3.6 (34th among SS)

I believed a significant jump in bat speed during spring training would help Volpe breakout in his third big league season. The bat speed improvements stuck in the regular season, resulting in career bests in average exit velocity, maxEV, Barrel%, ISO, and SLG. Unfortunately, his BABIP fell back to where it was during his rookie campaign and his plate discipline didn’t improve. His overall wOBA actually fell a point from where it was in 2024, and to make matters worse, his defense absolutely cratered as well.

8. Maikel Garcia is a top-15 2B (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ✅
2025 P/G: 5.4 (4th among 2B)

A breakout! Garcia significantly improved his plate discipline last year and his batted ball peripherals painted a much better picture than the .270 wOBA he posted in 2024. I predicted that he’d see a rebound with his batted ball luck to push his wOBA back up to around .300. I didn’t expect him to significantly improve his plate discipline again and start hitting for power by getting the ball off the ground more often. The result was a .347 wOBA, easily the best of his career, and a massive breakout season. What makes Garcia even more valuable is his position flexibility: he’s eligible at four different positions and everything about his improvements this year look sustainable into the future.

9. Miguel Vargas scores the most total points among White Sox hitters ✅
2025 Total Points: 609 (1st on White Sox)

All Vargas needed was an opportunity for full-time at-bats. The White Sox obliged and he delivered a solid, if up-and-down, season in 2025. He had a huge slump during the three weeks before the All-Star break, and two minor IL stints derailed the second half of his season, but he wound up with a .314 wOBA at the end of it all. That was good enough to eke out Lenyn Sosa for the team lead in total points. His excellent plate discipline metrics and solid batted ball peripherals give him a bit of room to grow as he continues to develop in the big leagues.

10. Neither Roman Anthony (❌) or Kristian Campbell (✅) will be starting-caliber options at their respective positions in 2025
Anthony 2025 P/G: 6.1 (10th among OF)
Campbell 2025 P/G: 3.6 (37th among 2B)

I’m giving myself half credit for this one. Campbell made the Red Sox’s Opening Day roster but really struggled in his first taste of the big leagues and found himself optioned back to Triple-A by mid-June. His huge minor league breakout in 2024 was impressive, but it came in just his second professional season. The jump from the high minors to the big leagues is extremely difficult; Campbell had just 85 plate appearances in Triple-A and 255 in Double-A before making his major league debut. The talent is undeniably there, but I think Boston rushed him to the big leagues.

As for Anthony, his talent and track record were a little more well established, but I didn’t think he’d find enough playing time to make an impact in the big leagues in 2025. The Rafael Devers trade opened up an opportunity for Anthony and he ran with it. He only accumulated 303 plate appearances in the big leagues but he absolutely made the most of them.

Overall score: 3.5/10

Pretty good for my first rodeo.

Over the last couple of weeks, I wrote about 1st and 2nd half splits, looking at one big gainer (Mike Burrows) and one big faller (Kodai Senga). Today, I turn my attention to the plate, with a first look at a hitter who fell off.

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I hate reviewing these bold predictions because, by their very nature, bold predictions are often wrong and so it is kind of depressing to go back and see just how wrong I was. I said as much when I wrote my bold predictions in March, and noted that my hope was they would be useful, even if wrong:

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Last week, I wrote about Mike Burrows, as he was the single largest gainer in Ottoneu FanGraphs points per IP between the first and second halves of the season, among pitchers with at least 30 IP as a starter in both halves. Today, I wanted to look at that same list and cover the pitcher who was the single largest faller among that same population. Except, I am not going to.

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Happy Arbitration Day, to those who celebrate! Today is the day Ottoneu Arbitration opens, both for vote off leagues and allocation leagues. If you are new to Ottoneu and not familiar with arbitration, there is a ton of information here – a quick Google search for “FanGraphs Ottoneu Arbitration” will bring up a decent number of results, but – before we get to the All Stars mentioned in the title – here are some of the best links.

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Ottoneu points leagues aren’t the same as 4×4 or 5×5. But there’s a subtle difference between H2H and season-long points leagues, as well. In season-long leagues, you have limits on games played for each position and innings pitched by your pitchers. That has relatively limited impact on bats, but it could theoretically impact the value of pitchers pretty significantly.

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