Years ago, Brad Johnson created the Ottoneu Arbitration Omnibus, trying to gather all the Ottoneu arbitration content from the site into a single place. It seems every year I get questions about arbitration strategies and plans, and the reality is, I don’t always have a lot more to say. Much of how I think about arbitration was shaped years ago and while I certainly make adjustments year-over-year and learn new things, the high level stuff stays the same.
But the last edition of this omnibus was published in 2019, and it is probably due for a refresh. So, without further ado, your one stop shop for all things Ottoneu Arbitration.
1. George Kirby is a top-15 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ❌
2026 P/IP: 3.7 (95th)
Ouch. George Kirby suffered through the worst season of his career in 2026. His strikeout-to-walk ratio dropped from its normal elite level to a merely good 3.2 and a high BABIP saw far too many batted balls drop in for hits. His ERA has now increased in four successive seasons while his FIP spiked up to 3.90 thanks to fewer strikeouts and a slightly higher walk rate.
Looking under the hood, it doesn’t seem like anything is dramatically amiss. He’s still pounding the zone and getting batters to chase out of the zone at an above average rate. His swinging strike rate dipped a little however, particularly in two-strike counts, which paints the picture of a pitcher who can get ahead of batters but struggles to put them away with an out pitch. The stuff looks solid and the command is elite but it just kind of feels like the league has figured out Kirby’s approach and he’s struggled to make an adjustment back.
Kirby’s fantasy value for 2027 will likely take a significant hit, but his history of elite strikeout-to-walk ratios is just too enticing to give up on. I’d be interested in seeing if he bounces back next year if his value winds up dropping into the $10-$14 range.
2. Ryne Nelson is a top-25 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ❌
2026 P/IP: 2.8 (N/A)
Ryne Nelson missed three months of the season with an elbow injury, compiling 87.1 innings altogether. That prevented him from meeting the minimum IP threshold for this prediction, but also, he was extremely bad when he was healthy and pitching. His fastball, which had produced so much value last year, wound up taking a huge step backwards. The contact suppression he enjoyed with his heater didn’t carry over into 2026 and none of his secondary pitches took a step forward. He ended up allowing 18 home runs in 15 starts — a death knell for any pitcher in Ottoneu — and there don’t appear to be any redeeming underlying metrics that indicate a potential bounce back next year.
3. Janson Junk is a top-30 SP (by P/IP among pitchers w/ 100+ IP) ❌
2026 P/IP: 3.8 (92nd)
Junk managed to spend the majority of the year pitching out of the Marlins starting rotation and put up a perfectly average season. His ERA- was exactly 100 with his FIP- sitting two points lower at 98. Unfortunately, that didn’t translate into good or even decent fantasy production. His elite walk rate that looked so enticing last year jumped back up to 6.3%, still better than league average but certainly not as good as the 2.9% mark he produced in 2025. His strikeout rate hardly budged which meant his strikeout-to-walk ratio dropped back down to a more mediocre 2.7.
While Junk may not be in line for a huge breakout until he can find a true swing-and-miss pitch, his excellent command does mean he’ll have stretches of usefulness in fantasy. For instance, from July 26 through September 4, he ran a 2.08 ERA and a 3.10 FIP across eight starts. Don’t count on him to carry your fantasy squad in 2027 but I think he’ll be a fine option in deep formats like Ottoneu.
4. Joey Cantillo scores the most total points among Guardians starting pitchers ❌
2026 Total Points: 672 (4th on Guardians)
If only I had gone with Parker Messick for this prediction — I liked Messick but thought Cantillo had a clearer path to a full-time role in the Guardians rotation. For his part, Cantillo was pretty solid throughout the season, making 30 starts and three relief appearances with a 3.62 ERA and a 3.98 FIP. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to hone his command to truly breakout; his walk rate actually rose a tick to 11.8%. His trademark changeup and curveball were both excellent at generating swings and misses, but his fastball was knocked around a bit, undercutting his high strikeout rate a bit.
As far as the rest of the Guardians rotation went, Messick obviously had the breakout rookie season but Gavin Williams was brilliant as well. And despite Cantillo pitching better from an P/IP standpoint, Tanner Bibee wound up earning 18 more points than Cantillo thanks to the 29 extra innings pitched from Bibee. You probably weren’t disappointed in Cantillo’s season if you rostered him in fantasy, but it definitely wasn’t the breakout I was predicting.
5. Chad Patrick scores the second most total points among Brewers starting pitchers ❌
2026 Total Points: 535 (N/A)
This prediction was proven incorrect almost immediately after the season began. Chad Patrick made a couple of starts out of the rotation but was quickly shuffled off to the bullpen in a bulk role and then slowly transitioned to a flexible reliever who could handle multiple innings or work in high leverage spots. He wound up earning as many saves (six) as he made starts, and added 11 holds to boot. If you give him credit for those relief innings, he technically earned the fourth most points among “starters” on the Brewers.
I still really like his profile. His cutter continued to be a solid pitch and his four-seam fastball took a step forward in shorter stints out of the bullpen. The issue is the flexibility of his role with the Brewers. They used him in nearly every single kind of situation throughout the season and that lack of consistent role undermined his fantasy value. I have no idea how Milwaukee will use him next year, which makes it difficult to recommend rostering him until he has a solidified role.
6. Mookie Betts scores the most total points among all SS ❌
2026 Total Points: 642 (17th among SS)
Well, Bobby Witt Jr. didn’t come close to breaking 1,000 points — the Royals shortstop finished the season with 865 points — so that part of this prediction came true. Unfortunately, Mookie Betts was even further away from 1,000 points with just 642, 17th at the position. There was a stretch at the end of the season where Betts was producing like he had during his peak; from August 10 onward, he posted a 168 wRC+ with 10 home runs. That provided a spark for any fantasy team who had held onto him for the championship stretch run. I actually picked him up in mid-August on one of my teams vying for a title and he helped immensely. That doesn’t hide the fact that he put up an 84 wRC+ across the first four months of the season. At this point, it’s pretty clear that he’s hit the decline phase of his career and our evaluation of his current talent needs to be divorced from his MVP-caliber past.
7. Alec Bohm is a top-5 3B (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ❌
2026 P/G: 4.1 (32nd among 3B)
Like Betts, Alec Bohm enjoyed a late season hot streak to salvage what had been a pretty miserable season. Prior to August 9, he had posted a dismal 73 wRC+. He compiled a 136 wRC+ over the final two months of the season, but that was far too little, too late to make up for the rough start to the year.
Heading into the season, I pointed to Bohm’s career-high contact rate in 2025 as a sign of an impending breakout. Well, his contact rate slid back down to his previous career norms and his batted ball profile was still heavily skewed towards groundball contact. An extremely low BABIP sabotaged his season and I’m not sure there are any positives to take forward in 2027. Bohm is who he is, and his approach just isn’t geared towards fantasy optimized production.
8. Bryson Stott is a top-5 2B (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ❌
2026 P/G: 4.6 (19th among 2B)
Second base wound up being a surprisingly strong position in 2026. Stott produced the best season of his career but he was only the 19th ranked 2B by P/G. In 2025, his 4.6 P/G would have ranked 11th at the position. While that kind of production wasn’t close to being top-5, you were probably happy with Stott as a MI or the first MI off your bench in Ottoneu.
I’m not hopping off the Stott train either. He improved his batted ball quality this year, posted the highest ISO of his career, and pushed his walk rate over 10%. Yes, this might be his ceiling, but I also want to believe there’s just a little bit more to wring out of his bat. After all, from the beginning of June through mid August, he posted a 135 wRC+. He shifted his approach to be geared towards producing more contact in the air to the pull side in 2026 but he could lean into that even more next year.
9. Spencer Horwitz is a top-12 1B (by P/G among batters w/ 300+ PA) ❌
2026 P/G: 4.1 (43rd among 1B)
I probably should have paid more attention to Horwitz’s poor contact quality. I thought his solid approach at the plate could overcome that lack of oomph in his bat, but his contact quality slipped even further in 2026. He also dealt with a few minor injuries during the season, including a neck issue, a hamstring strain, and a concussion. Prior to that hamstring injury, he had compiled a 132 wRC+ and was a key member of the Pirates rejuvenated offense. He suffered the concussion while rehabbing from that leg injury and just didn’t look the same over the final two months of the season.
10. Two of Konnor Griffin, Kevin McGonigle, or JJ Wetherholt will not be starting caliber players at shortstop in 2026 ❌
McGonigle P/G: 5.9 (4th among SS)
Griffin P/G: 4.9 (10th among SS)
Wetherholt P/G: 4.7 (15th among SS)
Kevin McGonigle is going to win AL Rookie of the Year and you were absolutely thrilled with the production he compiled during his first taste of the majors. He looks like a genuine superstar. Konnor Griffin didn’t have as smooth a transition to the big leagues and missed about three months of the season with an elbow strain and a finger injury. He just barely crossed the 300 PA threshold, and managed to post the 10th highest P/G among SS when he was on the field. If he was on your fantasy team, you probably started him while he was healthy, but that missed time was a significant blow to his overall value. Wetherholt ended the season as the 15th ranked SS by P/G, which puts him just outside the “starting caliber” threshold (assuming a 12 team league). Still, I think you were pretty happy with Wetherholt’s production during his rookie season, even if he didn’t immediately produce like a star.
Even though you could technically call this prediction true thanks to Griffin’s lost playing time and Wetherholt’s league average production, I think I missed the mark on this prediction. All three of these youngsters capably made the transition to the big leagues. It wasn’t smooth sailing for Griffin or Wetherholt like it was for McGonigle, but I think you’re happy to roster any of these three infielders and will probably be keeping them on your fantasy team for a long while.
We have been on a journey this week. Well, I have been on a journey, and maybe some of you joined me for that journey. And this journey has taken me into a a deep look at followers. Part I: Do they exist and how effective are they for fantasy? Part II: How do league rules impact their value?
Today, we are going to come full circle. This investigation was spurred by a conversation in the Ottoneu Slack community and today we are going to look very specifically at followers Ottoneu leagues.
There are even fewer predictable followers who put up numbers obviously good enough to be trusted in fantasy baseball
You could be forgiven for walking away now, muttering under your breath, “Why is he still writing? What more do I need to know?” But we ended with a caveat:
There are some guys worth using when they follow if you happen to roster them, but there aren’t many of them, and even they aren’t really sustainable or predictable enough to roster them specifically as followers, with rare exception.
Those exceptions have less to do with the pitcher’s involved and more to do with your league structure, which is what we’ll cover in part II.
And you can’t end on a cliffhanger like that, right? I introduced eight questions in Part I and answered the first three. Today we are on to the next three.
I don’t know about you, but as a kid I was inundated with messages about not being a follower. “Don’t be a sheep,” they said. “Be a leader,” they said. “If your friends all came out of the bullpen to throw bulk innings after, would you do that too?” they asked.
And now I want to call all those people and say, “Have you been watching the MLB postseason? Everyone wants to be a follower!”
The opener/follower structure is certainly having it’s moment and it’s easy to understand why this has value to MLB teams. You can split the opening innings between a left-handed and a right-handed arm, making lineup construction a little more difficult. You can let your follower get to a third time through the order without that third time starting with the big bats at the top. And you can guarantee you get one of your pen arms in the game for the first inning, when you can control the matchups.
The value to fantasy teams, however, is less obvious and worth evaluating.
Over a fantasy season, it’s hard to trace results back to the decisions or actions you took that led to that result. We take so many actions from keepers (if your league has them), to the draft, to trades, to FAAB or waiver moves, to lineup decisions, that parsing what mattered and what didn’t can be impossible.
Instead, I find it is more productive to evaluate things the other direction – look at decisions you made or actions you took, determine how they impacted your final results, and then decide if you did something right and repeatable or wrong and avoidable. That is how I started the analysis of my trade forTarik Skubal. And that’s why I am diving into my bullpen in Ottoneu League 1.
I felt I had a strong team, with a good lineup and a top-tier rotation. I finished 4th. That’s not terrible – we pay out the top four spots and I still get bragging rights over eight managers, many of whom I have competed with for nearly two decades. But it isn’t what I hoped. And the bullpen might be why.
On June 27, I had a team sitting in second place in a 4×4 league, 6.5 points out of first. This particular league, an Ottoneu league called the Food and Travel League, pays out prizes in the form of food and/or beverages. It is one of my favorite leagues, both for the prizes and the competition, and finishing top three in that league is a goal every year – it’s much more fun to receive food than to figure out how to ship it.
I had never won this league and while the gap to first made me wonder if this was the right year to push in my chips, I also saw a clear path to finishing second or third (fourth place was 7.5 points behind me). But I was behind the pace on innings pitched and needed arms. I was third in all of the pitching rate stats (HR/9, ERA, WHIP), but was ninth in IP and, as a result, tied for eighth in strikeouts. Gaining points in Ks while maintaining my rates was an obvious path forward.
So I made a trade. I ended up winning the league, but the trade was costly and it is worth wondering if the trade is why I won the league, or if I could have won without the deal.
Whether you think first of Lenny Kravitz or Yogi Berra, the simple truism used to title this article is a more than just a pithy saying. Sometimes we think a game is out of reach – and it turns out it isn’t. Sometimes we think a series is won – and it’s not. And sometimes you think it’s late September and my fantasy standings are locked in. But are they really?
There is still a lot that can happen even in the last four days of the season.
The final week of the 2026 season is upon us. Hitting your innings pitched cap in Ottoneu points leagues is one of the most important ways you can maximize your roster to its fullest extent. And because it’s a soft cap, you can stack as many starters as you can on the day you’ll hit the cap, and you’ll receive all the points from those pitchers.
If you’re planning ahead, you might want to think about adding one or two of the following under-rostered pitchers for their start during the final weekend of the season, if you can line everything up correctly. You’ll need to start your auction for any of these starters by Wednesday to ensure they’re on your roster by Friday. And if you’re in a more traditional fantasy league or a head-to-head league, these under-rostered starters could be solid streamers for you if you need one or two more starts before the end of the season.
Welcome to the final Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner of the year. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit for Ottoneu points leagues. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.
I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence.
Make sure you’re paying attention to the probable pitchers for that final weekend of the season. Some teams who are already locked into their playoff berth may take the opportunity to rest some of their starters ahead of the postseason. There are a handful of starters (Max Fried, Zack Wheeler, Logan Henderson) who are projected for two-start weeks but I could definitely see their respective teams skip that final start of the season to ensure everyone is well rested for the playoffs.
