Your draft room.
The auction draft is the busiest single event in the ottoneu year. Our first auction draft has started, and I know a few more are scheduled to start over the next week, including the draft for the original ottoneu league. I thought it would be helpful, now that the very beginnings of draft season are upon us, to step through what the actual process is of conducting an auction draft using ottoneu’s custom software.
We’ve been dissecting ottoneu one – the flagship league that spawned the FanGraphs fantasy game – and it seems we’ve been having fun doing it. Oh, and of course, someone usually ends up with a free team for the inaugural year. That might have something to do with why people find it fun.
One of the reasons that the game has resonated with so many players is the mix of valuation and keeping. Go into the auction like many have done before, go home with a value player as anybody worth their salt in auction leagues is capable of doing, and then at the end of the year, you are faced with salary inflation and arbitration. Now you have a new set of issues to ponder.
Was that player, who was a value at $x, worth $x+2 after a year of aging? Or does the risk put forward by his extra year of age eliminate that surplus value? You’re a general manager at the winter meetings pondering trade ideas. You’re examining your projections, and valuing the projected numbers. The advantage you have over your real-life GM is the fact that you, at any moment, can cut a player you don’t feel is performing up to his cost.
So we come to the keeper decisions made in ottoneu one – you can keep anyone you like, provided the price is right. Remember, the guys in this league are all FanGraphs readers like you, so let’s not get too snarky. They’ll be watching, and they’re all just trying to win their leagues like the rest of us. But, it’s still worth a discussion.
For a year of a free ottoneu/FanGraphs fantasy team, argue which hitter and which pitcher of the following actual keepers was the worst decision of this current offseason. Best argument wins.
Oh, and for context, I’ve added screenshots of the most expensive players in ottoneu one – this way you get to see how sweet the leaderboard looks, too. Pick one hitter and one pitcher in your comment:
Miguel Cabrera ($52)
Mark Teixeira ($46)
Jay Bruce ($30)
Andre Ethier ($26)
Justin Verlander ($44)
Johan Santana ($37)
Chad Billingsley ($28)
Ted Lilly ($17)
I love a lot of things about fantasy baseball. But like many of you, when understanding players in real life, I have become increasingly immersed in the sorts of statistics that are commonplace here at FanGraphs: wOBA, FIP, WAR, etc. And that created a problem for me as a fantasy manager: I just don’t enjoy leagues that reward managers for things like RBI, pitcher wins, etc.
Last year, I decided to do something about it. Inspired by this post by Tangotiger, I created a custom Yahoo league that used a scoring system designed to more accurately reflect “real” baseball–or, at least, real player value. It was a blast. And on the basis of this success, FanGraphs adopted this scoring system as one of the ways that you can play the ottoneu fantasy game.
What makes it different from other points systems? It is based upon those same, advanced statistics that we use to evaluate players in real life: linear weights for hitters and FIP for pitchers.
Let’s start with the point values for hitters: