Let’s say you blew all of your money on Albert Pujols, Michael Pineda, and Eric Hosmer, and need a super-cheap shortstop in an ottoneu fangraphs points league.  Or, maybe you’re scrambling because Stephen Drew is dealing with his day-to-day, negative-MRI, weeks-old abdominal injury.  You have $2 to spend, and you need a shortstop with a job.  Here are shortstops who have been going for two bucks in ottoneu points leagues:

Since it’s a FanGraphs Points league, we can get a good idea of value by simply ranking players based on your favorite offensive rate stat, be it wOBA here or at Hardball Times, or TAv at BPro.  I took a dumb average of the three projections just so we could get an overall ranking, but the average itself has no meaning in and of itself.

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Is there an elite experts dynasty league out there? One doesn’t immediately come to mind. And with ottoneu in the FanGraphs fold, it’s a perfect time to break new ground. So, in that vein, we are proud to announce the first annual FanGraphs Fantasy ottoneu Experts League. This 5×5 auction keeper will draft opening day and will surely test the wills and knowledge or our esteemed competitors.

Andy Behrens (Yahoo – Roto Arcade)
Michael Rathburn (RotoExperts)
Jeff Erickson / Peter Schoenke (RotoWire)
Andrew Fiorentino, (RotoWire)
Tim Heaney / Nicholas Minnix (KFFL)
Andy Andres (Tufts University)
Neil FitzGerald (BaseballHQ)
Tom Keppy (BaseballHQ)
James Quintong (ESPN)
Jack Moore (RotoHardball)
Eno Sarris (FanGraphs)
Chad Young (ottoneu)

We’ll be reporting in on this league periodically, and you’ll hear from our competitors, too. Wish your hometown heroes best, and give us your best advice in the comments!

As we get to the final stretch of fantasy prep before the season starts, I wanted to update everyone on some changes over at ottoneu Fantasy Baseball, as well as a few leagues that need a couple more owners for drafts over the next few days.  First, for those of you who might not know, ottoneu Fantasy Baseball is the FanGraphs fantasy baseball game.  You can read the introduction here, or you can send me an email with any questions you might have.

Technical Updates

Wednesday, a relatively large number of leagues wanted to draft at the same time, causing my server to eat itself for about 3 hours.  We’ve done a couple of things to ensure this won’t happen again, such as doubling the capacity of our server and examining all the database code line by line.  Long story short, it was unacceptable, and I’ve spent a lot of time Wednesday night fixing it up so that going forward we won’t have these issues.  Yesterday, we had a couple of leagues draft with no issues reported to me, so I think the changes have helped.

Open Leagues Still Available

We have a few leagues actively looking to fill out their ranks.  Here are a couple that reached out to me:

Halpin’s League – Run by John Halpin at foxsports.com, still needs 7 players.  It’s a 5×5 for those of you more interested in a traditional set of stats.  John knows his stuff and I imagine this league would be a pretty good challenge, if you fancy yourself as a fantasy expert.

RBP Blog League – Another 5×5 league, only needs 3 more players, and they are drafting tomorrow starting at 2pm PT.  Short lead time, but having talked to the guys running this league, it’ll definitely be a fun time. (corrected the draft time for this one from 2pm ET)

Money League Baseball – Finally, for those of you that want FanGraphs Points and some cash prizes, we have a $49.99 prize league that needs 8 owners still.  Highly recommend this league, as I know one of the participants is one of the original ottoneu owners playing in a points league for the first time.

Beyond these leagues I’ve mentioned here, there are a few more public leagues looking to fill out, as well as some private leagues that are very close.  Check out the list here and if you have any questions about a particular league or getting in touch with a commissioner, shoot me an email or tweet @ottoneu.  I will get back to you as fast as I can with whatever information you might need.  Since I like giving away teams, how about the best tweet about ottoneu today will get the winner a free $9.99 team for this season.  Include @ottoneu so I see it!

Continuing this series of comparing FanGraphs Points league scoring to traditional scoring, we’ll begin looking today at pitching.  To start, I decided to look at a traditional points scoring system compared to the ottoneu points scoring system.  There is no apparent “standard” fantasy points system, but I chose the points scoring used at CBSSportsline as my comparison, as it seems fairly typical of systems you see out “in the wild.”  Let’s start with a list of the top-10 pitchers by their system in the 2010 season:

For reference, I also included their rank according to total FanGraphs Points.  Overall, it doesn’t look that different, right?  The top three are identical, and most of the top-10 are ranked similarly in both systems.  There are two pitchers who had a ranking disparty of at least 10 spots, however: David Price and Tim Hudson.

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As Carson mentioned over the weekend, myself and eight of my fellow FanGraphers huddled up in the boardroom at Phoenix’s Highland Hotel at Biltmore for six-plus hours for our ottoneu league auction about two weeks ago (three others drafted from home). I selected 27 players that night then chose the final 13 when we wrapped things up this past Saturday. Eno presented his club yesterday, and here’s my roster…

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The FanGraphs in-house league drafted last week, and 60 cans of PBR and Tecate into the Arizona dawn, we were mostly finished. My domination – though assured – will be even sweeter against competition like the FanGraphs staff. Despite the danger of putting the cart before the horse, I’ll call PBR the champagne of beers and crack one open for myself.

Well, maybe. I tend to be a little bipolar with my fantasy teams. It’s either all good or all terrible. Tell me what you think.

12-Team Ottoneu LWTS Points
It’s A Perm
C Geovany Soto $26
C Ryan Doumit $1
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Commenters in my last post asked how to determine position scarcity in FanGraphs Points leagues, and another reader, Kris, suggested using box plots.  I figured “hey, that’s a good idea for a post.”  So, here is a box plot based on Marcel projected 2011 performances for starters at each hitting position (using the numbers of players per position that Zach used here).

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The below is a slightly modified email I sent yesterday to John, who has graciously allowed me to use the conversation for this post.  This is an open conversation, so I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

From: Niv Shah
Subject: Re: One potential customer’s thoughts
To: “John Meyer”
Date: Wednesday, March 16, 2011, 4:45 PM

Hi John,

First, I want to thank you for your well-thought out email.  It is great for me to get feedback like this, it helps me understand what my potential customers are thinking and its a great insight for me when thinking about what I should work on next.

I could not agree with you more about your underlying question about ottoneu.  This sentence of yours sums it up the best:

It requires people who are able to give a long-term and dedicated commitment, which is generally found only among acquaintances and friends, and it also requires people who are very serious baseball fans, which, for a full league, is generally found only among strangers on the internet.

So, here are my arguments as to why ottoneu is uniquely situated to limit this problem, as well as some for how when we inevitably run into this problem next offseason we plan on handling it.

First, I should start by stating that I have been in an ottoneu league for over 5 years.  In that time, 3 people have dropped out.  2 dropped out before the game started – said they would play, and quit before the draft.  1 dropped out after year 3 because he had to focus on other personal obligations.  A replacement was found in each case pretty quickly.  While everyone in the league is a friend of a friend by some degree, not everyone knows everyone, and there are definitely owners that have been in tough roster situations and could easily have quit, but have chosen not to.  Granted, this is a limited anecdote, but I believe it has some value to your concerns.

Second, there are a number of reasons why ottoneu, unlike other fantasy leagues, will work better with strangers from a competitive balance standpoint.  Year over year, there are a number of things in place to make sure each team has an opportunity to win at the beginning of the season – deadline trades, arbitration, the very nature that expensive superstars are sent back to auction every season by the way inflation and mid-season trades work all help give teams a chance to win every year.  I’m happy to discuss any of these in more detail if you have any questions about them.

Third, the fact that you are in a league with 11 other like-minded individuals who had to pay money to play, which more than anything acts as a barrier of entry to just mindlessly joining a league and ignoring it by June, will help attrition greatly.  In a sense, everyone else in the league has the same mindset as you when joining – is this league going to stay together, or are 3 teams going to quit, etc – yet they have chosen to play, making their implicit statement that they are probably not going to be the team that is going to drop out and ruin the league.  Beyond that, the game requires a lot of trading and interacting with the other owners, and while it might seem silly, the camaraderie from these interactions are a huge boost in keeping leagues together.

Finally, while we have been hesitant to mention it at this point of the year, we have a plan for an interesting way to redistribute teams in the case that an owner does decide for whatever reason to drop out or not renew their team.  We plan on offering abandoned teams at a half-off for the first season starting price, which brings in new owners to inherit disbanded teams at a discount in year one.  We believe this will help league health and limit the number of leagues that are faced with a completely abandoned team for an entire year.

I believe all of these points in total will really help attrition year over year, though obviously it will not solve the problem completely.  Towards that, the only other thing I can say is that so far I have had nothing but excellent responses from some of our public owners.  Many leagues have drafted already, people have repeatedly told me that it is one of the best draft experiences out there, and so far the ‘strangers’ issue just hasn’t been a problem for these leagues.

So, that is my argument.  I’d love to hear your thoughts more, and if you’re ok with it I would like to use this conversation as the basis for a post on FanGraphs/RotoGraphs tomorrow.

Thanks again for the great email!
Niv Shah

The only point I’d like to add to this already long post is that as long as I still need to administer my league, I’ll be here to help administer your leagues and add features and answer questions and help out in any way that I can.  My league has been going strong for six years and I don’t see it ending any time soon.

If you have questions that you want to send me directly, you can reach me at help AT ottoneu DOT com, and if any of this answers your concerns, there is still plenty of time to join a league or start a league today.

Last week, we looked at hitters who are likely to be overrated by traditional fantasy rankings when playing in ottoneu leagues using FanGraphs Points (built on linear weights).  Today, we’ll look at the other side of the coin: which players will have better value in lwts leagues than in traditional leagues?

Based on what we found last week about overrated players (steals, mostly), this is what I expected to find as the typical profile of someone who would be underrated by traditional fantasy rankings:
1) slow, with no steals
2) low batting average
3) high OBP
4) maybe someone who hits lots of doubles, but relatively few home runs.

Essentially, we’re talking traditional “moneyball” here, right?

To test that idea,went back to my simple ranking system, which is based on FG Points but adjusted for replacement level (specific to ottoneu’s rules) at each position.  Here are the top 10, along with ESPN player rater rank:

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ottoneu Fantasy Baseball has received a tremendous amount of feedback since launching, and it has resulted in some new features that I would like to share with all of you.

The largest improvement is that we’ve created an alternate draft method for those of you who aren’t able to get the league together for a live auction draft.  Based on feedback from various leagues, you can now opt out of the auction draft and run 48-hour blind auctions between now and the start of the season.  Now instead of needing one block of time that can last longer than six hours, you can organize the auctions to only require 5 minutes a day.  You can even do a live auction for part of the league, and then switch to the 48-hour auctions whenever you want.  Choose whatever is most convenient for the league.

We’ve done a lot to clarify and improve our FanGraphs integration as well.  The FanGraphs toolbar now gives you fantasy-relevant projections, sortable stats, free agents, and a stronger player search within one click.  The FanGraphs staff league is going to draft this week in Arizona, and as the FanGraphs guys get to play with the game a bit, we will be adding more tools and features based on their feedback.

Of course, at the end of the day, this operation is to share a really neat fantasy baseball game with all of you.  As those of you who have contacted us already know, I am very responsive to comments, bugs, new feature requests, and questions.  ottoneu consists of one person, me, trying to build something that you, the informed baseball fan, will enjoy much more than a traditional fantasy game.  Since I am familiar with the entire site and the game format, you can reach me at the contact us page and I will do everything in my power to add any new tools or integration or features you want, resolve any questions you have, and respond and understand any comments you send. 

Already, existing leagues have pointed out the need for a league message board (resolved, and being improved shortly), the need for an alternate long-form draft option (resolved), as well as the need for clarity in player search and other FanGraphs tools (resolved).  Go to the contact us page, send an email to help, and let’s keep improving fantasy baseball!

Free Team!
We aren’t done giving away free teams for this season, and after Eno picked on me a few times with my ‘bad’ keepers and ‘bad’ trades, I think I’ll give away the next team.  Let’s do an exercise about positional scarcity.  ottoneu lineups consist of 1 C, 1B, 2B, SS, MI, 3B, Util, 5 OF, 5 SP, and 5 RP.  There is no CI since the util spot tends to lean CI.  Here are some players, their positions, and their prices.  Based on positional scarcity and performance in the 4×4 format (OBP, SLG, HR, R and ERA, WHIP, HR/9, K), who do you think is the best value, and who do you think is the worst?  All prices are from the original ottoneu league.  As always, show your work:

Shin-Soo Choo, OF, $27

Hanley Ramirez, SS, $57

Tim Lincecum, SP, $58

Bobby Jenks, RP, $6

Pretty varied set of players, and all but one of these prices was set at our auction draft on February 28th.  I’m very interested to see what you come up with!  Good luck!