The day after arbitration ends is one of my favorites of the off-season because it feels like everything can start. Salaries are locked, rosters are set, trading is open and we are off to the races for the next couple of months, before we pause again to prep for auctions.
But before we get to wake up to newly updated salaries tomorrow, we have to get through the final day of arbitration today. And that means there are things to do!
Arbitrary (ar·bi·trar·y)
My Ottoneu arbitration strategies have varied over the past few years. I’ve been overly analytical, downloading .csv after .csv, splicing and merging and concatenating until there was more data than I cared to actually do anything with. I wrote last year about measuring salaries against the average and tipping the scales on already overpriced players. Sometimes it can be more fun to simply add a few dollars where it feels right. That’s what I did this year. Here are a few notes and thoughts I recorded as I dished out my dollars Read the rest of this entry »
The season is barely over, but we are already on to 2025, and some of the most useful tools for Ottoneu managers are out to help us. Early Steamer Projections are out and Justin Vibber has pulled them into the first push of the Ottoneu Surplus Calculator (SC) which means we have some early, rough values on players for 2025.
Sometimes, you set out on a journey, not knowing the destination and you wind up, well…nowhere. I think that may be what happened to me this week, but as the saying goes, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” so maybe there are some interesting nuggets to be gleaned from this somewhat aimless wandering.
Writing about fantasy baseball twice per week typically comes with a self-inflicted expectation of actually being good at playing fantasy baseball. I had some “W’s” this season (also known as dubs) and plenty of “L’s”, as the kids like to say, but being right in the middle feels worse. You can be the derelict, the scummy sewer rat who dwells at the deepest depths of the league standings. Or, you can be the king, looking down upon the peasants who hunger and thirst. But, being in the middle? It doesn’t lend itself to much insightful advice or analysis. “Write something actionable!”, I hear in the deepest REM parts of my sleep. Well, here I now hover, attempting to write something of the sort. In four parts, I’ll help you understand your options, if, like me, you are stuck in the metaphorical bathyal zone, swishing your dorsal fin back and forth hoping to make it up a few levels.
Some years just aren’t your year. Sometimes that is because you don’t get the breaks you need. Sometimes you just run into better teams in a bunch of leagues. And sometimes you load your rosters up with unproductive players and pay the price.
Each year, I take a moment before the season to review the players I roster most. And now, looking back that article…uh…yikes.
One of the most common questions I get in the off-season is around how many players a team should keep. Do you want to keep as many as possible, limiting your dependence on the draft and its fickle nature? Do you want to keep only the very best keepers, and take advantage of the values that creep up at a draft? Does it not matter, because everything that matters happens in-season?
The answer I almost always give is that it depends. You should keep as many players as you have that are worth keeping. You should depend on the draft as much as you need to. You should work in-season moves, as well. How you balance those things, I have argued, should be based on a combination of your team, your league, and your preferences. But I never had any data to back that up. Now I do.
Calling them the losers is kind of mean, isn’t it? These players are not losers. But they did lose position eligibility and so the word is pretty apt. I hope they don’t mind.
Yesterday we covered everyone who gained positional eligibility in Ottoneu this year and today we’ll look at the opposite: players who had eligibility from the 2023 season that carried over into 2024 but won’t be kept for 2025.
As the calendar turns to October and we turn our attention to the playoffs, Ottoneu quietly moves on to 2025. Niv Shah will keep us updated on off-season activity in his annual MegaThread (which is also a great place to ask him questions) and you can see there that the first step includes positional eligibility being updated.
The 2024 version of Hot Right Now will typically include three sections:
The FanGraphs Ottoneu team plans to run this feature weekly, updating fantasy managers on the biggest movers in Ottoneu leagues with an analysis of how these players could or could not help your roster.