Ottoneu: Chad’s Keep or Cut Decisions at C
My colleague, Lucas Kelly, covered his keep or cut decisions at catcher yesterday and that was a good reminder that I should probably be diving deeper into my rosters to figure out my off-season plans.
Archive for Ottoneu
The Analyst Who Used AI to Analyze His Analysis
by Lucas Kelly
November 21, 2024
Reader beware:
A human wrote this article. Some humans’ caffeine levels can fluctuate in predictable patterns and correlate strongly with “time of day” data points. Yet, there’s no telling how many milligrams were present in the author’s typing fingers at the various stages of writing this article. It was an iterative process that took the author much longer than he had originally expected. While a human wrote this article, a machine wrote and generated many sections, namely ChatGPT’s “gpt-4o” model. From here on out, anything written or output by the very friendly and human-helping artificial intelligence (be careful…they’re listening…) will be italicized.
Ottoneu: Lucas’ Keep or Cut Decisions at C
by Lucas Kelly
November 20, 2024
Assuming each team in your Ottoneu points league rosters two catchers, and you are playing in a twelve-team league, the replacement level points per game (P/G) mark for catchers in 2024 was 3.4. That means in most leagues, you should be able to find a catcher who can match somewhere around that mark at any point in the season on the waiver wire. In this example, we would set the rostered catcher mark at 24. But that’s not always the case. For example, if only five teams are rostering two catchers (10) while everyone else is rostering one (7), we would decrease our number of rostered catchers from 24 to 17, bringing up the replacement level mark to 3.9 P/G. For the point of this article, let’s set it at a hard 3.6 P/G and move on. In this article, I’ll list some of the catchers I am rostering and analyze whether they should be kept on my roster.
Ottoneu Arbitration’s Final Day
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!
Ottoneu: Arbitrary Arbitration Salary Increases
by Lucas Kelly
November 8, 2024
Arbitrary (ar·bi·trar·y)
- based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.
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 »
Evan Carter Teaches Us a Lesson About Projected Values
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.
The Relationship Between Hitting and Pitching Points in Ottoneu
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.
Ottoneu: How to Cope With the Crushing Disappointment of a Mid-Level Finish
by Lucas Kelly
October 30, 2024
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.
The Players I Roster Most In Ottoneu Reviewed
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.
The Many Ways to Build an Ottoneu Contender
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.