Part I covered 35-22 and Part II covered 21-11, so now we are onto the top ten trades I made in Ottoneu this year.

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Earlier this week, Lucas Kelly and Chad Young ran though their tough keep or cut decisions at middle infield for their Ottoneu teams. Now I’ll join in on the party and run through three players on my bubble and where I think the keep line could be for each of them. All P/G projections are from the 2024 Steamer projections.

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Ryan McMahon 2B/3B
Salary: $6 and $10
Average Salary: $11.4
2023 P/G: 4.71
Projected 2024 P/G: 4.95

Ryan McMahon’s career trajectory has been anything but a straight line. A breakout season in 2019 was followed by an extremely disappointing pandemic-shortened season. A second breakout in 2021 made it seem like he had gotten things back on track but he took some significant steps back the next year and followed that up with another step back this year.

It all comes down to his strikeout rate. In 2021, he struck out a career-low 24.7% of the time while continuing to hit for power and draw a decent amount of walks. The strikeout rate stayed low last year but his power dried up a bit despite similar looking underlying batted ball peripherals. His quality of contact stayed mostly the same in 2023 — a good thing — but his strikeout rate suddenly shot back up above 30%. It’s pretty easy to see why.

His ability to make contact on pitches in the zone absolutely cratered last year. His walk rate was actually a career-high 10.8% which indicates he still had a decent idea of which pitches to swing at. Unfortunately, his ability to consistently make contact with those right pitches eluded him. For a player with his offensive profile, making the most of every single ball he puts in play is paramount, but when those below-average bat-to-ball skills take a turn for the worse, the whole house of cards collapses.

Keep or Cut?
The good news is that his quality of contact is still present. He posted career bests in barrel rate and expected wOBA this year and will continue to play in the most hitter friendly environment in baseball. His profile will always be a little risky thanks to his below average contact skills even if his power and discipline give him a solid floor in this format. Steamer projects a bit of a bounce back in his strikeout rate at the cost of some power leading to an overall wOBA right in line with what he’s done the last two years. That puts his value somewhere between $8 and $11 based on the Auction Calculator. I’m rostering him in two leagues and I’m definitely keeping him at $6. In the other league, he’s still on my bubble since that team desperately needs cap space and I’m not sure keeping McMahon at essentially market value is the best use of resources there.

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Jeff McNeil 2B/OF
Salary: $8 and $13
Average Salary: $10.9
2023 P/G: 4.35
Projected 2024 P/G: 5.14

A year ago, Jeff McNeil was coming off a phenomenal season in which he won the NL batting crown, was an All-Star, and received down-ballot MVP votes. Fast forward a year and McNeil’s star looks a lot less bright. It’s not hard to figure out the issue that sank his season this year: it’s all about the BABIP. In many ways, his offensive struggles this year look a lot like the mediocre season he put together in 2021. Unfortunately, there are a lot more red flags this year than there were two years ago.

It’s important to note that McNeil’s full season stats hide the ebbs and flows of his season. He actually started off fairly strong, posting a 139 wRC+ through the first month of the season, but a prolonged summer slump dragged his production into a crater that even a late season surge couldn’t salvage.

For the most part, his wOBA followed his BABIP, which makes sense for a player so dependent on his high-contact approach. The weird thing was the gigantic spike in strikeout rate that occurred in the middle of the season. It’s almost as if he tried to swing his way out of his slump which only exacerbated his issues. Despite that huge mountain of strikeouts during the summer, his overall strikeout rate ended up at nearly a career-low by the end of the season. His ability to make contact isn’t in question.

I am a little more worried about his quality of contact. McNeil has never really hit the ball all that hard, relying instead on an ability to spray his contact from line to line while never really producing all that much weak contact. Unfortunately, his hard hit rate fell three points to 27% and his sweet spot rate dropped seven points to 32.1%. It all culminated in a ghastly .281 expected wOBA on contact, easily a career-worst for him and one of the worst marks in baseball among qualified batters. For a batter who relies so heavily on putting the ball in play, to have such a dramatic drop in contact quality is a serious red flag.

Keep or Cut?
McNeil now has almost 2700 career plate appearances with a .346 wOBA and Steamer projected a nice bounce back from him in 2024. Still, the drop in contact quality is a big concern which clouds his future a bit. During his down year in 2021, his hard hit and sweet spot rates were right in line with his career norms indicating that much of his struggles were simply rooted in bad batted ball luck; that’s not the case this year. Despite his up-and-down year, he was still worth $8 according to the Auction Calculator in 2023. Like McMahon, I’m rostering McNeil in two leagues and one is priced as an easy keep ($8) and the other puts him on the bubble ($13). There is certainly a universe where McNeil returns that higher value or even more but it now feels a little more risky than it did a year ago.

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Carlos Correa SS
Salary: $27
Average Salary: $27.4
2023 P/G: 4.45
Projected 2024 P/G: 5.40

A year ago, if you told me I had the option of keeping a $27 Carlos Correa, it would have been a no-brainer decision. One season long bout with Plantar Fasciitis has completely changed his fortunes. Health has always been an issue with Correa; he’s topped 150 games played in a season just once back in 2016 and has had major IL stints for a variety of ailments in nearly every other season. The production is obviously elite when he’s on the field, but you have to bake in some risk that he’ll miss significant time each season into your evaluation calculus.

While his foot injury sapped a lot of his power, he also underperformed many of his underlying metrics based on his batted ball quality. His hard hit and barrel rates were right in line with his career norms, but all of his expected stats outpaced what he actually produced at the plate this year and his BABIP fell from .339 to .272. That one-two punch of bad luck combined with bad health meant that he was a shell of his normal self in 2023.

The amount you value Correa in 2024 seems entirely dependent on how much you think he’ll play. If you believe he’ll be healthy and ready to play a full season, a $27 salary could be close to market value with the potential of becoming a steal if Correa is truly firing on all cylinders. As it is, $27 feels like too much of a risk for a player who had yet to prove he can stay on the field for an entire season.

Keep or Cut?
The team that has to make a decision about Correa also has Gunnar Henderson to cover shortstop if I end up cutting the former. Steamer projects a pretty significant bounce back campaign for Correa next year and the projection even accounts for around 20 games missed next year. Because I have Henderson to step into the full-time shortstop role and they’re priced around the same, I’ll be cutting Correa in favor of the younger option.

Yesterday, Lucas Kelly went through some tough keep or cut decisions at for his Ottoneu teams. Today, I’ll do the same. Before diving in, I’ll note that Lucas and I have slightly different values on middle infield.

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Last week I tried to create benchmarks for what should be considered a replacement-level player in a few of my FanGraphs points leagues. Here’s what I came up with for middle-infield players:

2B Replacement Level: 3.71 P/G
SS Replacement Level: 3.51 P/G

The actual MI position is a tricky one to nail down, so I’ll just separate the two positions out for now. This replacement level mark is not an exact science. Maybe your league mates have been stock-piling shortstops for some reason and that would change the way you calculate a replacement-level player. Regardless, if you have a sense of what kind of player you can typically find on the waiver wire throughout the season, you can make decisions on whether a player is worth keeping in 2024 or not. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few of my middle-infielders and analyze their keepworthiness for 2024.

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Tommy Edman, 2B/SS/OF
Salary: $11.00
Average Salary: $11.98
2023 P/G: 4.17
Proj 2024 P/G: 4.50

Edman’s projected 4.50 P/G according to Steamer places him in Tier 5 among all players who played in over 75 games last season. Steamer expects Edman to take a step forward in 2024, increasing his P/G mark by over 0.30 P/G. What’s the reason for that? Well, his BABIP was at a career-low .248 in 2023 and Steamer took notice, bumping it up to .264 in 2024, which is aiding increases in his slash line:

2023: .248/.307/.399
2024: .264/.321/.407 (PROJ)

Though Edman did lose some time to injury in 2023, he still reached 528 plate appearances. Steamer has bumped that up to 536 in 2024 and FanGraphs Depth Charts is even higher at 581. No one seems too concerned that Richie Palacios will be taking over either 2B or SS playing time from Edman in 2024. Unless something unexpected happens this offseason, Edman seems like a very good lock at everyday SS. Edman’s speed is still an asset and though FanGraphs points leagues reward power and slugging percentage more, speed still plays and I’m banking on a positive hitting regression for Edman.

Keep or Cut?
I am keeping for 2024. If I were rostering him for $12, I would cut him and take my chances trying to get him back for less at the auction. Cuts have not been made in this league yet, and when I look at the players who are not rostered at the 2B/SS positions who played more than 75 games in 2023, the best I can find is 4.35 P/G (Jeff McNeil). That makes me feel pretty good about where I’ve set the replacement level considering McNeil ended the year on the IL.

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Andrés Giménez, 2B
Average Salary: $9.11
Salary: $6.00
2023 P/G: 4.39
Proj 2024 P/G: 5.15

Giménez’s slash line took a hit in 2023 compared to 2022:

2022: .297/.371/.466
2023: .251/.314/.399
2024: .265/.328/.427 (PROJ)

If that’s not an example of a projection system regressing to the mean then I don’t know what is. It would be easy to say that he was BABIP’d in 2023 (.289) and move on. But Giménez is still only 25 years old and I do think there is another gear in his game. His power skills took a hit in 2023, but he played in a career-high 153 games. Could there be an aspect of fatigue involved? Take a look at some of his power skills between 2022 and 2023:

Barrel% 2022: 6.2 -> 2023: 5.5
HardHit% (Statcast) 2022: 37.6 -> 2023: 27.0
xwOBA 2022: .326 -> 2023: .300
EV: 2022: 87.8 -> 2023: 84.8
MaxEV 2022: 109.9 -> 2023: 108.8

He also started to pull the ball more with less power:

There is a disagreement between his statcast HardHit% and his SportsInfo measurements. Regardless of which you believe in more, the bump in 1% in the graph would need to be a whole lot higher in order for the pull-the-ball-in-the-air approach to help Giménez’s power. Though the table below is not adjusted for batted ball events, it does indicate that Giménez is generating the most power from line drives:

He seems to find himself in this place where he needs to add a little more power to his pull-the-ball-in-the-air approach, or he needs to simply focus on making hard contact and plate discipline to increase his BB%. His 30 stolen base potential is at risk and declines further from the .314 OBP he showed in 2023.

Keep or Cut?
Last season’s 4.39 P/G was well above what I’ve marked as replacement level (3.71 P/G) and Steamer likes a positive regression in 2024. The upside is there, stolen base potential and perhaps he finds a way to add power to his new approach. If not, and he reverts back to a harder-hit ball, not in the air, then I still like what he did in 2022. Most second basemen with over 75 games in 2023 at 5.00 P/G were rostered, on average, between $5-$12. I’m keeping anywhere below $8 and might even go a few dollars higher.

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Brice Turang, 2B/SS
Average Salary: $4.30
Salary: $3.00
2023 P/G: 2.51
Proj 2024 P/G: 3.87

Turang’s projection places him above the replacement level at 2B in 2024, but just barely. He came very close to a full season in 2023, playing 126 games and recording 546 plate appearances. Steamer projects a step forward when looking at his slash line:

2023: .218/.285/.300

2024: .246/.319/.370 (PROJ)

Steamer also thinks his six home runs and 26 stolen bases will turn into 10 home runs and 20 stolen bases next season. Turang is not being rostered in Ottoneu leagues due to his ability to provide a P/G mark above that of any replacement-level player. Managers are rostering for his future value and upside potential. The question is, will it come? For now, he seems good enough defensively to stay in the 2B position, and depending on what happens to shortstop Willy Adames in 2025 when he hits free agency, it could be a few more seasons before we really get a sense of what Turang will become. His contact rates from 2023 looked a little troublesome and he really struggled to hit the fastball. While rookies walked 8.1% and struck out 25.8% of the time in 2023, Turang did better, walking 8.5% of the time and striking out 21.0% of the time. However, he did not hit the ball hard very often, only barreling the ball 2.9% of the time. The league average among rookies is 7.6%.

Keep or Cut?
This is my last season holding Turang for upside and it might not last long. He hasn’t shown the skills necessary to be a rosterable hitter, yet. That is in a points format, however. Any player who can hit 10 home runs and steal 20 bases at a very low price should probably be rostered in roto formats. In points formats, anything over $3 is a cut for me.

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Jonathan India, 2B
Average Salary: $12.13
Salary: $16.00
2023 P/G: 5.20
Proj 2024 P/G: 5.23

India found himself in Jeff Zimmerman’s “Hitters Who Played Through a 2023 Injury” report at the end of the season, but the difference between his projected OPS and final OPS was a tiny .003. Regardless, Zimmerman’s research has determined a decline in performance while players play through injury, and with an injury like plantar fasciitis, the one India suffered through in 2023, you can hope that India will improve with health in 2024. Even with the injury, he was above replacement. Players who earned around the 5.0 P/G mark in 2023 with over 75 games have an average salary between $5-$14.

In 2023, India’s BB% increased, his K% decreased, but his overall slash line declined, except for SLG. His wOBA was also up over his 2022 mark. His BABIP was at a career low, .281. His power metrics and batted ball profile have roughly stayed the same, but he’s hitting the ball in the air more. The problem is that his fly ball increases did not correspond with his power increases throughout the season:

His swing percentages tell a story, I’m just not sure what the story is. It looks as if his swing decisions have improved. He has swung outside of the zone less often, swung inside the zone more often, and become more selective overall. None of that really helped against left-handed pitchers, though, he hit .207 against them. That’s the second-worst mark in front of Alan Trejo among second basemen with at least 100 plate appearances against lefties. That’s worrisome when you look at the Reds RosterResource page and see India lined up in the DH spot. He feels dangerously close to finding himself platooned.

Keep or Cut?
I think the $10 or $11 dollar mark is appropriate. Anything over $12 feels like a cut.

Did you roster any 4.33 points-per-game outfielders last season? Better yet, did you roll that 4.33 P/G outfielder into your starting lineup on a regular basis last season? If you did, you were straddling the line of replacement level. Last week I placed offensive players into ranked tiers based on their final P/G achievements and 4.33 P/G is a tier-five player at best. Here’s a reminder of the points spread between tiers:

Offensive P/G tiers for all position players who played in more than 75 games in 2023:

Tier 1 range: 9.1 P/G – 6.0 P/G

Tier 2 range: 5.9 P/G – 5.5 P/G

Tier 3 range: 5.5 P/G – 5.1 P/G

Tier 4 range: 5.0 P/G – 4.7 P/G

Tier 5 range: 4.7 P/G – 4.3 P/G

Remember that represents all players clumped together. 4.33 P/G is actually pretty good if we’re looking at only catchers. The tiers above are independent of position and therefore, flawed. Today, I’ll dial in what should have been considered rosterable in 2023 by position, making note of what a replacement-level player recorded in points per game. Let this serve as a starting point as you may play in a different league format than I do, which would create different-sized player pools. You should be able to easily copy and paste the table in this article and edit the inputs accordingly. Before the table, I need to set the parameters:

– This is representing a 12-team, FanGraphs points league
– I am considering players on my bench above replacement level and am being somewhat arbitrary about it. Each league has 40 roster spots, but I’m leaving 10 of those roster spots for minor leaguers and below replacement-level players. If you add up the “Starters” and “Bench” columns, that is what I’m marking as each team’s number of above-replacement level players. Again, copy and paste the table and make edits if you wish.
– I have excluded players whose “Level” was anything but a major league team at the time of the data pull, eliminating minor leaguers.
– If a player is eligible for that position, they were included in the analysis for that position.

If you take all outfielders in your league, rostered or unrostered, and you sort them by points per game, you simply check the points per game mark of the 73rd-best player. But wait, isn’t a replacement-level player the player with the highest P/G mark available on the waiver wire? Well, yes and no. Let’s now put this system to the test with that 4.33 OF I mentioned in the intro. First, I’ll start by going into my league’s free-agent player pool, isolating outfielders who are currently free agents and played in more than 75 games last season. That last 75-game qualifier is not a part of the table above, but since I’m using end-of-season data, I want to show the players who accumulated playing time and kept a high points per game mark. Here’s what I see:

Andrew McCutchen – 5.24 P/G

Jeff McNeil – 4.35 P/G

Luis Rengifo – 4.34 P/G

Edward Olivares – 4.33 P/G

Willi Castro – 4.11 P/G

So, in theory, this mark works for my league. McCutchen, McNeil, and Rengifo were all hurt toward the season’s end, so in reality, the first available player eligible for the OF spot is Castro. To really prove this out, I’ll do the same exact thing in a second league. Here are OF eligible players available as free agents with over 75 games played:

Tommy Pham – 4.73 P/G

Harold Ramírez – 4.63 P/G

Jose Siri – 4.42 P/G

Ok, so it’s not perfect, but it’s close. I rostered Cedric Mullins all season and he finished the year at 4.37 P/G. Should I have dropped Mullins for Siri? Tough to say. Hindsight is 20/20. I still prefer Mullins for 2024. For now, this may help inform you of where you need to make cuts this offseason. Stay tuned for next week’s post where I work through this same exercise for points per game projections in 2024 and begin converting those projections into dollar values.

In Part I, I went from #35 through #22, and today we’ll continue the countdown from worst-to-best, setting up a finale with the top 10 tomorrow.

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Over the course of the just-ended Ottoneu season, I made a total of 35 trades across seven leagues. I have no idea if that is a lot of trades or a small number or what. I know that I am pretty active on the trade market, so I assume it is a relatively high number. But the raw count isn’t what matters here. The only way we get better at making trades is by taking a moment to reflect on what went right and what went wrong, so we can learn and make better decisions in the future. So I did that. I ranked all 35 of my trades from best (I would do this again 10 times out of 10) to worst (I really wish I hadn’t done that). These articles will hopefully not just review that list but share some lessons learned along the way.

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It’s important to know what a good points per-game mark is and what kind of price points are attached. In this post, I’ve taken all offensive players and isolated down to those who played in more than 75 games in 2023, an arbitrary cut-off. Then, I placed them in decile groups according to their points per game marks in 2023, creating tier groups. Each decile contains 32 or 33 players. I chose to only present the top six deciles, bringing the player totals to 196. That doesn’t necessarily cover a full league of rostered offensive players, but it gets close. Here’s a look at the spread of tiers one, two, and three:

Tier one shows us the largest spread due to outliers like Ronald Acuña Jr.‘s 9.11 P/G season, Corey Seager’s 8.31 P/G season, and the Dodgers combo Mookie Betts (8.14 P/G) and Freddie Freeman (8.1 P/G). Those were the four offensive players who held P/G marks above eight in 2023. The crazy part is that there’s no qualifier involved beyond the 75-game cutoff, meaning, the best players in 2023 stuck around and accumulated their way to the top. Each of these top of tier-one players played in at least 119 games. The spread of games across these top three tiers doesn’t differ much. However, the average price certainly does:

Average Games Played and Cost by Tier:
Tier 1: 138 G, $29
Tier 2: 141 G, $18
Tier 3: 129 G, $10

These prices are specific to my league but still give a good sense of what a top-tier player should cost. Once we get into Tier two, the price goes down and we’re left with very good everyday players who aren’t going 70-40, but are still contributing daily. Tier three is where I’d like to live. Here are max, min, and median players by P/G within each tier:

Let’s move on to tiers four, five, and six, where a tight four to five points per game range is the norm:

Now, we get down to the player pool where the really tough decisions get made. Does the player have more to give? Or, will they forever be a tier six player who you swap between bench and starting position? Are they likely to fall out of tier six and drop down into the dungeons of lower tiers? These are the questions that we’ll be asking ourselves all off-season as we click them back and forth between “cut” and “keep” on our “Roster Organizer” tab:

This analysis does not take into consideration the players who showed up for 75 games or less and crushed. Players like Davis Schneider, Royce Lewis, Evan Carter, and Zack Gelof are omitted from the box plots above. However, a big takeaway for me is how similar players in tiers four, five, and six are from a points-per-game standpoint.

Having a solid handle on what a good points per game mark is for full-season players is important and hopefully, it will give you some benchmarks for your offseason decisions. Next week, I’ll take a look at the distribution of position eligibility across tiers to get a sense of how valuable, for example, a tier one shortstop is over a tier four shortstop. See you then.

Lucas Kelly has offered two interesting Ottoneu arbitration techniques already this week, and I want to hit you with a third before the weekend. This technique isn’t my favorite – it isn’t the most strategic or most impactful – but sometimes you just can’t do everything you want to do. You don’t have time to identify player values and figure out who has the most surplus. You don’t want to compare salaries to average salaries. Or you just got caught up in non-fantasy-baseball-life and time ran out. When that happens, this approach can be a lifesaver.

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Have you ever found yourself paying for something that you just knew you couldn’t afford? At the store, you talked yourself into it. You over-exaggerated how much “extra” you had in your budget. You convinced yourself that you needed this shiny, beautiful thing and that, heck, you even deserved it. But when you got home, thoughts started to creep in. How am I going to afford this?  My butt doesn’t look as good in my home mirror as it did in the store. Maybe I can get a second job. Maybe I can make cuts in other areas. Do I really need this? Eventually, after a week’s worth of instant mac n’ cheese dinners, you decide that it’s not worth it, that it’s time to come to reality, and that the high-priced item needs to go back to the store. In the case of Ottoneu fantasy baseball, managers are watching their arbitration dollars pile up and are asking the same questions. Can I really afford Adley Rutcshman now that the market has caught up? How much is too much for Ronald Acuña Jr.? Why is everyone picking on me?

During arbitration, your league mates will increase your players’ salaries, tightening the screws on your overall budget, but you get to do the same to them. Maybe the best thing to do is to simply force them to take their own high-priced items back to the store or, dropping the metaphor, cut the player. Let’s take a look at each team’s most expensive player in the FanGraphs Staff League II:

I’ve gone into experimental mode and added $3 to every player’s salary. In yellow, I’ve highlighted the players who were brought up above the average salary due to my adjustment. In red, I’ve highlighted players who were already rostered above the average and are now well over that limit. This helps visualize which teams I could have the biggest impact on with my arbitration dollars alone. That’s all well and nice but keep in mind that you wouldn’t be able to give each team $3. That would put you well above your $25 spending limit in 12-team leagues. No, you’ve got a healthy $25 to dish out and not a penny more. So, let’s create a different scenario.

I’ll take each team’s best two players and I’ll divvy out at least $1 to each team as required, focusing on teams that have players just about to tip over the average edge of the cliff. Here goes:

Once again I’ve highlighted players in yellow who I brought above the average. In red are the players who were already rostered for a price above average, and I’ve really started gouging. Muahahah! Take that! Can’t afford to pay!? Too bad! Ok, Aaron Judge is safe. So are Shohei Ohtani, Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, and Kyle Tucker. But it would take a concentrated effort to bring those players up to or above the average. You could very well do the opposite of what I’m suggesting here and give those players all of your focus, but I would imagine other members of the league will concentrate some inflation firepower in that direction. The rest of the players in the white cells, Goldschmidt, Bieber, and Snell, are already rostered above the average and don’t need any scale tipping to be done.

This is the way to keep the stars in each year’s draft and part of the reason, like baseball, Ottoneu is a very difficult game to play. Of course, this is only one strategy to use, but it can be very effective. Now, just imagine a world where every member of your league reads this article. Stay with me here. Each owner in your league adds just a dollar or more to each team’s top players. Now that would make for some interesting keeper deadlines, wouldn’t it?