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?

In a points format with a games cap, like Ottoneu, you win by a) scoring the most points per game and b) making sure to use up all your games. That’s an oversimplification but it is also fairly accurate. And so while I often used stats like wOBA as a proxy for player value in Ottoneu points league, at the end of the day, their value is best reflected in their points/game (P/G).

Kind of. P/G misses one key element and it can help you find underappreciated bats to add to your roster.

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One of the very best aspects of Ottoneu fantasy baseball is that you are involved all year round. As October hits, stats are no longer accumulating, points are no longer being totaled and performance measurements remain locked in the past. But arbitration begins and the business side of baseball is front and center. Would you believe that someone, somewhere, in an Ottoneu points league is rostering Ronald Acuña Jr. for only $26? It’s true. If he’s not a candidate for arbitration allocation in that league, I don’t know who is. This is a pure example of why arbitration matters. If the person rostering Acuña for only $26 doesn’t have that salary adjusted, they would go into the draft with Acuña and the additional dollars to auction another big name. Oh, the humanity!

You can find all kinds of interesting situations like the Acuña one by downloading average salary data right from your league page and in this post, I’ll take you through the details on how you can use it to generate insights and strategy specifically for your league.

Step 1: Download average salaries and make it specific to your scoring format

If you click on the “Players” tab at the top of your league page, the sub-menu has a link all the way to the right titled, “Average Salaries”. You can also click here. The drop-down menu in the top right corner of the page allows you to specify salaries based on your scoring format. Choose the option that matches your league and then click “Export as .csv”.

Step 2: Merge average salary data with your league’s roster data.

If you followed Step 1 above, then you have your “average salary data”. Now, back on the “Players” tab, simply click “FanGraphs Sortable Stats”. This will take you to a FanGraphs leaderboard. Make sure the drop-down menu reads “All Teams” so that you are being given salary information for your league-mates rosters. Lastly, merge the two data sets on “Name” and subset it to “Player Name”, “Average Salary”, “Last 10”, and “$”, which represents the actual salary the player is currently rostered for in your league. Here’s an example:

You’ll notice a few things in the table above. First, I’ve also included “Last 10” which gives an average of the most recent 10 completed auctions for that player. You’ll also notice that I calculated the difference between the player’s average salary and what they are actually rostered for. From here I can start to make some decisions. For example, I’m not worried at all about the roughly $4.00 difference between the average salary and the actual salary for Benintendi and Kelenic. If you look at Benintendi’s “Last 10” you’ll notice he’s trending down anyways. By 2024, he may be worth less than the $5.00 he’s actually being paid. Yordan Alvarez, however, needs some adjusting. He’s worth more than $34, just try and change my mind.

Step 3: Group your new data set by team to determine who has the most “surplus value”

You can eyeball this process by simply going to your league’s “Arbitration” page and looking at the comparison of “Curr Salary” versus “Proj Salary” by team. Remember that you must give each team in your league at least $1. Note that this process does not provide a true “surplus” value for each team because each team is also overpaying on players. However, you won’t know who is being cut for a number of weeks, and that probably shouldn’t factor into your allocation strategy. It’s important to take stock of who in your league seems to have all the riches. There are a few different ways to do this but I like to take a simplistic route and isolate the league to players who are rostered lower than the average salary. Then, I sum the difference (Avg Salary – Actual Salary) by team and end up with something like this:

Right away I can see that there are two teams who have a big discrepancy between what they are paying and what other teams are paying on average. That could be a difference between two or three players, or it could be that a team is rostering a handful of players for a few dollars less than average. Let’s take a look at team F to see what is going on:

Team F looks a little less scary when you see that the value difference is spread out. Again, Yordan Alvarez needs to be adjusted. But, who else on this list should I allocate arbitration dollars to? Well, that’s the fun part. It’s not necessarily as easy as just tossing dollars on Yordan and Devers. Even if at the end of arbitration, Alvarez’s salary increases to $50, I’d probably still be inclined to keep him on my roster if I were the Team F manager. If that is the case, what does that actually do? Well, it limits the amount Team F will take into next year’s draft, but it doesn’t free up Alvarez for me to draft. That’s where the real strategy comes into play and over the next few weeks, our Ottoneu team will be writing more about arbitration strategy.

We made it through the whole regular season and hopefully you brought home some hardware in your leagues. For Ottoneu teams, the job isn’t finished at the end of the season; there’s arbitration, the keeper deadline, offseason trades, and next year’s draft to look forward to. For rebuilding teams, this is the time to evaluate your progress and to start making a plan for next season; will you be continuing to build toward the future or is your roster ready to compete? If you haven’t been following along with this series, I’ve covered my process of rebuilding this team, from the initial decision to rebuild, to the draft, to preparing to sell.

This season was a wild roller coaster for my team in Ottoneu League 32 – Fantasy Field of Dreams. I made some blockbuster trades this summer and churned through a ton of players on the waiver wire. In the end, I wound up in seventh place with 17,046.4 total points, just a hair under 2,000 points behind the winning team. Despite the mediocre finish, I was actually pretty happy with how I finished the season; during the second half of the season, my team was the fifth highest scoring team in the league and during the final month of the year, I out scored every other team.

My rate stats (P/G and P/IP) weren’t the best during September, even though they were comfortably above average, so that big point total seems to be a bit of a mirage thanks to hitting my games and innings caps. Still, I’m happy with the progress of my roster and I think I’ve taken a big step towards competing sooner rather than later. I’m still a bit unsure if that window is opening next year or not, but I’m closer to moving out of this rebuilding cycle than I thought I’d be at the start of the season.

The biggest challenge I had on my roster during the season was rostering — and subsequently cutting — Wander Franco. He was one of the core pieces I was planning on building around but his legal trouble has sabotaged the bright future he had in baseball. I won’t wade into that situation except to say that fantasy baseball is a game and you should do what helps you enjoy it as much as possible. I wound up cutting Franco and didn’t look back.

Losing Franco obviously changes the complexion of my roster a bit. Instead of building around a pair of superstars in Aaron Judge and Franco, I’m now left with a pretty significant hole at shortstop that I’ll need to address in the offseason. Despite that gap, I’m actually pretty happy with where my roster stands. Here are the 20 players I’ve identified as clear keepers with an early look at their potential production in 2024 using the in-season updated Steamer 600 projections:

I’ve got a solid core of position players with a few key high priced veterans and a young, cheap pitching staff. Of these 20 keepers, I acquired seven of them via trades, four of them through in-season auctions, and two through the preseason draft. Spencers Torkelson and Steer were the last two draftees on my roster by the end of the season; of my ten drafted players at the beginning of the season, four were traded away and four were cut during the season. Obviously every team’s mileage will vary, but that’s a pretty clear illustration of how difficult it is to rebuild through the draft.

I’m really happy with how my outfield is shaping up. Judge is the obvious headliner but Jazz Chisholm Jr. provides an exciting ceiling if he can stay healthy next year while Ian Happ and Taylor Ward should be consistent contributors. I’ve got Steer, Josh Lowe, and Jeff Mcneil to plug and play as needed. Because five outfield spots have been increasingly more difficult to fill with solid options over the last few seasons, I’m pleased to head into next year with these players locked in.

Third base is another strength as long as Royce Lewis can stay healthy. His second-half breakout was exciting to watch and he’s finally fulfilling the lofty prospect ceiling he’s had since being drafted first overall back in 2017. More importantly, I’ve got some nice backup options on my roster if Lewis continues to be injury plagued; Steer, Alec Bohm, and Jorge Polanco can all fill in at third base if needed, though that might have some knock-on effects on my middle infield situation.

I quite like where my pitching staff ended up by the end of the season too. Tarik Skubal’s breakout after returning from his own elbow injury gives me a high-ceiling starter to anchor my rotation alongside George Kirby, Jesús Luzardo, and Grayson Rodriguez. Pending the status of his injured leg, Nick Lodolo could ascend into that group as well. This group of pitchers is young and filled with potential.

With just seven obvious cuts on my roster, that leaves 18 players on my keep/cut bubble. I have $194 in cap space devoted to my 20 keepers above which gives me a ton of room to play with. Ideally, I’d probably keep half of these bubble players while adding another $60-$80 in salary to my cap.

There’s definitely a world where I’d keep both Sean Murphy and Shane Bieber, the highest priced players on my bubble, but I’m not sure I need either on my roster next year. Murphy started the year really strong but really struggled in the second half of the season and the emergence of Jonah Heim at a fraction of the salary means I can head into the draft looking for a cheap catcher to add. Bieber’s return from his elbow injury before the season ended gives me a lot more confidence about his ability to be a solid contributor next year; I’m just not sure his ceiling is as high as it’s been in the recent past when he was producing over 5 P/IP.

There’s that group of young outfielders priced around $9-$10 that feel like they’re just a touch too expensive but still have some promise to outproduce their projections. I also have to make a decision about Jake Cronenworth or Brendan Donovan as a utility knife for my roster; the projection for the latter surprised me and I’m leaning towards him even though I thought he would have been a cut before this exercise.

Then there’s this group of cheap-ish pitchers who should provide some nice bulk innings for my roster even if there isn’t much ceiling for much more than their projections. Drew Rasmussen’s injury is a wild card and Jack Leiter made some promising steps forward during the second-half of the season. I’m not sure it really matters which of these pitchers I keep, but I think it’s important to keep three or four of them to give me plenty of opportunities to play matchups and still hit my innings cap.

Let’s say I keep nine of those bubble guys giving me 29 players on my roster heading into the draft — disregarding any offseason wheeling and dealing. Accounting for the $30-ish in salary added to my roster via arbitration, I’m expecting to have around $285 in salary committed to these 29 keepers. That leaves me around $115 to fill 11 spots in the draft which is a great spot to be in. I’ll need a shortstop, one more big bat, a frontline starter or two, and a full bullpen. That feels doable with the amount of cap space that I’ll have.

Back in March, I shared my annual look at the players most likely to be found on my Ottoneu rosters, focusing on six players who were on four or more of my seven teams. This year I was interested to see how my rosters changed by the end of the season. So I redid the exercise of totalling up the players on my rosters to see where things shook out.

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