We flipped the script this week, with Jake Mailhot posting his FanGraphs Points reliever ranks before I posted my 4×4 ranks, but I still wanted to provide my ranks. I am also going to make this article – the last of the ranks before the keeper deadline this weekend! – pull double duty. In addition to my 4×4 tiers, I am going to share my thoughts on Points and 5×5 leagues, as well as head-to-head, rather than doing a full follow-up article. All the same great taste now packed into a single bite.
Last Saturday night was the Ottoneu keeper deadline. If you’re like me, you might have spent too much time the last few months weighing which players deserve a spot on your 2026 roster. A handful of last minute offseason trades ahead of the deadline got things in order and then came the chopping block. For better or worse, everything is locked in until draft day arrives for your league.
Before looking ahead towards your draft this spring, let’s take a look at what happened at the keeper deadline. There isn’t much immediately actionable information here since rosters are locked until your league’s draft, but I found it interesting to dig into the players who were cut the most and how average salaries have changed over the course of the offseason.
There aren’t a lot of surprises on the list of most cut players. It’s mostly populated with guys who were either injured in 2025 or who struggled mightily last season. When looking ahead towards this season, the uncertainty surrounding all of these players made them all easy cuts at the deadline.
A spring illness caused Mookie Betts to lose nearly 20 pounds in two weeks and forced him to miss the Dodgers’ two-game series in Japan to start the season. His conditioning never really caught up once the season got underway and he struggled for nearly the entire season. He did finish on a high note, posting a 128 wRC+ in August and September, but the early season damage was already done. As one of the most expensive players in the Ottoneu universe, a lost season from Betts was bound to have repercussions, and he wound up being the second most cut player at the deadline. Still, if we chalk up his struggles in 2025 to his spring illness, then a bounce back season in ‘26 is more than likely. The projections see a wide range of potential outcomes — ZiPS is projecting him at a 131 wRC+ while OOPSY is all the way down at 118 — but his history of production is good enough that you should expect to pay top dollar for him in the draft. His average salary after the cut deadline is nearly $50, though I’d expect that to fall a bit once he’s drafted in all those leagues where he’s available.
I really want to believe in Lars Nootbaar’s skillset. He’s got an excellent approach at the plate and his contact quality is fantastic. He lowered his groundball rate by nearly 15 points in 2025, but despite a hard hit rate of 50%, he didn’t see a big improvement in results on contact. A lot of that added air contact was hit at too high launch angles or hit to the opposite field. In other words, despite embracing “elevate and celebrate,” all that elevated contact wasn’t optimized for damage. To make matters worse, he played through a rib injury for some of the season and then had surgery to correct issues in both of his heels this offseason. I want to believe in Nootbaar, but between the injury issues and the difficulty translating his contact quality into real results, I’m not sold on a bounce back from him.
After a very successful first year in the US, Shota Imanaga took a pretty significant step back in his second season in Chicago. The twin culprits were a strikeout rate that dropped by nearly five points and a groundball rate that fell eight points. With all that extra elevated contact allowed, he saw a corresponding jump in home runs allowed that shot his FIP up by more than a run. Homers are a death knell for any pitcher in Ottoneu and so it’s no surprise to see Imanaga on the chopping block. I think it’s probably reasonable to expect a bit of a bounce back — his SIERA and xFIP were both well below his actual FIP in 2025 — but getting back to his outstanding ‘24 season is probably out of the question. As a fly ball heavy pitcher, his success will wax and wane based on his home run rate which gives him a pretty volatile profile.
Largest Drop in Average Salary — All Ottoneu Leagues
The table above lists players who saw their average salaries drop the most after the cut deadline. As you’d expect, there are a bunch of aging stars and once-great players who suffered a sudden dip in performance in 2025.
Man, what happened to Ozzie Albies? You could chalk up his power outage in 2024 to a broken wrist suffered in July of that season. But then he didn’t bounce back in ‘25; his ISO dropped to a career-low .124 and he blasted only 16 home runs. Even though we only have limited bat speed data, Albies’s average bat speed dropped a full tick from 2023 to ‘24 and it didn’t bounce back last year when he was supposedly healthy. His contact quality has never really been all that great but he made the most of it every season until last year. He’s still only 29 years old, but unless he rediscovers an extra gear with his bat speed, I’m afraid his best days are already in the past.
Oh look, another Braves hitter who really struggled last year. At least with Austin Riley, you can point to a hand injury in 2024 and three separate core injuries in ‘25 to explain his struggles. Then again, his production at the plate had already started to decline slightly in 2023, and really reached fever pitch when his plate discipline started slipping in ‘24. It deteriorated further in 2025 when he got more aggressive at the plate while running a slightly higher whiff rate. The good news is that his contact quality was still elite which means the only thing he needs to work on is his approach. Of all the guys on the two lists in this article, Riley is the one I’m most confident in predicting a bounce back this year.
Finally, here’s a long list of players cut in more than 50% of all Ottoneu leagues.
After a series of these follow-up articles on hitters, we turn our attention to pitchers and all that stuff I said about how the various formats differ from each other gets thrown out the window. Kind of. The formats are still different but they are different in different ways. And so if you have been reading along this month, forget what you think you know, because we are basically starting over.
We are winding down towards the end of this series and we have landed on (in my opinion) one of the least interesting of these “follow up” articles. The cross-format comparisons are most interesting at positions where variations in player values are the greatest. Shortstop or outfield, for example, are full of guys who run, guys who mash, guys who do a bit of both. There are players at a lot of positions who stay on the field thanks to their defense, creating an opportunity for volume-based value that their bat doesn’t carry alone. But at first base and util? Not so much.
Long weekends are great for quick family trips, maybe some skiing, perhaps just a little extra rest, or the rare Sunday night out. But they are not great for keeping up the pace of rankings articles! Nothing on Monday! Short week! The deadline is coming! But never fear, we are still on track, and today I follow up my third base rankings for 4×4 with a look at all the other Ottoneu formats.
By now you are probably getting used to the cadence, but after sharing my tiered catcher rankings for 4×4 leagues yesterday, today you will get my FanGraphs Points leagues tiered catcher rankings, as well as thoughts on the position for other Ottoneu formats.
The rankings beat marches on. Yesterday, you saw my 4×4 rankings for outfield and today I’ll share my FanGraphs Points rankings, as well as thoughts on the other formats.
My 4×4 tiered rankings for middle infield came out yesterday, and as promised in my intro article back in December, I am going to follow up each positional ranking with two things: my rankings for FanGraphs Points leagues and notes on how rankings would differ for other formats.
The Ottoneu keeper deadline is quickly approaching. There’s less than a month left to make your roster decisions before the January 31 cut deadline. I’m going through a handful of difficult keep or cut decisions at every position group to give you a transparent look at my decision making process and hopefully help you with theses specific cases for these specific players. I’ve already covered hitters in three separate articles — corner infielders, middle infielders, and outfielders — now I’m wrapping everything by covering three starting pitchers.
I’m not sure the Mets know what to do with Kodai Senga so I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t know what to do with him on your fantasy squad. Injuries cost him nearly all of 2024 and a hamstring injury in June derailed his season a year later. Before that injury, he had put up a 1.47 ERA and a 3.24 FIP in 13 starts. During the rehab from his injury, his mechanics were thrown out of whack, and after he returned to the majors, he produced a 5.90 ERA and 5.76 FIP across nine starts. Ultimately, he was demoted to Triple-A in September to work on those mechanical inconsistencies.
Even if Senga is completely healthy in 2026, there were enough yellow flags in his first-half performance that a rebound back to the level of his excellent 2023 debut isn’t necessarily guaranteed. During those first 13 starts of the season, his strikeout-minus-walk rate was 13.3%, just a hair below league average and well short of the 18.0% K-BB% he posted during his first season in the US. Most of that was driven by a significant drop in strikeout rate.
You could point to his signature pitch, the ghost fork, as the reason why he wasn’t seeing as many swings and misses in 2025. And while that pitch was a little less effective last year, it was his cutter that saw the most dramatic drop in effectiveness. In 2023, his cutter was the fourth most valuable pitch in baseball by Run Value with a 2.9 RV/100, far outpacing his forkball (1.0 RV/100). In 2025, his cutter was exactly neutral with a 0.0 RV/100. Unlike his diving forkball, Senga’s cutter was a contact suppression machine during its peak, but batters made much higher quality contact against that pitch last year. That combination — a forkball that wasn’t getting as many swings and misses and a cutter that wasn’t generating as much weak contact — has me worried that Senga’s ceiling is far lower than we might think.
The projections are picking up on those concerns and see Senga taking a pretty significant step back in 2026. Health concerns aside, there are enough flags in his pitch arsenal that present enough risk to steer clear. And when you add his mechanical issues and injury history back into the picture, it’s a pretty easy call to avoid paying too high a price for Senga in 2026.
Keep or cut?
I’m cutting Senga in both of my leagues where I’m rostering him and I doubt I’ll be looking to redraft him in the spring.
Through his first 11 starts of the year, Gavin Williams put up a rough 4.27 ERA and 4.65 FIP. It wasn’t terrible, but it was a concerning start to the season after an up-and-down year in 2024. From the beginning of June through the end of the season, his ERA fell by nearly two full runs down to 2.50 but his FIP only dropped to 4.27. His strikeout-to-walk ratio improved slightly during those final four months of the season but the biggest reason his ERA improved was thanks to a .221 BABIP and a 87.5% strand rate. Most of his underlying peripherals pointed to the same pitcher on the mound, but a ton of good batted ball luck helped him flip his season.
For Ottoneu players, an improved ERA shouldn’t necessarily help Williams’s fantasy production and a FIP above four is usually a bad sign. But here’s where understanding the ins and outs of your given format becomes extremely important.
Gavin Williams, Ottoneu Points Performance
Time Period
FIP
BABIP
FGpts/IP
SABRpts/IP
Prior to June
4.65
0.323
3.43
3.47
June Onward
4.27
0.221
4.57
3.86
In Ottoneu leagues using the FanGraphs points system — which critically takes hits allowed into account — Williams dramatically improved his production during the later half of the season. In leagues using the SABR points system — using only the inputs for FIP — Williams’s season was frustrating from start to finish.
As for Williams’s pitch arsenal, he was able to develop a very effective sweeper last year that returned a 44.0% whiff rate. That’s an excellent pitch to add to his repertoire, though his lack of command holds him back from really raising his ceiling. That’s sort of the big issue with his profile. He has a good, hard fastball, two excellent breaking balls, but he needed some incredible batted ball luck to turn into an effective pitcher for fantasy. His command was still an issue throughout the season, leading to some pretty inconsistent outings. Still, his Location+ improved from 91 during the first two months to 96 through the end of the year. That’s something to build off of, but until he’s able to make some significant improvements in that area, I fear his excellent stuff will be held back from reaching its maximum potential.
Keep or cut?
Thankfully, all three leagues where I’m rostering Williams use FanGraphs points, so I was able to partially enjoy his second half improvements in 2025. I’m probably keeping him at $8 and $9 but I think I’ll be cutting him at $11. His inconsistencies and command issues make him a risk to roster at a double-digit salary.
Coming off what seemed to be a mini-breakout during his short 10 start stint with the Astros during the second half of 2024, Yusei Kikuchi latched on with the Angels last year. Even though he was leaving the pitching development powerhouse in Houston, I expected the changes he implemented while he was there to stick in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, they didn’t. Some mechanical issues led to a drop in velocity and a lower arm slot affected the shapes of all his pitches. He spent most of the season working out the kinks in his delivery, slowly raising his arm slot and regaining some of his velocity.
I think the thing that worries me the most is the effectiveness of Kikuchi’s fastball. He’s one of the hardest throwing left-handers in baseball, but he’s entering his age-35 season in 2026. His velocity dropped early last year, and even though he regained it in the middle of the season, it dropped again in August and September and his results tanked along with it.
Last year, he generated the lowest whiff rate on his fastball since his debut season in 2019. Both his slider and changeup were a little less effective at getting swings and misses too. It all added up to a 5.5 point drop in strikeout rate and a much higher walk rate that was more in line with what he was posting during his time in Seattle.
Kikuchi has never been a model of consistency during his career. He’ll have dominant stretches from time to time, but his command issues have often held him back from reaching his ceiling. It looked like he had turned a corner in Toronto and Houston in 2023 and ‘24, but he came crashing back down last year thanks to his mechanical troubles. Steamer projects a small bounce back but he’s getting to the point in his career where the velocity of his fastball is sitting on a knife’s edge; dip just a little and the whole repertoire comes crashing down.
Keep or cut?
$5 is probably the highest I’d want to roster Kikuchi for heading into next season. There’s always the possibility he’ll figure out his mechanics over the offseason and post another strong season like he did in 2024, but there are too many flags to risk anything higher than that. I’ll probably keep him at $5, but he’s a quick cut if his fastball isn’t looking good in the spring.
We wrap up this series today with a look at tough keep or cut calls on pitchers. This is the group I like the least. Pitching is an area where I least trust the projections and so I have the hardest time figuring out how to value these guys. As a result, I tend to prefer obvious values and I am often willing to pay a premium in trade for a guy pitcher I have no questions about. Of course, they are pitchers, so there are always questions – volatility in performance, injury risk, etc. But, I still have to make decisions, so here are some of my tough ones.
