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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Yesterday, Lucas Kelly shared three lessons he learned playing Ottoneu this year, leading off with “Reach your maximums!” Lucas showed that the teams that finished atop the standings in league 184 did so, at least in part, by making sure they reached 162 games played at each position and 1500 IP.

This sparked an interesting discussion in Ottoneu slack around hitting those caps, including questions of just how important it is and how much hitting your caps is a result of being a contender (because contenders actively try to maximize points while rebuilders might be less engaged) vs. a cause of being a contender. And we got some very interesting data as a result.

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The winner of the FanGraphs Staff Two Ottoneu League (1327) won by a minuscule two-tenths of a point. With 18,670.7 total points, “Roy Donk?” outlasted “Trial By Drury” by sheer force, maximizing all of his positional games played and missing his innings mark by only two. What a feat! Could it have been different had “Trial By Drury” maxed out on their OF and UTIL games played? We’ll never know.

I certainly can’t pass judgment on any team’s ability to maximize their points. My team, “The Ghost Runners” missed positional game maximums for 2B, SS, MI (by a lot!), OF, and UTIL. Oh, yeah, and I missed my IP totals too. I had a lot of injuries, played in too many leagues, dealt with cap space issues, yada, yada, yada! Yet somehow, I finished fifth. Luck? Probably. This season in our little free league, teams that reached their maximums were much more likely to finish higher in the standings, and that brings me to my first lesson of 2023…

Reach your maximums!

In FanGraphs Points Leagues that do not have playoffs, teams are allowed 1,500 innings pitched (soft-max) and 162 games per position with a higher 810 games allowed total for OF slots. This is a free league and it’s very possible that some of my league mates are playing in other, paid and possibly high-stakes, leagues. But, I should have used that to my advantage. Take a look at how teams finished, on average, when they reached their max compared to when they did not:

It’s illuminating to see how many teams did not get to their max. My MI situation was a mess all season long, but I still should have put a player, any player, there more often. I noticed it was an issue mid-season, and tried to trade away one of my extra outfielders for a middle infielder, but couldn’t find any takers. Being left with low points-per-game (P/G) targets on the waiver wire sucked the motivation right out of me and I continued to ignore the missing slot in my lineup. Shame! Lack of effort is to blame, but I also hit maximums too early last season and may have been too conservative this season because of it.

Home runs hurt your pitching, but accumulation is more important

You’ll notice in the scatter plots below that the best teams in this league hit the most home runs. Though the first-place finisher did not hit the most home runs, they finished in the top five. On the other side of things, teams that gave up fewer home runs than everyone else didn’t necessarily show tremendous gains. That’s mostly due to the fact that when you accumulate innings, you accumulate home runs given up. Those teams whose pitchers aren’t giving up home runs are likely avoiding them because they are starting pitchers less often.

Each day matters

Total all your points and divide them by all of your games started among your position players, and you have your season-long points per game (P/G). Do the same with your innings pitched (P/IP) and then add the two together. The sum of P/G and P/IP is telling of how your team did on not only a daily basis but also a decision basis. Obviously, having good players is what you’re after, but scoring points each and every day throughout the season is the name of the game:

Teams that finished in the top three spots had the highest sum of P/G and P/IP. That generally translates to good, quality players, but as we’ve seen, it also translates to accumulation. This season, teams that had a handful of everyday hitters and regular pitchers above six points per game were much better for it. Here are all pitchers and hitters placed into decile groups by P/G and P/IP:

This reflects all players regardless of games or innings pitched or whether they are a reliever or a starter. In upcoming posts, I’ll build out these decile ranks with more specificity, but for now, this will do. It gives us a clearer picture of how P/G and P/IP relate to your team as a whole. We all want decile one and two players. Heck, I’ll take decile three players any day. Those are the quality players that contribute to your daily points at a high level.

Taking stock and analyzing your league as a whole is an important step to improving. I, personally, have a long list of things that I need to do to win this league next season. Now, sadly, I have six months to think about it.

The Ottoneu off-season has already commenced, as the first steps to turn the calendar to 2024 are underway. Over the off-season, we will continue to provide Ottoneu content, including some season recaps of what went right and wrong for our teams. But today, I want to look at positional eligibility.

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The 2023 version of Ottoneu Hot Right Now will include three different sections:

1. Current Auctions: A closer look at players being auctioned at a high rate.
2. Roster Adds: Analysis of players with high add% changes.
3. Hot Performers: Players with a high P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

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.

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You’ve pushed through six months of baseball. You have set your lineups daily (or almost daily, or weekly, or something). You have bid on more auctions than you can count. And here you are, six days of baseball remaining until we hit the off-season, and you are wondering what to do now.

That depends a lot on where you are in the standings but there are a few things to keep in mind as you enjoy this final week of fantasy baseball.

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Much like Hot Right Now, Cold Right Now will be a weekly Ottoneu feature with a focus on players who are being dropped or who maybe should be dropped in Ottoneu leagues. Hot Right Now will focus on players up for auction, players recently added, and players generally performing well. Cold Right Now will have parallel two of those three sections:

1. Roster Cuts: Analysis of players with high cut% changes.
2. Cold Performers: Players with a low P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

There won’t be a corresponding section to Current Auctions because, well, there is nothing in cuts that correspond to current auctions.

Roster Cuts

Gregory Santos, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 22.12%

Santos has, at times, looked like the best reliever in the White Sox pen and while that isn’t all that impressive, it does mean he has had a chance for saves and holds on a regular basis. That wasn’t enough to make him “good” (6.06 P/IP for a RP) but it was enough to make him rosterable. Until mid-August he was closer to 6.5 P/IP, but over a one-month period, he put up 34.57 points over 9.1 IP. That is both a relatively limited work-load and a well-below-replacement-level P/IP. That rough stretch coincided with a pretty clear drop in his velocity and ended with an IL stint.

Mediocre numbers followed by bad numbers followed by an injury is a recipe for a reliever to be cut and he should be cut everywhere. He isn’t good enough to keep and he is probably only a “buy” in auctions next year if he either starts off well or has a nice jump in velocity (or both).

Hunter Renfroe, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 21.79%

Renfroe wasn’t having a great season for the Angels and they put him on waivers. The Reds claimed him and, to be honest, I hoped that would be a nice landing spot for him. Instead, over 17 days he got 44 PA and posted a 17 wRC+ and the Reds cut him loose. Renfroe turns 32 this off-season and came into this year with two very solid offensive years in 2021 and 2022, so you would imagine he lands somewhere for 2024, but as a fantasy manager, I think I am staying away.

He had a bit of an odd season. His BB-rate was higher than those two strong years and his K-rate was almost perfectly in-line with those two years, despite the fact that he was more aggressive at the plate (chasing more and swinging in the zone more), didn’t make more contact, and ran a higher swinging-strike rate. That success with his plate discipline didn’t lead to success overall because his power dried up. After averaging 30 HR and .239 ISO in 547 PA the last two seasons, this year he hit 20 HR with a .183 ISO in 548 PA. His hard-hit and barrel rates both decreased, and he decreased his fly-ball rate, as well, hitting more grounders instead. He used to punish fastballs, and that wasn’t the case this year. You can see this in his Baseball Savant Swing/Take profile: last year he was +19 runs on pitches he took and this year he was +17 (not a huge shift), but on his swings he went from -13 runs to -26. Part of that is just that he swung more, but the bigger issue is he simply didn’t punish the ball when he swung. This was almost entirely in the “Shadow” zone – pitches around the edge of the strike zone – where he swung a bit more and was far less successful. In 2022, his wOBA on contact in the shadow zone was .357 with a .319 xwOBA. This year it was .267 with a .265 xwOBA.

This all looks to me like a guy losing bat speed, making more aggressive swing choices to make up for that, and not being able to create the quality of contact he expects. That’s not something I want to buy in on.

Alex Cobb, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 12.82%

Cobb threw an absolute gem against Cincinnati, then made three horrific starts and hit the IL. He just hasn’t been good enough to keep around through an IL stint, but he will assuredly show up on rosters again next year. He always does enough to tantalize.

Colin Holderman, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 12.82%

Holderman is an easy one – he has been a decently good but not-great RP and now he is hurt. No need to holderhim.

Cold Performers

To measure cold performers this week, I’m looking for players with low P/G or P/IP in the last 14 days.

Sean Murphy,  -0.83 P/G:

Sean Murphy has done wonderful things for fantasy teams all year but over the last couple of weeks, it has been ugly. I am not sure if I am more concerned about the -5 points or the fact that he has made just six appearances, but neither is good. Though it is worth nothing that because I am writing this on Sunday night, his Sunday afternoon home run hasn’t hit these numbers yet and would certainly help. But no matter how you look at it, Murphy has been so bad in September that it has tanked his entire second half line. For now, there isn’t much you can do. If you have a backup C you like, you may need to use him more to fill out games played, as Murphy is clearly being given plenty of rest ahead of the post-season. But other than that, you just have to ride through this because Murphy is a legitimately elite C and you probably want to keep him for 2024.

C.J. Cron, -4.00 P/G:

Is this cheating, given he played just one game? Yes, it kind of is. But Cron came to LA, got hurt, played one game, and got hurt again. But even around that, he was not good in Colorado this year and he was putrid with the Angels. He’s an easy cut, at any price, right now, and going into 2024, he isn’t more than a late-draft flyer, and that assumes he has a starting job somewhere.

Jon Gray,  -4.04 P/IP:

Holy smokes, Gray tanked his season in a hurry. As of the end of August, Gray had 137.2 IP and put up 547.59 points for 3.98 P/IP. That isn’t good, but it is bordering on useful especially if you can play matchups with him. An abysmal September, especially his last three starts, has him at 3.75 P/IP on the year. He’s not only played his way into being an easy cut today, I think he is going to be hard to roster next year.

Welcome back to the Ottoneu Starting Pitching Planner. Based on the Roster Resource Probables Grid, I’ve organized every starter slated to start next week into four categories: start, maybe, risky, and sit. The first and last category are pretty self-explanatory. Starters who fall into the “maybe” category are guys you could start if you need to keep up with the innings pitched pace in points leagues or need to hit your games started cap in head-to-head leagues; they’re good bets to turn in a decent start, but you shouldn’t automatically insert them into your lineup. If you’ve fallen behind on the innings pitched pace or you’re really starving for starts in a head-to-head matchup, you could turn to a “risky” starter or two.

I’ve also calculated a “Matchup Score” for each series using a straight combination of opponent’s home/away wOBA, opponent wOBA over the last 14 days, and the park factor for the ballpark the teams are playing in. It’s indexed so that 100 is average and anything above that is a favorable matchup and anything below is unfavorable. That matchup rating informs some of the sit/start recommendations I’m making, though the quality of the pitcher definitely takes precedence.

A few general schedule notes first:

• We’ve made it to the final week of the season. Ottoneu head-to-head leagues should be all wrapped up leaving teams in points leagues to battle it out for the top three spots in their leagues. A reminder that the innings pitched cap is a soft cap, so make sure you plan out when your starters are going next week and try to stack as many of them as you can on the day you think you’ll go over the cap.
• Be on the lookout for teams that re-slot their rotations in preparation for the playoffs or teams who try to line up their starters for a final push into the postseason. Double-check your probables and be ready to switch to a backup plan if things go sideways.
• The Orioles, Royals, and Tigers all have easier matchups to close out the season. Those teams don’t normally have a ton of “must start” pitchers but the schedule aligns perfectly to give them some nice and easy opponents next week.
• The Cubs and Mariners are both fighting for a playoff spot in their respective Wild Card races and they’ll be going up against some tough offenses. You’ve got to start the three aces on Seattle’s pitching staff but I’d be weary of calling on their two young rookies. It’s even tougher for Chicago since they’ll spend all of next week on the road against two very good teams. Justin Steele is fighting for the NL Cy Young and he even has a two-start week next week, but I think I’d only be comfortable starting him against the Brewers.

Notable two-start pitchers:

• Blake Snell
• Kevin Gausman
• Logan Webb
• Luis Castillo
• Zac Gallen
• Aaron Nola
• Justin Verlander
• George Kirby
• Michael King
• Kyle Bradish
• Reese Olson