Sometimes in this game of ours, you make a mistake and it comes back to bite you almost immediately. The pitcher you should have benched who gives up a first-inning HR. The trade you make for the injury-prone pitcher who hits the IL the next day.

Sometimes, however, those mistakes are a slower boil, taking their time to show you what you did wrong. This is a story of one of that kind of mistake – with the advice that you just can’t worry about it.

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Question: What’s the most important thing to remember when drafting in any fantasy baseball league?

Wise-Guy Answer: The type of beer you have on deck.

Wise-Guy’s Friend’s Answer: Making sure you have snacks that don’t grease up your keyboard!

Serious Answer: Your league’s scoring system.

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On Tuesday, just hours before I dove into the auction for league 1199, I laid out the challenge I faced for the brilliant minds that read this site, and promised to return with news of how things played out. This is my foretold return.

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This post won’t be long. And it has more questions than answers. But it’s the most immediately relevant thing I have ever written (at least to me). What do you do in auction where you have a choice between getting a star or building a balanced team and you can’t realistically do both?

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Today, Ottoneu launched the 2023 edition of the Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL), a best-ball, overall competition open only to teams that finished top-six in their league in 2022. It has become one of my favorite aspects of Ottoneu, with unique rules that create a nice challenge for balancing competing in your “home league” and fighting through to the playoffs in OPL.

If you have an eligible team, I recommend joining, but I’m not here to convince you to join (you should join). I am here to complain about trade-offs.

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I’ll wrap up my 2023 positional rankings with a look at the relief pitching market. You can find links to the rest of my rankings as well as Chad’s below. And a reminder, if you want a big picture view, you can see our ordinal Ottoneu rankings on the FanGraphs Fantasy Rankings Board.

Jake Mailhot’s Ottoneu Position Rankings: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | OF | SP | RP
Chad Young’s Ottoneu Position Rankings: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | OF | SP | RP

I really like the format of Chad’s ranking so I’ll try and emulate them a bit here. Here are few more notes about my process:

1. Tiers > Ranks. While these players will all be technically ranked ordinally, the tier they’re placed in really matters. The order within the tiers doesn’t matter as much, though that isn’t to imply that the players within each tier are interchangeable either.
2. Projected points. I’ve been building my own homebrewed projections for the past decade plus, ever since I started playing Ottoneu, and they form the basis for the rankings below. They’re nothing overly complicated; essentially just a MARCEL-esque projection using three years of historical data filtered through a rough aging curve and adjusted for the current run environment. I also include a collection of three public projection systems (ZiPS, Steamer, and PECOTA) to provide some additional context. That gives each player six data sources that form their projection.
3. P/IP is the basis. Points per innings pitched is the gold standard by which you should be evaluating pitchers in Ottoneu but there are plenty of factors that will affect a player’s ranking outside of their raw projection. Injury risk, projected playing time and role, age, and future value are all things that need to be taken into account when evaluating pitchers.
4. Dollar amounts are pre-inflation. The dollar amounts assigned to each tier are pre-inflation but are easily adjusted for your league context.

Rather than give notes on every player like Chad, I’ll give my general thoughts on the position below and discuss a handful of players I like more or less than his rankings. Let’s get into it.

NOTE: For the P/IP projection you see below, I’ve subtracted out points for saves and holds. Those two categories are notoriously fickle and extremely difficult to project. Evaluating relief pitchers based on their raw skills alone has usually worked out for me; teams generally give their highest leverage opportunities to their best bullpen arms, so the saves and holds should flow from those pitchers with the best skills. I’ve also included a column for each pitcher’s projected role based on the Roster Resource Depth Charts. Between those two factors, you should have a pretty solid grasp of how any given reliever should be valued.

Rather than pick a handful of guys to write up like in my previous rankings articles, I’m just going to give some general thoughts about building a bullpen in Ottoneu. There are two competing considerations when building your strategy: relievers are the most volatile part of your roster and they’re the most fungible players in the format. That means even if you invest heavily to build an elite bullpen, a team who spends $10 total on 5 or 6 relievers could outperform your team if they find the right mix of breakouts and sleepers. Be ready to churn through a bunch of relievers throughout the season as pitchers get hurt or lose their effectiveness. That process is so much easier if you’re not invested into a bunch of high priced closers.

While I’m not as extreme as Chad in my devaluation of relief pitchers, I’ve rarely rostered any of the elite closers in my time playing Ottoneu. Generally, I’ll allocate around $25-$30 of my salary cap to fill out my bullpen and that’s usually accomplished by picking a couple of guys from the middle tiers and then a bunch of $1-$3 fliers that I can churn through during the season.

Like I said above, skills really matter because teams will generally use their most skilled relievers in the highest leverage situations. That means Ottoneu Points and 4×4 owners can ignore the closer carousel game that 5×5 players are tied to. A pitcher’s place in the bullpen pecking order matters, but it should be a secondary consideration when you’re looking for potential breakouts on the waiver wire.

With the rankings for position players complete, I’ll turn my attention to the mound, starting with my rankings for starting pitchers.

Jake Mailhot’s Ottoneu Position Rankings: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | OF | SP | RP
Chad Young’s Ottoneu Position Rankings: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | OF | SP | RP

I really like the format of Chad’s ranking so I’ll try and emulate them a bit here. Here are few more notes about my process:

1. Tiers > Ranks. While these players will all be technically ranked ordinally, the tier they’re placed in really matters. The order within the tiers doesn’t matter as much, though that isn’t to imply that the players within each tier are interchangeable either.
2. Projected points. I’ve been building my own homebrewed projections for the past decade plus, ever since I started playing Ottoneu, and they form the basis for the rankings below. They’re nothing overly complicated; essentially just a MARCEL-esque projection using three years of historical data filtered through a rough aging curve and adjusted for the current run environment. I also include a collection of three public projection systems (ZiPS, Steamer, and PECOTA) to provide some additional context. That gives each player six data sources that form their projection.
3. P/IP is the basis. Points per innings pitched is the gold standard by which you should be evaluating pitchers in Ottoneu but there are plenty of factors that will affect a player’s ranking outside of their raw projection. Injury risk, projected playing time and role, age, and future value are all things that need to be taken into account when evaluating pitchers.
4. Dollar amounts are pre-inflation. The dollar amounts assigned to each tier are pre-inflation but are easily adjusted for your league context.

Rather than give notes on every player like Chad, I’ll give my general thoughts on the position below and discuss a handful of players I like more or less than his rankings. Let’s get into it.

Pitching is always tricky to evaluate. It seems like there are always breakout pitchers who made a tweak to their arsenal or are suddenly throwing 95 after an offseason trip to Driveline. There are always the established options who can be reliable, but pitchers break down more often than any other position. That means investing a large portion of your salary cap into your pitching staff will always carry some amount of risk.

To be fair, there’s great reward if you choose to pay up for the best pitchers on the market. There’s about 25-30 guys who are projected to cross the 5 P/IP threshold and a handful who might even get up to 6 P/IP. The risk is so much greater in these higher tiers; the best pitcher on the planet has thrown just 156.1 innings over the last two years. They were extremely high quality innings, but it’s an open question whether those few innings were worth the high market price deGrom commanded.

Luckily, if you choose to pass on the best pitchers on the market, there’s a large middle tier that you can build a perfectly productive pitching staff with. There’s probably 40-50 guys in this group that have good projections but won’t break the bank to roster. Some of them even have the upside to push into the higher tiers if things go right in 2023. This is where I like to build the bulk of my staff.

Once you’re past those top 70-80 pitchers, you’re getting into the lower tiers where all sorts of warts and question marks abound. Here, you’re simply searching for potential breakouts and bounce backs. There are a bunch of pitchers in these lower tiers who will give you bulk innings without good ratios. These guys will provide consistent points but their ceilings are usually capped pretty low; they’re good options if you need to mitigate some of the risk you might have taken on with some of your higher priced pitchers.

The other nice thing about playing in these lower tiers is that you can churn through pitchers pretty quickly if they’re not working out. Chasing after the newest breakout or surprising rookie is much easier if you don’t have to jettison a higher priced player to open up a roster spot. There are always guys on the waiver wire who will be useful for your team during the season, the trick is to quickly determine which ones to pursue because they’re actually productive and which ones to pass on because they’re getting lucky or on a hot streak.

Three Guys I Like More than Chad
Cristian Javier – Javier finally received the opportunity to pitch out of the rotation on a full-time basis and he produced a breakout season for the Astros. He struck out nearly a third of the batters he faced in the regular season and was nearly unhittable in the postseason. He excels at generating whiffs with an elite fastball that he regularly locates at the top of the zone. But unlike some pitchers who suffer from a home run problem when they try to elevate their fastballs, Javier manages to avoid barrels too. Just a third of the balls put in play against him were hard hit and just 7.2% of them were barreled up last year. That’s a pretty incredible pair of skills and now he doesn’t have to worry about his role moving forward.

Garrett Whitlock – Like Javier, Whitlock’s usage in 2023 should be much clearer; all signs indicate he’ll spend the entire season in the rotation after getting bounced to the bullpen after suffering a hip injury. I wrote about Whitlock’s potential as a starter last spring but here’s the tl;dr version of it: he possesses three pitches that generate elite results and developed a changeup as a third pitch last year to help him work through lineups multiple times. There is some injury risk here — his hip still isn’t right and he might miss Opening Day as a result — but if he’s healthy and spends the entire season as a starter, he should produce fantastic results for your squad.

Patrick Sandoval – Sandoval’s fastball has been the one thing holding him back from truly ascending to join the game’s elite pitchers. He possesses one of the best changeups in baseball and pairs that with a devastating slider. On July 2, he started throwing his sinker more often and reduced his usage of his four-seamer. His strikeout rate ticked up, his walk rate fell, and his ERA and FIP both improved. You can read more about this shift in pitch mix in my deep dive from last summer.

Three Guys I Don’t Like as Much as Chad
Gerrit Cole – For Cole, everything comes down to his alarming home run rates. He’s still running fantastic strikeout-to-walk ratios and possesses one of the most dominant pitch arsenals in the game. Unfortunately, he’s been increasingly prone to allowing a few too many dingers since joining the Yankees. His HR/FB% over the last three years is 15.8%, the third highest in baseball among qualified starters. It’s a big reason why his xFIP is nearly 40 points lower than his actual FIP during that period and why it was 70 points lower in 2022. Home runs are pitcher killers in Ottoneu and I’m pretty weary of Cole for that reason alone.

Sandy Alcantara – Alcantara turned in a phenomenal season last year to rightfully earn the NL Cy Young award. Unfortunately, a lot of his value in Ottoneu last year came from his league leading 228.2 innings pitched. That kind of workload is nearly unheard of in the modern era and it really helped him outpace his peers in raw points. But when you look at his peripherals, specifically his strikeout rate, he’s clearly a step behind the best pitchers in the league. You can pay for his bulk innings in the hope that he pushes past 200 IP again, but that seems like a risky bet considering how often pitchers breakdown. On a pure rate basis, Alcantara sits behind the pitchers in the highest tier.

Robbie Ray – Ray’s issues mirror Cole’s; he was one of the two pitchers who ran a higher HR/FB% than Cole over the last three seasons. To make matters worse, he dealt with a drop in fastball velocity last year which affected his entire repertoire. The good news was that he maintained the gains in control that allowed him to win the Cy Young in 2021, but his overall performance took a dip after joining the Mariners. Like Cole, it really all comes down to his home run rate and the significant damage it will do to his ability to produce consistently in the format.

It’s always good to remind yourself of your league’s scoring system before you start a re-draft for the season. If you’re like me and you play in multiple fantasy baseball leagues with multiple scoring systems, things can get a little blended together. Here are some really important points to remember when comparing Ottoneu points and standard roto Read the rest of this entry »

We’ll wrap up my position player rankings with a look at the outfield.

Jake Mailhot’s Ottoneu Position Rankings: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | OF | SP | RP
Chad Young’s Ottoneu Position Rankings: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | OF | SP | RP

I really like the format of Chad’s ranking so I’ll try and emulate them a bit here. Here are few more notes about my process:

1. Tiers > Ranks. While these players will all be technically ranked ordinally, the tier they’re placed in really matters. The order within the tiers doesn’t matter as much, though that isn’t to imply that the players within each tier are interchangeable either.
2. Projected points. I’ve been building my own homebrewed projections for the past decade plus, ever since I started playing Ottoneu, and they form the basis for the rankings below. They’re nothing overly complicated; essentially just a MARCEL-esque projection using three years of historical data filtered through a rough aging curve and adjusted for the current run environment. I also include a collection of three public projection systems (ZiPS, Steamer, and PECOTA) to provide some additional context. That gives each player six data sources that form their projection.
3. P/G vs P/PA. Points per game played is the gold standard by which you should be evaluating players in Ottoneu. I won’t argue with that. That measure does have some drawbacks, particularly for players who pinch hit, pinch run, or are used as defensive substitutions often. Those limited appearances can skew a player’s P/G lower than what they’re producing when they’re getting full-time playing time. To provide a little more context for these kinds of players, I’ve also included points per plate appearance below. That measure should give us a better idea of how a player produces no matter how he’s used by his team.
4. Dollar amounts are pre-inflation. The dollar amounts assigned to each tier are pre-inflation but are easily adjusted for your league context.

Rather than give notes on every player like Chad, I’ll give my general thoughts on the position below and discuss a handful of players I like more or less than his rankings. Let’s get into it.

NOTE: I’ve included Util-only players in my OF rankings. In general, they’ll be listed at the bottom of whatever tier they’re placed in because of the lack of positional flexibility. In addition, Shohei Ohtani is listed in a tier as if he were only a batter — obviously he provides a ton of value as a pitcher as well and he would be my top ranked player in Ottoneu if I listed his combined value.

In Ottoneu, you’re afforded five starting spots for your outfielders. That creates a situation where the position is simultaneously deep and shallow. The top of the position is filled with superstars but you’ll be able to find solid production all the way down into the middle tiers. There does seem to be a pretty significant drop off once you get 40 deep which means you’ll likely be filling out the last couple of spots in your outfield with flawed players.

Having deep rosters and daily lineups are definitely benefits as you try and find five viable outfielders to start. I’ve found that platoons work especially well at this position. Players like Jesse Winker, Joc Pederson, and Josh Naylor all have much higher value in Ottoneu because you can really squeeze out as much value out of them when they’re facing the platoon advantage. Personally, I like to try and fill at least three of my OF spots with full-time, consistent contributors, and then grab a handful of players I can platoon.

Three Guys I Like More than Chad
Michael Harris II – I understand the trepidation surrounding Harris. He only played in 43 games above High-A before making the leap up to the big leagues, he really struggled against left-handed pitching, and his surface level plate discipline metrics looked pretty poor in his rookie season. Despite those nits to pick, Harris was a genuine revelation last year. His power surpassed anything he was able to do in the minor leagues and his underlying batted ball peripherals support his newfound power profile. A mid-season swing change after being called up helped him unlock that tool. And the approach at the plate? It too improved as the season went on and he became more settled in at the game’s highest level; he cut his chase rate from around 50% in late-June to just over 35% by the end of the season and improved his in-zone contact rate correspondingly. Those adjustments on the fly as a 21-year-old really speak to his talent, coachability, and drive to succeed.

Teoscar Hernández – It feels like a lot of the concerns surrounding Hernández involve his move to Seattle where he’ll play his home games in the pitcher’s paradise that is T-Mobile Park. Just comparing the park factors, his new home isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation for right-handed batters; Rogers Centre has a factor of 106 for right-handed home runs to 102 for T-Mobile Park. The real issue for batters in Seattle is finding hits that don’t fly over the fences. Hernández certainly has the power to overcome whatever ballpark he calls home anyway. His exit velocities and hard hit and barrel rates all sit in the top 5% of baseball and have for the last three seasons. Perhaps you’re looking at his 129 wRC+, a three-year low since his breakout in 2020. Hernández strained an oblique early in the season and missed about a month on the IL, but he didn’t really get right until a few weeks after being activated. From June 1 onwards, he posted a 146 wRC+ with 23 of his 25 home runs. That beat his career-best mark he posted in 2020 and indicates he was just as productive last year once he got healthy.

Hunter Renfroe – At this point in his career, Renfroe’s power should be unquestioned. He’s blasted 153 home runs over the last six seasons and possesses a career isolated power of .247. The reason I’m so high on him is because he’s seemingly figured out the swing-and-miss issues that plagued him earlier in his career. Over the last two seasons, he’s cut his strikeout rate from 28% during his first five seasons to just under 23%. The biggest difference has been a significant improvement to his overall contact rate. He’s also gotten a little more swing happy with that change in approach, which has helped him put more balls in play with his better bat-to-ball skills. With his power, that’s definitely a good thing and it’s a big reason why his wRC+ jumped up to a career-high 124 last year.

Three Guys I Don’t Like as Much as Chad
Randy Arozarena – Arozarena is almost certainly a better 4×4 or 5×5 player than he is an Ottoneu contributor. His power and speed combo is perfectly suited for those formats that reward stolen bases. In the FanGraphs points format, his speed isn’t nearly as valuable a tool and his power actually isn’t all that impressive. For one, more than half of his batted balls were put on the ground last year. Second, when he does elevate, his hard hit and barrel rates are merely average; he outperformed his expected slugging by 63 points in 2022. Third, he’s notoriously streaky, with significant periods of abysmal production throughout a season. If I’m paying more than $20 for an outfielder, I want a little more consistency and a higher ceiling than Arozarena can provide.

Steven Kwan – The argument against Kwan is somewhat similar to Arozarena; he’s a better 4×4 or 5×5 player than he is a points league accumulator. Granted, Kwan (5.28 P/G) just outproduced Arozarena (5.22 P/G) in his rookie season, but leagues that value runs, average, and stolen bases are where Kwan shines. In Ottoneu, Kwan’s contact-heavy approach leaves too much to chance on all those balls he puts in play. That was the story over his first two months in the big leagues where he put up a .259 BABIP and a 105 wRC+. Without any power to speak of, he’s just too reliant on getting hits to fall to produce points consistently when his batted balls are falling into gloves instead.

Oscar Gonzalez – Gonzalez came out of nowhere to post a 122 wRC+ in 91 games last year and was a postseason hero for the Guardians. The power was just a continuation of a breakout season in 2021 where he blasted 31 home runs across two minor league levels. But the plate discipline leaves so much to be desired. His 48.4% chase rate ranked third-highest among all batters with at least 300 plate appearances. It’s a testament to his bat-to-ball ability in two-strike counts that his strikeout rate sat below 20%. But such an aggressive approach means that he’s walking a knife’s edge, and if all those swings start coming up empty, he could find himself cratering.

What is fantasy baseball money anyways? It’s made up, monopoly money, fake, and not tied to any real financial logical thinking. If I want to pay Mike Trout $75, I’ll do it. So long as no one in my league wants to pay him $76. It’s in my rights as an Ottoneu player. Some people pull up to the closest gas station they can find, don’t even look at the price per gallon, pump away and jam the “No” button when asked, “Do you want a receipt?” Others drive around for miles waiting to find that station showing a $0.05 lower price than all the rest, print that receipt, stuff it in their wallet, and keep it for proof of the deal they got to show their neighbors at a later date. What I’m really trying to get at here is that the price you pay can be entirely different than the price someone else is willing to pay and this is really what playing in fantasy baseball auction leagues is all about.

Click over to the auction calculator, set it to Ottoneu FanGraphs points league scoring, and take a look at Aaron Judge’s 2022 year-to-date (YTD) value. $93! That’s 1458.2 points worth of one outfielder. Starting in 2018, the FanGraphs Staff II League champion typically accumulated a few hundred points above 18,500. For teams that rostered Judge in 2022 and came close to this point total, Judge represented roughly eight percent of their points total. But any manager who bid anywhere above $70 for Judge last season was likely ridiculed. While Judge’s current average (and median) salary in FanGraphs points leagues is $50, his value won’t be realized until the end of this season. Yes, the person who bid $70 for Aaron Judge this time last year came out on top, but did they cut him and send him back to re-draft this year? He’s valued by the auction calculator at $68.80 and that doesn’t include inflation.

So, who do you believe? Where do you look? How many of you have already stopped reading this and are currently typing in the comments section about how your valuation is the valuation? To be honest, I don’t know. What I do know is the auction calculator provides a good jumping-off point. If you really want to get a close estimate of what you should pay in an auction, you can plug in all the keepers in your league and it will help with controlling for inflation. I chose not to go through that process and instead added roughly 20% to a player’s salary to get a “Predicted Value”. Last week, our FanGraphs staff two league conducted its yearly re-draft. Here are the 10 players furthest from that prediction in the negative (Underpays) and the 10 players furthest from that prediction in the positive (Overpays):

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There will always be a few players whose final salary is way out of line with what we would expect. It happens in every draft and someone undoubtedly tweets about it looking for crowd-sourced justification that the price is out of line. But only showing you the highest and lowest differentials doesn’t do the predictions analysis justice. The graph below shows my average predictions versus the average actual winning bid (salary) by decile. The decile rank was created using the predicted value. Keep in mind that this is a re-draft, so the player pool is limited to the non-keeper, free agents.

There are huge discrepancies from decile four onward because my predictions didn’t make negative players worth $1, but instead kept their negative price and, even worse, added negative value in my inflation calculation. This is not the way to do it but had I converted all these players to $1 the graph wouldn’t become any more informative because all the blue bars would average to $1. The way it is constructed now at least gives you a sense of how unlikely players in lower deciles are to actually return a positive value. With that explanation out of the way, we can see that deciles five, six, and nine have larger standard deviations in actuals, meaning drafters were willing to pay well over $1 in many cases. If this informs us of anything, it’s that in most leagues, a $1 player is difficult to define/value and it remains an area with huge potential for those who can come close to doing so.

Lastly, here are the average-squared error measurements of each valuation from this draft and this time, I’ve made all negative-value players worth $1. This is because in reality if my spreadsheet said player X was valued at -$13, but I disagreed, I would only bid $1.

Mean Squared Error (MSE):

AVERAGE((Actual Salary – Auction Calculated Value) ^ 2) = 34.1

AVERAGE((Actual Salary – Adjusted or Predicted Value) ^ 2) = 32.0

Remember that the Adjusted/Predicted Value, the blue bars in the graph above, were simply auction calculator values adjusted for inflation by adding 20%. Overall, these adjustments proved more accurate by MSE.

Adjusting for inflation, in this case, was a good move, but in the grand scheme of things it didn’t really make individual predictions that much better. Just look at Jesse Winker in the “Overpay” table above. Winker’s low game/PA projection places him just above replacement level with 590.6 projected points, but at 5.2 points per game. In other words, when you play him, he’ll be better than the average player but it’s unclear just how much he will play. If you take the under on playing time you’ll have a really valuable player that you can plug in and out of your lineup. If you take the over, that points per game number will start to go down, possibly finding him somewhere in-between those two points measurements with a higher total points but a lower points per game, making him, in my opinion, a much different player. Have I written myself into circles? Maybe. But, it’s all related to the fact that trying to find accurate valuation for players in Ottoneu leagues is a challenge. The key here is that all of these values, total points, points per game, adjusted for inflation values, are all based on projections and projections, by nature, are inaccurate.

Will we ever get closer to true auction values? Probably not and that’s what makes it so much fun. Is $10 a good price for Mitch Haniger? I think so. I’m the one who paid it. By my calculation I saved myself $8. But only the San Francisco Giants outfield and Hanigers’ ability to stay there will tell me whether I’m right or wrong.