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

JoJo Romero, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 33.01%

While a low LOB% helped push his ERA up to 3.68, Romero looked great during his 36.2 IP with St. Louis this year. Among pitchers with 30+ IP as a reliever, Romero had a top-15 ground ball rate, top-25 IFFB rate, and top-60 K% and BB%. None of that is elite, but it adds up to a really good reliever who established himself as a late-inning arm for the Cards. But with an injured knee that landed him on the IL for most of the rest of the season, he became a roster casualty for a lot of teams, including mine.

That said, I am impressed with what he has done and he is staying on my watchlists. If he comes back, I will try to pick him up again. If not, I might still grab him in the final days of the season – if I can add him now for $1-$2 and he looks likely to be the Cardinal closer in January, he is going to be an easy keep.

Julio Urías, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 32.05%

We covered him last week and there isn’t much more to say. He is under 60% rostered and that should keep going down.

Andrew McCutchen, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 26.60%

Back home in Pittsburgh, Cutch was having a resurgent season, posting 5.24 P/G and making him a very useful OF bat for Ottoneu leagues. Now a partially torn Achilles tendon has ended his season and it is hard to get excited about keeping him, even given how he performed this year. He really wasn’t useful from 2020-2022 and now he has to overcome a pretty serious injury just weeks before he turns 37 years old. That will raise questions of retirement, though at 299 career homers and coming off a solid season, I expect he will sign another one-year deal with the Pirates. And I might check him out for a dollar at the end of auctions.

Luis Severino, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 19.23%

Severino at his best was so, so good, and now you just wonder if we will ever get to see that again. He turns 30 before the start of next season, and his 2023 is now over thanks to an oblique strain. To give you a sense of just how snake-bitten his career has been, Severino’s reaction to the injury included him saying, “I’m happy it’s not going to take a full year or two [to recover],” as reported by Peter Sblendorio of the NY Daily News. It’s not great when your reaction to a season-ending injury is, “well at least this time I didn’t lose NEXT season as well.” He’s an easy cut, given how poorly he was pitching before getting hurt. If you are drafting later in draft season and he has looked good in spring, I could see taking a flyer on him, but the risk is high and the reward is probably not what it once was.

James Paxton, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 18.59%

Last week I speculated that he might have just run out of gas and that Red Sox have now shut him down for the year due to right knee inflammation. He’s a bit like Severino, in that he isn’t a guy you can rely on enough to want to keep him, but I am much more interested in him come March, at least based on what we know right now. This doesn’t sound like a serious injury and so there is reason to believe he can be ready for the start of 2024. I again wouldn’t want to count on him for a full season, but could he go more like 100 innings next year? Maybe.

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.

Brett Baty, -0.33 P/G:

I was a big Baty believer but this year has been ugly and it isn’t getting better. Baty was given a real shot to claim the 3B job early in the season and struggled – much like he did last year before being sent down in August. He was back on September 1, but the performance has only gotten worse. Baty appears to have a power hitter’s plate discipline – decent walks but a lot of strikeouts – but he isn’t punishing the ball enough to make that work. That’s what made things go for him in the minors, and until he finds some real pop, he won’t be playable in the bigs.

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:

• The Braves have a double-header scheduled for Monday which could jumble up their rotation if they decide to call up a spot starter for one of those games. Kyle Wright is also on the mend and could be activated from the IL next week. Keep an eye on the listed probables because the Phillies and Marlins present matchups on opposite ends of the spectrum.
• It looks like the Blue Jays are the only team to have a couple of tough matchups next week when they host the Rangers and Red Sox. Every other team has a mix of matchups that don’t present any easy decisions.

Notable two-start pitchers:

• Framber Valdez
• Brandon Woodruff
• Freddy Peralta
• Tyler Glasnow
• Sonny Gray
• Joe Ryan
• José Quintana
• Logan Gilbert
• Max Scherzer
• Dylan Cease

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Julio Urías, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 20.19%

Urías is not traveling with the Dodgers after being arrested on a domestic violence charge. Unfortunately, this is not the first such issue for the pitcher, as he was suspended 20 games for a similar 2019 arrest. In that 2019 case, the woman involved claimed she fell despite witnesses saying they saw Urías shove her (and video supposedly backing up those witness reports). Urías is not with the team while they (and the police and presumably the league) are investigating. Given his history, I think it is a safe bet that Urías is done for the year. The Dodgers seem to be distancing themselves from him already and the league is unlikely to let this go unpunished.

For what it’s worth, Urías’s 20-game suspension is one of the shortest in recent history under MLB’s Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy. Marcell Ozuna was also suspended 20 games in 2021, but the other nine cases since the start of the 2018 season have all been 40+ games. Unless this proves to be a misunderstanding (which I would bet against), Urías could be out a good long time. I have him on one roster and he’s next in line to be cut.

Yu Darvish, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 17.63%

Darvish is hurt and has an unclear timeline for a return to action, which is enough to justify a cut this late in the year. But it’s also worth noting that Darvish just hasn’t been very good this year. The one-time ace has been on a roller coaster since the 2018 season and just celebrated his 37th birthday. His average salary is north of $20 and he hasn’t come close to earning that value this year. He’s not a keeper and he isn’t helping you this year, so there is no reason to hold onto him.

Jurickson Profar, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 12.82%

Profar was decent for the Padres last year, but had a hard time finding a landing spot for 2023. When he signed with the Rockies fantasy managers rejoiced but we got the wrong kind of rocky season – a 71 wRC+ and 4.03 P/G. He was useful in Coors but even there he was only useful and not much more. That made him tough to roster. Now he has been cut loose and landed on a minor league deal with the Padres. San Diego might have need of him, but I don’t love his chances to have a real impact.

If he gets a call and regular playing time (the first a small-ish “if,” the second rather large, I think), he could be a dart-throw type pick up just to see if he can catch fire for a couple of weeks and help you in the stretch run. But he isn’t really more than that – even if you get him for $1, I can’t see keeping him for $3, and there is a good chance he plays sparingly the rest of the way, anyway.

James Paxton, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 12.82%

Paxton was a fun resurgence story earlier this year, but things have gone very wrong lately. His last three starts have netted him -38.46 points and while you could blame the Astro and Dodger offenses for that, the bulk of those lost points came in a -33.76 point outing at Kansas City.

Earlier this year, I suggested he might do well, but “I would expect him to only throw another 50-75 IP the rest of way, if things go pretty well. The smart money would be on less than that.” He ended July with 70 total innings, a 3.34 ERA and 3.59 FIP. Since then, he has a 7.62 ERA and 7.64 FIP in 26 IP. His fastball is almost 1 mph slower in August and September vs. earlier in the year. He may have managed to stay healthy, but it’s possible the innings are just catching up to him. He threw 44 innings from 2020-2022 combined, across all levels. It looks like he might be out of gas.

Josh Sborz Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 12.82%

Sborz was a hot pickup earlier this year, but after putting up negative points in five of his last six outings, he hit the IL. He now has just 5.8 P/IP on the season, which is actually the best season of his career. But it is still a really bad number for a reliever. Sub-6.0 RP don’t need to be rostered. Injured RP usually don’t need to be rostered. Injured with sub-6.0 P/IP should be 0% rostered. Sborz is still rostered in over a third of leagues. That should change.

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.

Alek Thomas, 0.08 P/G:

Thomas was once a highly-regarded prospect and I have continued to buy in on a post-hype breakout. And I thought we might have had it! From May 6 through August 25, he seemed to have figured things out and was posting a 112 wRC+. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows as he was walking just 3.3% of the time and was relying on a .354 BABIP to get to that number, but it gave me hope. That hope has evaporated the last couple of weeks. If he gets it going again by the end of the year, maybe I will get back on the Alek-wagon in the off-season, but I think I am probably off for good.

Nolan Arenado, 0.10 P/G:

I imagine many fantasy managers are frustrated with Arenado lately and I suspect he is pretty frustrated, as well. Over the last ten games, Arenado has been walking at a higher rate than his season line, striking out at a lower rate, and posting just atrocious results. Hello .147 BABIP. His hard-hit and barrel rates have tanked, as well, but it’s such a small sample that I assume it is just noise. Except, this stretch also coincides with a back issue. On August 25, Arenado left a game early with back tightness and it kind of looks like he hasn’t been the same, since. If you want to leave him on the bench until he puts together a couple of hard-hit balls, I wouldn’t blame you. I am more likely to just ride this out with him and trust that it’s only been a brief stretch of issues that won’t continue. Now, if you are debating what to do with Arenado in the off-season…that is a different question and I am not ready to wrestle with that yet.

Lucas Giolito,  -5.19 P/IP:

When Giolito was claimed by the Guardians there were two competing reactions:

1. The Guardians are a pitching-rich, pitching-smart organization that has seen Giolito as much as anyone over the last few years. They must see something in him that made them want to take a shot at fixing him.
2. The Guardians pitching has been crushed with injuries, they are relying on a bunch of kids whose arms they want to protect for the future, and they were just using Noah Syndergaard to plug a hole in the rotation. They just need an innings eater to eat innings.

Uh…maybe both were wrong? Giolito did not look fixed nor did he eat innings in his first start for Cleveland. Obviously that isn’t the entire story, but for now, you can let Giolito go.

I went back and checked and it’s been more than two months since I’ve written up some under-rostered starters. This column is finally back with a few suggestions for the stretch run. Most Ottoneu head-to-head leagues began their playoffs this week and teams in points leagues will soon need to start really thinking about managing their innings cap. Here are a few starters who have been performing particularly well over the last few weeks who are rostered in less than 60% of all Ottoneu leagues and a look at their remaining schedules.

With Shohei Ohtani unable to pitch for the rest of the season, Griffin Canning is getting another shot to prove he can handle a starter’s workload. He had been working in a piggyback role with Chase Silseth but his last two appearances have been traditional starts. He’s excelled by allowing just three runs in 13 innings, striking out 16. The biggest difference I can discern in those two starts was a greater reliance on his hard changeup. It’s not his best pitch — that would be his slider — but it does help him keep left-handed batters at bay. He’s also got a pretty soft schedule to finish the season too with starts against the Guardians, Tigers, and A’s potentially on the docket.

Dean Kremer has been a frequent recommendation in this column this year and his up-and-down performance has likely kept his roster rate pretty low. He’s actually been on a pretty good run since the All-Star break with just a single start where he’s allowed more than three runs. His strikeout-minus-walk rate has been a fairly mediocre 11.3% during this stretch but he’s managed to keep the ball in the yard which had been his Achilles Heel previously. He has starts lined up against the Angels (today), Cardinals, Astros, Guardians, and potentially the Red Sox depending on how the Orioles shift their rotation with John Means’ impending return. I’d feel comfortable starting him in four of those five games.

Brandon Williamson has seemingly settled into the big leagues after a rough-ish start to his major league career. He’s posted a solid 3.93 FIP in the second half with a good 16.7% strikeout-minus-walk rate; over his last six starts, he’s racked up 39 strikeouts against just six walks. A slight uptick in fastball velocity and a greater reliance on his changeup are likely the drivers behind this recent stretch of good outings. Unfortunately, he was placed on the COVID-19 IL last weekend and his outlook for the rest of the season is a bit up in the air. If he returns quickly, he could potentially start against the Cardinals, Mets, and Pirates to end the season but that’s obviously very tentative at this point.

Paul Blackburn has been the A’s best starter this year (which isn’t actually saying much) and he’s taken a pretty big step forward as far as his underlying metrics go. A new slider has helped him push his strikeout rate up to a career-high. Combined with his very favorable home park, he’s got some sneaky upside on a team that no one is paying attention to. I’d avoid his next two starts against the Rangers and Astros, but he’s got the Mariners (at home), Tigers, and Angels lined up to finish out the season.

Of the five pitchers listed above, I think I’m most interested in adding Javier Assad for this stretch run. He pitched out of the Cubs bullpen for nearly the entire season before getting shifted to the rotation in August. He’s thrived in longer outings and has been one of the key contributors to Chicago’s summer ascent. He hasn’t allowed more than three runs in any of his six starts since making the transition out of the ‘pen; his last two starts have been particularly impressive, allowing just a single run in 15 innings with 14 strikeouts and just 3 walks. He has scheduled starts against the Diamondbacks, the Rockies twice (avoid him in Coors Field), the Pirates, and the Brewers to finish out the season.

NOTE: The stats for this article were pulled on August 18th. Everything in this article reflects that date.

We’ve all done it. Leaving players in your lineup in unfavorable matchups is something that happens for many reasons. Maybe you had to choose between player A and leaving that spot on your roster empty for the day. “Scared money don’t make money!” you screamed as you clicked Joey Gallo into your lineup. But then, Joey Gallo went 0 for 4 and subtracted four points from your hard-earned point totals on the season.

If you’ve had Gallo hanging out on your roster all season long, he has tagged your team for negative points 39 separate times, bringing your team down by a total of 95 points. Now, if you’ve had Gallo on your team all season long, you should be considering changing that. His season-long points-per-game mark currently sits at 3.82, lower than what most would consider rosterable. But what if all of Gallo’s negative point games were taken away as if they never happened? He would technically be a 9.23 P/G player. That’s wild. Too wild. It would never happen. You would be more than a fantasy baseball player if you could predict every bad game and sit a player on those days. But, is there some edge that can be gained from this in a more practical way? Let’s find out.

A hitter can negatively impact your team by recording at-bats without a hit or a walk or a hit-by-pitch. They can also get caught stealing:

So who are the players that don’t look great from a P/G perspective or a total points perspective because they so often have negative point games? Or, perhaps, another way to look at it is, who are the really good players who could be even better with less negative point games? Well, here are the top 10 negative points scorers this season with what their P/G mark would be (Adjusted P/G) had they never recorded negative point games:

Note: In order to keep the P/G mark a little more realistic, I’m going to keep the game totals but zero out the negative games. 

Some of these players are actually excellent Ottoneu points league players despite their knack for dipping below zero with regularity. No one is questioning rostering Bobby Witt Jr. or this year’s version of Nick Castellanos. The table above attempts to forgive these players for all their negative impacts on our teams by replacing negative values with zero. The table tells us two important things. First, these players need to be managed more strictly than others. Javier Báez is over a P/G better when adjusted and that is the reason he is rostered in over a third of all FanGraphs points leagues while still showcasing such low regular/real P/G marks. Fantasy managers just can’t set him and forget him.  Second, the table shows us that a player like Luis García can score both a lot of positive and negative points.

Let’s now attempt an experiment that will help us see if paying that much attention can actually be beneficial to our teams. We’ll use Teoscar Hernández as our subject. You’ll never be able to sit Hernández for every good game and bench him for every bad game. But, what if you could get it right 20% of the time? When I randomly strip out 20% of Hernández’s negative point games, I get the following:

Total Points: 545.6, Games: 112, P/G: 4.87

That’s good. He’s worth about .4 more P/G and a little over 20 more points. But, we’ve also lost the 20% of his negative point games and left the roster spot empty in this situation. We benched him for seven games, 20% of the 35 negative-point games. However, this still assumes that we were totally accurate in choosing the right games to bench. To make this a little more realistic, I’ll also bench a random 10% (8 games) of his positive games (75 total). Here’s a more realistic view of Hernández under those conditions:

Total Points: 474.3, Games: 104, P/G: 4.56

Sadly, we’re worse off with this version of Hernández than if we had just kept him fully in our lineup. Keen observers will notice that we’ve taken 15 games away from our team. Maybe, just maybe, if we bring in a replacement for those 15 games we could do better than a full-time Hernández. You may argue with me about whether or not Adam Frazier is a replacement-level player. That’s fine. But he’s my guy and I’m the one writing the article so nah-nah-nah-nah-boo-boo. The cool part is Frazier actually played in 12 of the games that we benched Hernández for and we’ll just have to be ok with the missing three. Here’s our new version of Hernández. I’ll call him Fraz-nández:

Total Points: 505.1, Games: 119, P/G: 4.24

Dang. The 30.8 points that Adam Frazier scored while Hernández rode the pine did not help us get above the mark that Hernández made on his own, negative points and all. Fraz-nández isn’t cutting it.

Sadly this little experiment has exhausted itself and I’m sitting here wondering why I even started it in the first place. Maybe it sparked some ideas. Maybe it made you realize that you should probably do a better job of managing some of your players. But, maybe you’ll also give benching some of these players a try. And yet, the question of whose negative point games are most predictable does enter into the minds of real gamers and that may just be my next task. Finding out what is most predictive of an individual player scoring negative points could really turn this analysis into strategy. Stay tuned.

Here’s the list of players 11-20 who, like the table above, score a lot of negative points and should be managed with extra precaution:

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:

• The Ottoneu playoffs begin for most head-to-head leagues next week.
• The Blue Jays and White Sox both have a pair of easier matchups next week. That’s great news for Toronto’s starters who have had a bunch of tougher matchups in the recent weeks. Dylan Cease is really the only starter who really benefits from Chicago’s scheduled series against the Royals and Tigers; the rest of their rotation is pretty flawed and would be risky starts no matter who the opponent is.
• The Orioles and Padres both have tough matchups next week. Baltimore is on the road to face the Angels and Red Sox — both teams are extremely difficult to face in their home stadiums — while San Diego faces the red hot Phillies and Astros. Be weary of the Marlins schedule too; they host the Dodgers before traveling to Philadelphia next weekend.

Notable two-start pitchers:

• Gerrit Cole
• Corbin Burnes
• Clayton Kershaw
• Logan Webb
• Pablo López
• Justin Steele
• Zach Eflin
• José Berríos
• Cole Ragans
• Merrill Kelly

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping track of the machinations of 30 major league bullpens is pretty tricky. In standard leagues, it’s hard enough trying to discern which relievers are earning save opportunities, especially since more and more teams are using a committee approach in the ninth inning. In Ottoneu, with both saves and holds earning points, that search for high leverage relievers becomes even more of a challenge. There are plenty of resources out there — the Roster Resource Closer Depth Chart is one of my favorites — but even the most vigilant fantasy player can’t keep track of everything going on across the majors.

Today, I’m going to focus on four teams who have had a recent bullpen shakeup (either due to the trade deadline or injury) where there are new opportunities for high leverage work. The relievers listed below are rostered in less than 60% of all Ottoneu leagues.

Félix Bautista’s elbow injury has opened up new high leverage opportunities in Baltimore’s bullpen. Yannier Cano should receive the bulk of the ninth inning duties and has already earned a save and a loss. Behind him, Danny Coulombe and DL Hall will probably be called on in the seventh and eighth innings. The former was just activated off the IL last week and had been working in high leverage opportunities for most of the season prior to that. Hall might be the pitcher with the highest upside in Baltimore’s bullpen. He was called up when Bautista hit the IL and his velocity was up nearly four ticks from where it was back in April when he had a brief stint in the majors. He’s got the prospect pedigree and a deep repertoire to thrive in short stints out of the bullpen; the only thing you’ll need to keep an eye on is his command.

Adbert Alzolay and Mark Leiter Jr. have the eighth and ninth innings locked down in the Cubs bullpen but Michael Fulmer’s elbow injury has opened up some opportunities behind those two. Julian Merryweather looks like he’ll be the main beneficiary. It looked like he had broken out way back in April of 2021 but an oblique strain curtailed that season. He struggled through last season in Toronto and made his way to the Cubs this year. Since the beginning of July, he’s collected 10 holds while racking up 32 strikeouts in 23.1 innings (a 32.7% strikeout rate). More importantly, his fastball velocity has ticked up as the season has progressed and he’s now averaging over 98 mph like he was two years ago during his brief breakout.

When the Mariners traded away Paul Sewald at the trade deadline, it opened up the ninth inning for Andrés Muñoz to take the reins as closer and allowed a number of other relievers to begin earning high leverage work in the seventh and eighth innings. Justin Topa had been receiving a lot of those opportunities early in the season and he’s been relied on even further. He’s been a frequent recommendation in this column this year and yet he’s rostered in less than 50% of Ottoneu leagues. He’s allowed just a single unearned run in August — a Manfred man in an extra innings game — and just three runs total since the beginning of July. The other relievers in Seattle’s bullpen earning new high leverage innings are Gabe Speier and Tayler Saucedo. The former is a lefty groundball specialist who has collected five holds in August while the latter actually earned some brief ninth inning work when the M’s were trying to limit Muñoz’s and Matt Brash’s workload.

The Rays have had trouble all season long building a bridge to Jason Adam and Pete Fairbanks in the eighth and ninth innings. Right now, it looks like some combination of Colin Poche, Robert Stephenson, and Andrew Kittredge are seeing the most high leverage looks behind those other two relievers. Stephenson is the one who is flying under the radar right now; since being acquired from Pittsburgh in June, he’s running a gaudy 41.2% strikeout rate in Tampa Bay. He’s earned holds in his last two appearances and might be on his way towards earning more high leverage opportunities if he can continue striking out so many batters. The biggest difference maker for him is a new cutter that was introduced to his repertoire upon joining his new team; that pitch is generating a ridiculous 59.5% whiff rate, the highest in baseball for that pitch type. Kittredge is another name to monitor; he was working as the Rays closer towards the end of 2021 and into 2022 before undergoing Tommy John surgery. He earned a save in his first appearance off the IL a few weeks ago and could work his way back into high leverage opportunities if his skills haven’t deteriorated post-surgery.

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

Joey Votto, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 15.34%

Votto is one of the most likable players in the game and is one of the best offensive players of his generation, but he is also turning 40 in less than two weeks and hurt. He actually hasn’t performed poorly, though that is hard to see from the surface-level stats. A .328 wOBA from a 1B is nothing to write home about, but he had 13 HR (better than a 40-homer pace over a full season) and a .206 BABIP is severely hampering his OBP. His line drive rate is just 10.4% and he is hitting way too many grounders, but there is good reason to think that is unsustainable (in a good way) and he’ll hit more line drives (pulling up his BABIP and with it his AVG and OBP) when he comes back. He is expected to be activated in “early September.”

That all sounds like an endorsement to hold Votto, but I will probably end up cutting the one share I have as soon as I need a roster spot. He hasn’t been good or reliable enough to be a regular 1B or Util bat in Ottoneu, which means he is languishing on my bench even when healthy. If you are in need of a 1B when he comes back, he could be useful, so I could see adding him to a watchlist if he is a FA in your league, but there is no need to rush out to grab him.

Jake Cronenworth, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 14.06%

Cronenworth fractured his wrist when he was hit by a pitch and Tim Stebbins of MLB.com reports that “he will be in a cast for several weeks and get imaging done after that.” That doesn’t bode well. Several weeks is basically the rest of the season. Which means the only reason to hold Cronenworth is if you think you have him cheap enough to justify keeping him for 2024.

You don’t. Cronenworth has been a pretty poor performer for fantasy this year and really was not much better last year. After his excellent 2021, he showed enough in 2022 to justify hope for this year, but that is gone now. Beyond the fantasy performance questions, it’s unclear to me if he’ll even have a starting job next year. He has a contract that you would think would keep him in the lineup, but the Padres infield is crowded and this offseason should be an interesting one for them. I think he is an easy cut and I don’t expect him to be a priority come 2024 auctions, either.

Stone Garrett, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 13.10%

Garrett’s season is over, as he was placed on the 60-day IL with less than 60 days before the Nats wrap up their 2023 campaign. Like Cronenworth, that means the only reason to hold him now is to keep him for 2024. Unlike Cronenworth, he is on the 60-day IL so he isn’t using up a roster spot, and the only reason to cut him is to save cash.

I liked Garrett before 2023 as a weak-side platoon OF. That role (and the lack of clarity on whether he would even have a chance to fill that role regularly) limited his value, but there was potential there for 40-60 really strong starts against LHP. And Garrett has delivered that, with a .354 wOBA vs. LHP. But he has surprised me with a .333 wOBA against RHP – not nearly as good but enough to be a viable back-end Ottoneu OF. If he keeps that up and has an everyday job, he is a nice bench option – start him against every LHP and have the option to use him when needed against righties. Not bad! But that line vs. RHP is inflated by a .387 BABIP. He still draws walks against righties, but he shows almost no power (2 HR in 129 PA and a .125 ISO).

If you don’t need the cap space, there is no harm in holding (or even adding) him to see what happens in the off-season, but the chances are he’s just a $1 guy.

Luis Medina, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 13.10%

Medina is the first of these players that I am pretty sure I don’t want to cut. The overall numbers are ugly, but he had an absolutely brilliant July. Ben Clemens dove into what drove that impressive run back on August 3, and while the results since then haven’t been as good, that article shows you there is a lot to like. He has a shot to be back from the IL as soon as this coming weekend and that would give him time to make a few more starts this year and provide us more data heading into the off-season. But right now, I think he is better than a lot of other options out there and there is good potential for him to be the kind of guy you can keep for $3-$6 instead of paying $8-$10 on him at auction when the hype machine starts up. It’s also possible he stinks in September and is an afterthought in January, but unless I really can’t afford to hold him on my roster, I would prefer to wait and see.

Emerson Hancock, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 12.78%

Hancock is a somewhat maddening prospect, as scouts love his stuff and he has flashed some really impressive performances but he has yet to consistently produce in the high minors (or the majors). He also skipped Double-A and is in a pitching-rich org that may not have a need for him in their April (or May, or June) rotation next year. In leagues where cap space is not at a premium, I am happy to hold him (or pick him up) and stash him, since he is on the 60-day. If we find out in January that he is slated for a rotation spot (either in Seattle or with another org following a trade), I think I will be happy to have held him and there is basically zero risk since you can just cut him in the off-season anyway.

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.

Travis d’Arnaud, -1.67 P/G:

TdA was on fire early in the year, part of the most feared offensive catching tandem in the game. But he has been down since June 1, bad since July 1, and awful recently. It’s a challenge to know when to move on from any player, but that gets even harder for a part-time catcher, as it takes so long for any slump to become a meaningful sample of data to draw conclusions from. This two-week stretch looks awful, but it is just six games and 24 PA! But we are now at more than a two-month run where, if you were using d’Arnaud for every start, you haven’t been benefiting. If you haven’t moved on already, I would.

Francisco Alvarez, 0.45 P/G:

NL East catchers are all tanking, I guess. Alvarez has really been struggling ever since the calendar turned to August, and I wondered if he is maybe just hitting a wall in his rookie year. But, he hasn’t reached some crazy PA or games played milestones – he got plenty of minor league playing time in the past – and in some ways his stats are improving. His August K-rate is better than his season-long K-rate. Same for his walk rate. Same for his exit velocity and hard-hit rates. His barrel-rate is down, his BABIP is way down, his ISO is down, and his line drive rate is down. All of those “downs” are related, but they are also all numbers that are hard to trust in small samples, in part because they are so related to each other. I don’t think there is much to see here and even if there is, he is too talented to do anything other than live with the slump and be glad you have him for the future.

Hunter Greene,  -9.45 P/IP:

Greene looks like such a special pitcher, at times, and then he comes back from injury and gives up 5 HR and 8 walks over 6.2 IP in two starts. Greene had some big homer blow-ups in 2022 but managed to avoid those this year, never giving up more than two in a start until the five-homer barrage against Toronto last week. The walks, though, have been a real issue, and even without any other big homer days, he was still fairly homer-prone. This just seems like it will be the Hunter Greene experience – the walks will come with a lot of strikeouts, he’ll often give up a homer or two, and there will be occasional implosions when the ball is just sailing out on him. The overall package is still worth it, but unless he finds a way to rein in the BB and HR, he is going to be more good than great.