This is the third installment of this annual Ottoneu tradition. In 2021, I broke the 12 players I rostered most into six buckets of types of players I look for. In 2022, I covered the five players I rostered in more than half of my Ottoneu leagues. This year will look more like last year – the 2021 piece still basically holds true, even if the names have changed, so no need to rehash it.

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ZiPs 2024 gives us some insight as to how prospects will perform if and when they make it to the big leagues. If we can get a general sense of how a player will perform with projections, we can get a general sense of how much they should be valued. To call this process an oversimplification is to look up at the sun and say, “Bright!” Yes, it is an oversimplification, that’s a given. First, we’re trying to predict not only the future performance of a player who hasn’t actually done it yet. Next, we’re trying to determine how much that performance will be worth without any real context. Where will they play? Who will be on their team? Are they as mentally strong as they are physically strong? Finally, we’re assuming they’ll be healthy.

This oversimplified process can only give us a sense of who might perform like a big leaguer in 2024 and since I’m writing from a FanGraphs points scoring system viewpoint, we can make comparisons with other, more established pitchers. Here’s a reminder of my process. First, I find prospect pitchers yet to debut using The Board. Next, I bring in the ZiPs 2024 projections for the players on that list. Not all of them have projections. After that, I convert their projected stats into FanGraphs Ottoneu points. Finally, I throw the prospects and their projected points into Justin Vibber’s Surplus Calculator output for 2023 and make comparisons. The result tells me how these pitchers will perform in 2024 if they are in a pool of 2023 projected players. The dollar value given assumes that next year’s player pool will be much like this year’s player pool. Here’s an example:

Pfaadt is already grabbing the attention of Ottoneu players as his current FanGraphs points average salary is $4, or $3 Median. Will he increase in value by the end of 2024? ZiPs likes his chances and you can compare his projected points total for 2024 with this year’s Jordan Montgomery. If you pay over the average now, let’s say $6, and this projection comes to fruition, you’ll have a good chance of generating value in 2024. There is, however, another scenario where ZiPs is off the mark and he only brings in $4 in 2024. In that case, you’ll be overpaying. Here are the rest of the 2024 ZiPs projected prospect pitchers and what their value could be at the end of the 2024 season:

Let’s compare these estimated 2024 values with some current (2023) average/median Ottoneu salaries:

Current FanGraphs Points Leagues Avg./Med.:

Kodai Senga – Average: $15 / Median: $15
Grayson Rodriguez – Average: $4 / Median: $6
Taj Bradley – Average: $3 / Median: $3
Kyle Harrison – Average: $3 / Median: $3
Ricky Tiedemann – Average: $3 / Median: $3
Robert Gasser – Average: $2 / Median: $3
Tanner Bibee – Average: $2 / Median: $1
Gavin Stone – Average: $2 / Median: $2

This is just one way of trying to look into an uncertain future; mashing a bunch of different spreadsheets together and then estimating a value. Is it worth doing, or would you rather just pay a few dollars now to see what happens later? I think this analysis helps us do both. Remember that the goal is to identify future value and not current value. It allows us to prospect on players because we like them or we believe in them or we saw them at a AA game and were impressed. But, it also allows us to put some kind of filter on how we are rostering and for how much. Are you rostering Taj Bradley for $7 because he was bumped up during arbitration, or you got him in a rebuild trade deal when someone else realized his salary was too high? It may be time to re-examine that hold because, by this analysis at least, he won’t reach that value in 2024. Everyone has a strategy and this is just one approach, but it’s utilizing analytical tools and projections from smarter people than myself to provide insight and that can’t be a bad thing.

I’ve been vocal about this in the past and I’ve been asked to explain why I am so adamant about not price enforcing. The simple reason is because the risk isn’t worth the reward. But I can offer more detail than that.

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Rostering minor leaguers in any Ottoneu format is super fun. It’s fun because you get to take a chance on a player. Build your roster now in order to plan for the future. Isn’t that what so many real-world teams are doing? Yet, it can be cumbersome to hold onto a player for a few years while paying them a $1 or more in salary when you really don’t know when and even if they will pan out.

A few months ago, I was up against this very challenge. Rostering Jack Leiter was exciting. He was a college pitcher with a lot of hype and talent and now a minor leaguer who has held onto both of those traits. But, I needed to try and quantify how much he would be worth in a few years. His MLB ETA isn’t until this season and likely the end of this season. Looking for a range of reasonable salary expectations, I used ZiPs’ 2024 and 2025 projections to get a sense of how to value Leiter in a few years. My analysis concluded that Leiter would likely only return somewhere around $4 in 2023 and that’s if he meets the higher end of likely outcomes. I was paying $6, too much for this year, so I cut him.

Rostering Leiter at $6 doesn’t make sense for 2023. But now that he is back on the waiver wire, should I attempt to re-roster him for $1? In order for that to make sense, two things need to happen. First, he needs to return over $1 of value in 2023. Second, he needs to return over $1 of value in 2024 and pass through arbitration untouched at the end of the 2023 season. Only then is he worth selecting for a $1. In this analysis, I’ll look at the players who are most likely to pass through those qualifiers. Choo! Choo! All aboard the hypothetical train! Here’s a map of our journey:

Step 1: Take a deep breath. A lot of assumptions are going to be made here. This is not an exact science. Please, do not rush to your player page and start auctioning off these players at these exact prices. Use these values as a jumping-off point.

Step 2: Grab a pool of minor league players who have not yet debuted from “The Board” with a Future FV value greater than or equal to 30 and subset it down to players with a “Current Level” not equal to “MLB”.

Step 3: Download ZiPs 2024 projections for the players in Step 2 and calculate their Ottoneu FanGraphs points totals based on those projections.

Step 4: Add those players into the auction calculator’s outputs, sort by rPTS, and see what the value is for players in that same rPTS area. Keep in mind, player value is altered by positional adjustments.

This process ultimately tells us what these players’ auction value could be if they play to their full zips projections in 2024 and the league looks identical to this season’s (2023) player pool. It tells us how much they should be valued for next year.

Out of the 271 prospects I downloaded from the board, 242 had a “Current Level” other than MLB. Of those 242, only 60 have been projected by ZiPs for 2024. Of those 60, only 15 (but number 1 on the list kind of doesn’t count) end up with a positive projected value in 2024. Here they are:

Now, it’s very, very possible that this process excluded some highly touted prospects. Hopefully, I was clear enough with my process that you can hypothesize as to why they were left out or replicate a version of this for yourself. This is not a top draftable prospects list. I repeat; This is not a top draftable prospects list. For example, where is Jordan Walker? Well, ZiPs doesn’t necessarily project Walker to be roster-able in 2024. Here’s where the Cardinals prospect stands in this process:

Now, to see why Walker falls out of a roster-able projected salary, let’s look at his 2024 ZiPs projections compared to a couple players high on this list, Colton Cowser and Christian Encarnacion-Strand:

You can see why Cowser has more projected value in 2024, but you can also see how this system has some flaws. Walker has already been creating a lot of buzz in Spring Training and many might look at that 2024 projection and scoff. Projecting players who haven’t appeared in the MLB yet is hard. Time is money and if I had more of it, I would go about the valuation a little more scientifically. Rather than comparing rPTS and suggesting a value range, it would be interesting to iterate through runs of the auction calculator, each time removing the player the minor leaguer would be replacing and determining value from a more believable player pool. I think I’ve gotten close enough for now. Roster any of the players listed above for $1, make it through the end of the 2023 season arbitration without their salaries increasing, and you have a good chance at value in 2024.

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.