I know Mike Elias is not running an Ottoneu fantasy baseball team. I also know this exercise is very unrealistic, yet I’m doing it anyway. For those who have never had the pleasure of playing in an Ottoneu league, you should try it! I’m sure regular readers of our wonderful site here at FanGraphs have heard plenty about it. You get a $400 budget every year. You have a huge roster that functions in a dynasty format. You can alter the scoring from standard roto to sabermetric points leagues to head-to-head leagues. Regardless of the format, the goal of Ottoneu is to be as realistic as possible. It seeks to simulate the real baseball general manager experience. One of the ways it accomplishes that is an end-of-season tradition called arbitration where your league mates get to increase the salaries of your players. If you somehow made it to the end of your season rostering Fernando Tatis Jr. for $10, you likely saw his salary shoot up in the arbitration process. But, it can only go up by so much each year and this, in a way, mimics salary increase through arbitration in real life. If a player gets too expensive to keep on your roster, you have to cut him at the end of the season, sending him back to a re-auction draft and thus, simulating free agency.

Ottoneu makes fantasy baseball just a little more realistic. So, I decided to take that a few steps further and create an Ottoneu roster that closely mimics the Baltimore Orioles. Read the rest of this entry »

Typically a look at the most ongoing auctions shows 4-5 intriguing names, but right now there are a few in the top 10 overall that just aren’t interesting. Trevor Bauer and Adalberto Mondesi are just being auctioned to reduce their cap penalties. Alex Lange and Jason Adam are decent enough RP options, but there are probably 10 other RP you could throw out there right now.

Rather than dive into all of them, today we’ll focus on three names: Christopher Morel, Tyrone Taylor, and Oscar Gonzalez.

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One of the quickest and easiest ways to find productive Ottoneu hitters is to go to the Ottoneu search and sort by points per game. At the end of the day, that is what we are trying to maximize as Ottoneu managers – we all get the same 1,944 games split over 12 positions and we need to get the most points possible from those games.

However, those numbers can be skewed by pinch hit, pinch run, or defensive replacement appearances. A hitting putting up 1.25 points per plate appearance should score over 5.0 points per game, but if they have a handful of games with one PA, that will pull down the average.

To find players who you might be underrating by viewing points per game, it’s helpful to look at points per game as a starter.
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As of Thursday afternoon, there were four players up for auction in more than 10% – a prospect, a guy finally getting a clean chance, a power hitting 1B, and a reliever. And all four of these players are legitimately interesting and worth rostering.

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We are less than a month into the season, meaning we have yet to hit the first Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL) cut. But it’s time to do your roster analysis, as Thursday will be the last day to start auctions in time to add players to your second-round roster – if you survive the first cut.

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The season is just two weeks old, but that doesn’t mean fantasy managers are sitting on their hands. We are busy overreacting to three-inning samples of relievers, two starts for starters, and a single hot (or cold) streak for hitters. And that means rosters are churning and cuts are being made. Here are the players cut in at least 10% of leagues in the last week, along with advice on how to handle them if they are on your roster or if they are now free agents in your league.

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As always happens a few days into the season, Ottoneu managers are firing up auctions left and right, trying to grab the next big thing before it becomes too big for grabbing. Today, we’ll look at the six players who are being auctioned in the most leagues right now.

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Last year, I shared the 12 players I had on most of my rosters, broken into types of players. This year, I want to dive into the five players I have on more than half my Ottoneu rosters.

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It’s almost baseball season, which means we are in the heat of bold predictions season, and I can’t pass on a chance to throw out some hot takes. Here are my ten bold (slightly Ottoneu-focused) predictions for the 2022 season.

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The first inning of any spring training game should come with tempered expectations, but I always find myself like the kid in the bleachers whose parents thought it would be a good idea to just get the ice cream out of the way before the first pitch is thrown. With a chocolate-smeared face and wide eyes, I find myself taking in every pitch as if I’ll never see another game again. So, maybe that’s why my reaction to Clarke Schmidt’s first inning against the Phillies motivated me to write about the Yankee righty, or maybe, he’s a pitcher that should be on your radar in keeper and dynasty leagues. Let me preface this article with the mutual understanding that I am not a prospects guy, I’m just a kid watching from the bleachers taking in the sunshine with chocolate on my face, excited to see baseball again.

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