The key currency for bats in Ottoneu is points per game (P/G). You have 162 games to fill at each position and you need to maximize the points you get from those 162 games. Total points and points per plate appearance have their value, but at the end of the day, filling 162 games with the highest P/G you can will maximize your team’s score.

But there is a caveat: since most managers bench players on days they don’t start, points per game started (P/GS) is what really matters. When you go to the Ottoneu search and look at free agents or when you consider a trade offer and look at a player page, you see points per game, but that isn’t telling the entire story.

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Ever since the opener became a thing in MLB, I have been wondering if I should be aggressively targeting openers among my RP corps in Ottoneu. I typically like to carry 6-8 RP on a roster, and having the option to extend my bullpen by locking in an opener on occasion seems like a nice way to get some extra pen innings. But opener innings aren’t exactly relief innings. Yes, they are pitched by relievers, and they are short-burst outings like relief appearances, but they don’t offer any hope of a save or hold, and they are often not as short-burst as they would be from the pen.

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With the Ottoneu Prestige League knockout rounds starting today, OPL is now a spectator sport for all but the 27 players who manage or co-manage at least one of the 32 remaining teams. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good data or lessons to be learned from what those teams are doing. And looking at changes made to those rosters might help the rest of the Ottoneu world make smarter choices starting as soon as today.

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With the Ottoneu Prestige League about to hit the knockout rounds, there are about 40 teams still scrambling to figure out what to do ahead of the final OPL snap for the season. There are another 200 teams wondering what went wrong this year and thinking about next year. And perhaps there are many other managers looking forward to their first foray into OPL in 2023 and wondering how to prep.

One of the most debated topics among OPL managers is what changes to make ahead of each snapshot – do I bail on this injured player? Do I hold this prospect? Should I drop this underperforming player? I want to look into some of these questions over the next few weeks and into the off-season, but today we’ll start with a quantitative question: how much should my team turn over round-to-round?

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I thought about making this a special Joey Gallo edition of Cold Right now. Gallo has been cut in 11.75% of leagues over the last week and in nearly a quarter of leagues over the last month. And while there are some other players who have been cut more, none offer the potential of league-altering production the way Gallo does. But rather than focus on just Gallo, I want to take a quick look at some other names before figuring out what to make of Gallo.

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Ottoneu never rests, even for holiday weekends, and extra time off often serves as an opportunity to catch up on cleaning up rosters, filling gaps in the lineup, or just making interesting trades and pickups. As we wrap up 4th of July weekend, there are five players who are up for auction in 25 or more leagues.

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Last week, I covered four prospects rostered in less than 10% of Ottoneu leagues who deserve more attention. This week, I want to go the other direction and look at prospects who are rostered in too many leagues. This proved far more difficult, for a couple of reasons.

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For a variety of reasons, since the start of June I have been reloading my Ottoneu rosters with prospects and have been surprised to see some interesting names almost universally available. While I am not a prospect expert by trade, I love scouting stat lines, reading scouting reports, and finding prospects who others may not have noticed yet. These four players are all rostered in less than 10% of Ottoneu leagues and should be on your radar.

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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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