I recently received an invitation to join Dave Cameron’s Screw Cancer league on ottoneu (I’m A New Owner To Exploit). It’s been in existence since 2012. Any time one joins a longstanding dynasty league, you’re likely to inherit a steaming pile. In this case, former owner Joe Douglas was kind enough to hand me some very solid assets as part of an incomplete roster. He didn’t leave the league due to the usual reasons – poor performance, rigged rules, and/or frustration. Instead, he was hired by an MLB team. Congrats to him.

My new ottoclub includes plenty of players I don’t want to keep. When considering the current state of the roster, it’s tempting to pursue a complete rebuild. My advice, resist the temptation to rush into a remodeling job. Take this opportunity to learn how to use players you don’t like. At the very least, make sure you maximize your trade returns. Let’s take a closer look at my situation.

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It’s probably been awhile since you’ve read a traditional “buy low, sell high” article.  In today’s golden age of baseball analytics where complex physics and statistics can be boiled down to a few simple indicators accessed instantly using one hand, it’s not very often that we (readers, fans, fantasy players) find ourselves in possession of knowledge before the masses.  For example, try “selling” Avisail Garcia and his recent .375 wOBA around your league without getting some type of response that includes “yeah, but he had a .392 BABIP”.

Thankfully, despite all the data available at our fingertips, the one ingredient that will always play a critical role in the mixture of value is the human element of perception, which can swing wildly in different directions depending who you’re dealing with.  Today I’d like to isolate a few players who’s perception may be suppressing their actual value a little more than it should be, which may represent a buying opportunity for savvy fantasy owners prepping for 2018.  The good news is you don’t have to stand in line to land these deals, but you will still need to get them early.

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My first post here at RotoGraphs was an introduction to the Ottoneu Surplus Calculator, a tool I created to help ottoneu owners calculate and visualize the best assets in their leagues. If you want to know more about the background of the tool, or more specifics on how to use it, be sure to read that prior article. Today I wanted to announce the release of the early 2018 version of the calculator, using the just released Steamer 2018 projections.

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In case you missed it, the ottoneu arbitration deadline has passed, and off season trading is now available. While teams scramble to begin making moves to build a contender in 2018, let’s take a look at the players who attracted the most arbitration allocations.

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Guess what? Your ottoneu arbitration allocations are due today!

For those of you living in a hole or a shoe or wherever it is people have to live to be utterly ignorant of important world events, FanGraphs hosts a unique fantasy platform called ottoneu. It’s a 12-team, semi-dynasty format with a $400 budget. A key part of the experience is this concept of “arbitration” wherein your rivals can make your team more expensive. If you’d like to know more about arbitration and way too many related strategies, we have an ominbus for that.

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My review of a recent Ottoneu dynasty prospect draft continues today with highlights from rounds 10 – 12.

Dynasty Prospect Draft Review: Rounds 1 – 3

Dynasty Prospect Draft Review: Rounds 4 – 6

Dynasty Prospect Draft Review: Rounds 7 – 9

This draft should help you “discover” a few prospect names to keep an eye on going forward.  If you have specific questions about players or the thought process of why they were selected, fire away in the comments section, as I’ve asked each owner in the league to be on standby to provide feedback as we review the rounds.

Before I review my own thoughts on the draft, you should know this Ottoneu league uses the “FanGraphs Points” scoring system based on linear weights, so offense is heavily slanted towards wOBA skills (and speed is almost a non-factor).  We also somewhat arbitrarily removed the Top 12 overall offensive prospects to save them for the standard 40-man auction next spring.  Otherwise, any minor league player without one (1) MLB PA or IP is eligible to be drafted. You can read more about the custom rules of this dynasty league here, and follow along with the draft here.

A few of the prospects below are also featured on the 2018 Top 100 Fantasy Prospects list.

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Niv Shah, creator of ottoneu, was kind enough to provide me with the end of season rosters for every ottoneu league/team, and I’ve been playing with the data on and off for the last week. For today’s post, I’m going to start simply and look at some of the players most often owned by ottoneu champions, the players most drafted by champions in first year leagues, and some of the average finishes by player in those first year leagues.

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Happy Game 7 Day!

About a year ago I released my (2017) Top 50 Fantasy Prospect rankings using the Prospect Scorecard to weight a variety of important variables in the context of fantasy baseball.  Today I’m publishing an (early) expanded list of the Top 100 Fantasy Prospects for 2018 for both Ottoneu’s FanGraphs Points leagues (where wOBA is a key measure on offense) and Roto leagues (5 x 5).

A few quick notes before we begin:

• Since “Cost” is league-dependent (auction salary, keeper round, etc.), I’ve ignored it here for simplicity by keeping it constant for every prospect listed. Feel free to use the Scorecard to make changes that reflect true player costs for your league, which will impact these rankings.
• These rankings below are intended to represent the 100 most valuable prospects for fantasy leagues (depending on scoring format).
• It’s quite possible I’m missing an obvious player that should be ranked, so let me know in the comments.  We can discuss the specific rationale for player rankings in the comments, too.  Player ages are current ages.
• For a lot more prospect resources, check out the Ottoneu community.

Here are the (early) 2018 Top 100 prospects for the linear-weights-based FanGraphs Points scoring format (a good proxy for those in OBP leagues):

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Ottoneu arbitration began on October 15 and runs through November 15. This omnibus is a one stop shop for all the strategy and tactics you need to get through the process. The following omnibus is a recreation of the one I published the last two years. We’ve mostly said everything there is to say over the course of more than 10,000 words. But first, some background.

Perhaps I jumped too quickly into the details. Ottoneu is the award-eligible fantasy platform hosted by FanGraphs. Think of it as dynasty-lite. You get a 40-man roster, a $400 payroll, and way too much freedom to manage your team your way.

Over the offseason, the price of every major league player increases by $2. Minor leaguers increase by $1. Then there is an arbitration process that can be done one of two ways. Most leagues use the allocation process which ultimately adds an additional $11 to $33 per team. This omnibus is intended for both forms of arbitration, but the allocation process does open more possibilities for strategery and thus has more words dedicated to it.

As I mentioned, there are two systems of arbitration: voting and allocation. An asterisk indicates that the article is intending for voting leagues. I’ve organized the omnibus into sections: intro, intermediate, and advanced. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I posted my calculated 2017 dollar values for ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues, and while they aren’t meant to be an exact representation of each player’s true value this past season, they should reasonably convey how much each player was worth. I also happen to have a set of data on the average auction price for all players in thirty first year ottoneu FGPts leagues from last spring. Today I’ll be constructing three hypothetical ottoneu teams using ’17 final results and those average auction salaries, with one of those teams serving as my best guess for the best $400 ottoneu team that could have been built in a first year league.

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