“The trade deadline is fast approaching.” – Hard to believe that time is here.  This season has flown by, hasn’t it? With just one week before rosters solidify for the final stretch, now is as good a time as ever to ensure new Ottoneu owners are fully prepared for the future, which is now fast becoming the off-season.  Joe recently outlined the mindset that’s needed to approach the trade deadline strategically, depending on your place in the standings, but since it’s also my job to cover Ottoneu on these pages, I’ll take a more mechanical look at what happens at this critical point in the season.

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We are officially in the dog days of ottoneu summer, with contending teams scrambling to plug leaks to keep their championship hopes alive and rebuilding teams sifting through the free agent wreckage to find something of value for next season and beyond. Let’s take a look at the players that have been most added across all ottoneu leagues over the past week and month.

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I first started playing fantasy baseball more than 20 years ago, and I have fond memories of calculating the scoring for the league I ran in middle school by hand using old Baseball Weekly’s (now known as Sports Weekly). Back then rotisserie leagues were synonymous with fantasy baseball, there weren’t really any other formats, the only distinction was using a 5×5 setup that incorporated runs and strikeouts versus the original 4×4 format. Rotisserie baseball was directly responsible for the current fantasy sports boom, but as I got older and other options became popular I found reasons to move away from the format.

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If you discuss player valuations with anyone who plays Ottoneu, chances are the word “surplus” has come up. Fellow Rotographs contributor Justin Vibber and his robotic heart love the S word, while others believe it to be a catch all that does a poor job of incorporating context, and therefore should be applied a little more conservatively. Maybe the S word isn’t used; maybe owners mention a player is “overpaid” or “underpaid.” Maybe they mention that they prefer talent they “view as a keeper.” Or maybe they claim someone is a “$30 player” without defining what they mean by “$30 player” and without acknowledging that they actually own this player for $15 salary.

As with all areas of life, communication comes with barriers. Written communication creates more barriers than most. Whatever jargon or form of communication is being used, we should recognize that owners tend to skew heavily toward talent that fits these descriptions “surplus”, “keeper”, “underpaid”, etc. We’re all very loosely trying to define the same thing. First let’s talk about why paying a player less than he produces is important.

If Mike Trout is a $70 player (generally), and you own him for $60, that would be viewed as a very good contract. It doesn’t matter that Trout is eating up $60 of your budget (especially if acquired via trade with a loan), because if he was cut, he would auction for more than $60. So, let’s say this hypothetical Trout is $10 underpaid. Does that change the fact that he is still producing $70 of production? No. Regardless of the salary I own Trout for in my league there is zero impact on his on field production. However, he is certainly more valuable to me at a $1 salary than a $99 salary (extreme I know). In this example, his salary of $60 would allow you to buy around $10 dollars more of production in the auction next season. If I bought Trout at $70, I would still have $70 dollars of production. However, I would now be unable to spend $10 on something else compared to if I had owned Trout at $60. If I owned Trout at a $90 salary, well I am still banking a $70 dollars of production, but now I have given up the ability to spend $20 later. Make sense? Because of this, players who are underpaid tend to be the building blocks of successful teams. They are the most highly coveted assets across leagues.

First, Let’s define a few terms. Then we’ll come back to this example. Read the rest of this entry »

With the Ottoneu trade deadline fast approaching, you are probably trying to determine where your team stands for the rest of 2016. Do you need that extra piece to make a title push this year? Is your league out of reach? Does a team in your league have (what appears to be) and insurmountable lead? These are all factors that need to bear in mind as the August 31^st trade deadline approaches.

The first place to start is to know how your team compares to the rest of the league. As one of the twelve owners in your league, it is important to know where you stand in relation to the other eleven teams. A great place to start is to run your league through the standings dashboard. While this tool gives you a pace at which you are performing (prorated for the whole season), it does not project what will happen based on a projection system (like ZIPS or Steamer). It can still be very useful to get a general idea of where you stand relative to the rest of the league. While this standard is different among many owners, I typically try to shoot for being within 350 to 400 points of 1^st (innings adjusted) if I am going to make any moves to buy. Read the rest of this entry »

We are now two thirds of the way through the season, and only a month out from the ottoneu trade deadline, so league races have narrowed down quite a bit and every move from here on out becomes critically important. Here is the link to last month’s rankings, which also includes links to the other rankings this season if you want to look at how things have changed.

Without further ado, the FanGraphs points league team rankings (1,340 teams):
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Earlier this season I introduced the Prospect Scorecard as a way of better comparing and identifying the best fit prospect value for your specific fantasy league.  Today I’ll get a head start on my own 2017 prospect rankings by using the Scorecard methodology to rank the current top 50 prospects for Ottoneu. Even if you don’t play Ottoneu specifically, the 4 x 4 and FGPTS prospect rankings can serve as a good proxy for most OPS or wOBA-centric fantasy leagues, and the traditional 5 x 5 prospect rankings should cover a large portion of the rest.

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In this super-sized episode of OttoGraphs, Tom and Justin discuss some of the many lessons we’ve learned this season, including our thoughts about infield depth, managing injuries, and accounting for inflation in the annual auctions. Plus, we play a few rounds of “guess the player,” alternating between some recent standouts and some of 2016’s worst performers.

As a reminder, OttoGraphs is now available on iTunes! Subscribe using this link or the one below, and if you like what you hear, we’d happily accept ratings or reviews to help us reach new listeners, and potentially recruit some new Ottoneu players! Plus, don’t forget to check out the new Ottoneu Community, where discussions are starting to pick up! Feel free as always to comment with any questions or suggestions you may have about this episode or future topics. We can be reached individually on Twitter:

@OttoneuTrades

@JustinVibber

@TomHasOpinions

@Fazeorange

Lastly, special thanks to Treemen who provided our intro and outro music. If you like what you hear, please check out their other work at http://treemen.bandcamp.com/

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I’m no artist, but as we enter August let me paint a picture of what I see happening in many fantasy leagues:

“My team started fast and I was optimistic in May, but since then I’ve fallen out of the race and am now looking only towards next season.”

“My league’s title chase appeared to be close in June, but just a month or so later it now looks like it’s really over – it’s a one (maybe two) horse race.”

“Our league trade deadline is still 30 days away but no one is really buying at this point.  It makes for a tough sell.”

“A lot of the owners in my league seem like they’ve checked out for the summer.  There’s just not a lot of activity from those teams lower in the standings.”

Familiar? Of course I’m using very broad brush strokes here but you get the point: it’s rare to find a fantasy league that has a hot race involving half your league’s teams in August (and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one in September).  But this isn’t really surprising, is it? Still, if you’ve ever won a fantasy league then you know the only thing better than winning is winning a competitive fantasy league.  We all want to win among the best, don’t we? That’s what bragging rights are all about.

My original intent for this article was to debate whether or not it’s possible to legislate competitiveness within your fantasy league, but we’ll just skip to the conclusion and say “it’s not”. This fact is probably obvious to you but in 20 years of being a fantasy commissioner I can tell you I’ve tried many times to drive competition up and down the standings each season, but in the end there’s no secret sauce.  Instead, I’ve come to the conclusion that attempting to build an active league is far better than trying to manufacture a competitive one, so today I’ll leave you with a few ideas that might help increase engagement in your league, and also ask for your feedback on what else might be working for you.

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FanGraphs presents on its pages a few different projection systems (Steamer/ZiPS/Depth Charts-which is a combination of the prior two) and shows preseason projections for each system, rest of season projections, and update projections (which is simply actual year to date performance plus rest of season projections). One of the more unique versions, and the one I will be looking at today, is the Steamer600 projections. These simply take the Steamer projections and assumes every player has the same playing time (600 PA/200 IP for SP/65 IP for RP). The Steamer600 Update projections (found here) incorporate the up to date Steamer RoS projections, so I like to look at them from time to time to get a sense of how Steamer is estimating true talent level regardless of playing time (due to injury, a bench role, or being in the minor leagues). I have taken those Steamer600 Update projections and applied ottoneu FGPTs scoring to find some interesting and surprising names that might be underappreciated as potential keepers.

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