I trade a lot. Like Justin, I am also a trade-aholic.  So once the Ottoneu trade deadline has ended my feelings are mixed. There is slight disappointment; I will readily admit that fantasy baseball is a little less fun (for me at least) if I don’t have the ability to make trades. I also feel relieved. After sending out offers constantly since our March draft, I would be lying if I said exhaustion didn’t catch up with me. Not feeling compelled to check trades is a nice change. Baseball is still here after all. I am happy. Leading up to the Ottoneu trade deadline (August 31) I tried to cover how you should prepare for next year (if selling) or how you could stock up for the stretch run if buying. Today, I want to take some time to talk about how you can use September to bolster your chances of clinching the championship, or of improving your odds for 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

The Ottoneu Trade Deadline is today! If you’ve followed along recently, we have covered the trade deadline (or trading in general) in some detail.

Ottoneu 101: Roster Organizer – Using the roster organizer as you start to plan for next season.

OttoGraphs Episode 16: VetoGate 2016 – Podcast on acceptable behavior of vetoing trades.

Ottoneu 101: Approaching the Trade Deadline – Primer on the Ottoneu Trade Deadline, and how to approach it as you consider buying/selling.

Ottoneu 101: Production, Salary, Surplus, Value – Definitions and applications of how trades can be viewed when trying to weight surplus and current production.

Today we want to try something a little bit different. We are encouraging everyone to leave their Ottoneu trade questions in the comments and we will help to answer them as best we can. Trey, Tom, and Justin will be stopping in throughout the day as well. As a reminder – each of us focuses on Ottoneu and it’s various formats. We are happy to help out to the best of our abilities with other league types, but recognize that is not our strong suit. The deadline ends at 11:59:59 ET. So get those trade offers out and work towards finishing those deals as soon as possible. Today is not the time to be nickle and dime your league mates in hopes of extracting every ounce of value you can. Time is short.

I’m going to do something a little different today and step away from fantasy analysis and try to leave you with something that is simple, very practical, and hopefully helpful.  With a shout out to my fellow commissioners out there, I’d like to give you a template for creating a fantasy league charter.

I’ve been playing fantasy baseball for 20 years now and I’ve had the honor of commissioning for most of that time too.  It can be a fun job but for those that have done it you know that it can also be a little rough sometimes.  No one enjoys stepping into the middle of heated league debates, trade meltdowns, or finding replacement owners, but if you’ve commissioned a league in the past odds are you’ve dealt with a few issues here and there.  While there’s no way to foresee or avoid every issue that can derail a fantasy league (and since there’s no substitute for having great owners as your foundation), a rock solid league charter can go a long way in setting both the tone and direction of your league long term.  In my opinion, it’s a must-have.

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“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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