Hard to believe, but it’s almost February.  Almost all the top free agents have signed.  It’s almost prospect season, and it’s almost time for pitchers and catchers to report.  All these things add up to a baseball season that is almost here.

Patience.

But patience is a luxury we don’t have these days in fantasy leagues like Ottoneu that have a keeper deadline (January 31st) fast approaching.  Auction formats make player valuation even more complex, and now that it’s crunch time, tough decisions need to be made.  How comfortable are you hanging onto that $20 Corey Dickerson while the risk of a possible trade out of COL remains a real possibility in February or March? Despite the power and the incoming fences, how does Giancarlo Stanton’s unavoidable injury history influence your decision to keep at $56? How much value, if any, has Zack Greinke really lost moving to Arizona? Is he a $35 starting pitcher? Everybody loves Kyle Schwarber as the next best thing (C and OF!), but where’s the line? $20? $25? $30?

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Am I keeping too many players?  This is a question I am constantly asking myself as the Ottoneu keeper deadline approaches. Typically, Ottoneu leagues keep over 200 players (around 230-240) but what is the optimal amount?  Certainly it’s extremely league dependent, but is there a general way we can get an idea of how many players actually should be kept? First, we need to answer a couple questions.

Why does it matter if I keep too many players?

 Ottoneu championships can be difficult to win. If you want to increase your odds in the offseason, the main way to do so is to acquire players who are underpaid via offseason trades. These surplus assets allow you to enter the auction with more flexibility, often allowing you to purchase more talent at market value than your rivals. However, trading for surplus assets is only half the battle. Throughout my 4 years playing Ottoneu, I have witnessed many teams trade for surplus talent only to “waste” the benefit they receive from these players by keeping overpaid or marginal players.  The two often negate each other.  We want to trade for underpaid players, but we also want to be conscious of the impact of keeping overpaid players.

Let’s say that you currently own Francisco Lindor at a $10 salary and you believe he is worth $15 (a $5 underpay).  On the same team, you also own Salvador Perez at $8 and Brandon Phillips at $6 (both of whom you think are worth $3). Perez and Phillips combine to be overpaid by $8. This a simple example for convenience, but the net impact of owning these 3 players is to overpay the group by $3.  Each non-surplus asset owned counteracts the surplus assets you have worked hard all offseason to acquire. Owning a $10 Lindor is fun, removing the benefit you receive from a $10 Lindor before the annual auction even occurs is far less fun.

How many players should be kept?

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As mentioned last week, ottoneu is a deep fantasy game that comes in a variety of formats (5×5, 4×4, and two flavors of linear weights based total points), but one thing that all ottoneu leagues share is the $400 salary cap and keeper process. While ottoneu may not be a dynasty league in the literal sense, it does function as a very flexible auction keeper league, where the only limit on how many keepers a team can have is the need to stay under the salary cap and 40 man roster limits.

History of the Surplus Calculator

Even before I started playing ottoneu, there was a process I went through for every auction keeper league I was in. With every team in the league entering the auction with keepers that theoretically are worth more than their salary, I wanted a way to compare my keepers against my competition. In order to do that I would go through each team’s roster and determine the players I expected to be kept, and using dollar values I created for the league I could tally each team’s projected keeper salary and keeper value. Ranking teams by how much surplus (total keeper value less total keeper salaries) they had would allow me to identify who had the best selection of keepers, and therefore went into auction with the best chance to build a strong team.

As I played in more and more ottoneu leagues, I quickly realized that I needed a way to automate my keeper ranking process, and that automation is what led to the creation of the ottoneu Surplus Calculator. Ottoneu is uniquely suited to making this calculator easy for everyone to use, as ottoneu owners can go to their league page and download a rosters.csv file that includes their entire league rosters by team that includes salary info and Fangraphs IDs. Having that exported roster file means not having to manually assign players to teams, and makes tying the player values to the rosters a simple matter of a vlookup function.

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It’s cliche, but January is as good a time as ever to consider changing some behaviors (probably in response to learning from our mistakes).  Let’s dive into how this annual opportunity to manufacture inspiration can help us improve our fantasy trade skills by reviewing why we trade in the first place.

The foundation of trade is mutual gain.  It really is that simple.  Whether we’re discussing economics or fantasy sports, trade is beneficial because it enables each party to get more of what they want at a (perceived) cost lower than what they could produce it for themselves.

If trade is mutually beneficial, it stands to reason you should consider doing it more often.  In the context of your Ottoneu league (where trading is active and sophisticated), if you’re going to make more trades, you’re going to have to make more trade offers.  Some owners are reluctant to make trade offers, so let me encourage you to live a little more dangerously this year because, in addition to improving your roster, making trade offers will provide you with a lot of additional benefits.

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So, what is Ottoneu?

Ottoneu is a smarter, better brand of fantasy baseball.  By design, it’s a fantasy platform engineered for the hardcore baseball fan that doesn’t enjoy the term “off season”.  Ottoneu is the perfect fit for FanGraphs readers looking to join a competitive fantasy baseball league with a lot of cool features, a sabermetric-economy, and a massive community of raving fans.

You can read first-year feedback from Ottoneu players here.  You can also learn a lot more about the game from the FAQ, but here are the top 10 reasons you should consider joining or moving your fantasy baseball league to Ottoneu this year:

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There’s a saying – nobody cares about your fantasy team. Generally speaking, it’s true. When people in the real world find out I’m a fantasy baseball writer, they’ll start telling me about their team. Usually, they play in a hopelessly shallow format. My eyes glaze over. I nod in the right places. I think about the chores I need to finish in the next few days.

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The ottoneu Slack community continues to be a great place to discuss strategy, get feedback, and more. One of the more active channels is Trade Review, where you can talk about ongoing trade discussions and get feedback from the crowd, and on that channel, there tend to be two camps in this off-season window – those who only care about player values and those who care about roster construction.

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My ottoneu rivals are conspiring against me. Not really, it just feels that way because several have reached a conclusion that is not beneficial to me. Luckily, I have some options. And if those don’t work, I have one final spiteful course of action available.

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One of the things I love most about ottoneu is the robust user community on Slack. Contrary to more widely used platforms like Yahoo or CBS, ottoneu is just small enough to bring all of its users together on one forum. This leads to helpful services like leagues wanted, trade reviews, and freely available analysis tools.

If you play ottoneu and would like to join the Slack community, please say so in the comments. I’ve asked one of the admins to come collect anybody who wants to sign up. If you’re not in an ottoneu league but want to join one, the community is a good place to find the right group of players. Now, onto the bounty.

A couple days ago, community member Justin released a Surplus Value Calculator into the wild. The purpose of the tool is to help you determine which players are valuable keepers and which might be overrated. Expected dollar values for every rostered player are compared against their actual price. The tool uses Steamer projections to form the expected values.

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I opened up trade talks with my esteemed colleague Brandon Warne the other day, inquiring on one of his three elite SS in our ottoneu league.

“Any chance you are interested in moving [Manny] Machado, Xander [Bogaerts] or [Carlos] Correa? You can only use two at SS/MI and while you could play Machado at 3B, you have [Miguel] Sanothere.”

His reply was direct – “Probably will just start Sano at util.”

But I still need a SS and he still has a monopoly (those three plus Brad Miller and Starlin Castro), so how do I convince him to part with one of his prize possessions?
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