The Alex Rodriguez news will send a lot of fantasy owners scrambling for a new 3B, but it has other implications on the Yankees infield that may present an opportunity for savvy fantasy owners.

Brad Johnson looked at what the A-Rod suspension means for the Yankees yesterday. Not long thereafter, New York added Scott Sizemore and Ken Rosenthal reported that the Yanks are unlikely to add another MLB IF, which means the in-house options Johnson considered – along with Sizemore – are basically the only options in the Bronx.

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One of my favorite things about Ottoneu is that owners generally have to do their own leg work when identifying players to target and how to value them. With the $400 auction budget and 40 player roster, traditional price guides are only really useful for the purpose of ranking. The extra dollars and roster spots greatly affect a player’s value. Like in real baseball where Shin-Soo Choo is more valuable to the Rangers than the Astros, the dynamics of Ottoneu ensure that certain players have different values to different owners – even if the owners agree precisely about the player’s expected performance.

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I am getting ready to take part in my first weekly-lineup fantasy baseball league. I’ve done this for fantasy football (which I suppose goes without saying) and for fantasy basketball (back in high school when the “find the guy playing five games this week” strategy seemed novel), but never for baseball.

As I try to build a team, I am realizing that I need to completely shift the way I value opportunity.

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While a lot of our ottoneu arbitration season coverage was focused on the allocation leagues, there are still quite a few leagues that use the original vote off system. With voting complete, we now have a chance to review the results.

As a reminder, in the voting leagues, each owner can vote for one player on each opposing team. The player on each team with the most votes becomes a free agent, but the team who lost the player can get him back for a $5 discount a the pre-season auction. So in most cases you would expect owners to target their votes on the players who are the most under-priced – basically the greatest difference between salary and projected production in 2014.

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A plea was recently posted on the message board of one of my ottoneu leagues:

To the 4 owners who allocated a total of $9 to my team, keep in mind that it’s strategically sub-optimal to spend more than $1 on a non-contending roster.

Posted by the last place team, this argument seems perfectly logical and in most leagues the chances are the top 2-3 teams will get hit by close to $30 in allocations, while last place teams will be closer to $15-$20 (we’ll confirm this once allocations are done). But in reality this is an overly simplistic way to look at allocations.

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Prior to the season, as part of the FanGraphs+ offering, I went over my methodology for creating ottoneu player valuations, which included my decision to use Points/PA rather than total points or points per game evaluate players in points leagues. In fact, my preference in almost all formats is to break players down to their per PA values and rank them based on how much production above replacement level they provide in that increment.

This led to a debate on the relative merits of Pts/PA vs. Pts/G, in which I basically stood by the fact that the per PA method better accounted for platoon players – guys who pinch hit a lot and therefore have a lot of low-point games thanks to getting only 1-2 PA. And while I still contend that Pts/PA is better than Pts/G, I have been wondering if there is not a third way.

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For those who have not compulsively checked their Ottoneu rosters since the end of the regular season, it may have slipped your attention that arbitration began on October 16. Well, now it’s time for that to unslip your attention. Voting or allocating – depending on your league settings – will run through November 15, and I heartily recommend that you act early and often.

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We are still a few weeks from the arbitration deadline, but owners are starting to get their allocations (and votes, where applicable) in. My three leagues all use the allocation system, and there are some interesting patterns emerging in the allocations so far.

So far, 16 teams have completed their allocations across the three leagues, while three other teams have allocated $11 of their $25 (those teams are all mine, actually, and I can explain why I did that).

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For the last few months, a debate has been raging at ottoneu headquarters* about how to handle the innings pitched cap. See, games played is relatively simple – if your 1B plays your 162nd game today, you cannot start him tomorrow.

But when you have 1495 IP and have multiple starters and relievers set to go the next day, things can get a bit hairy. We’ve landed on a decision to use a soft cap and I’d like to give some insight into a) why we made this call and b) why you shouldn’t really care all that much.

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Earlier this week, Zach Sanders shared end of year fantasy rankings, providing a position-adjusted view of who provided the most (Chris Davis) and least (Barry Zito) value among qualified players in typical 5×5 roto leagues. This is extremely helpful information for those in 5×5 roto leagues, still helpful but maybe not extremely helpful for those who play in other formats.

What I’d like to look at is how the ottoneu end of season player rankings compare.

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