Over the past two weeks, we’ve discussed player valuation in Ottoneu leagues and sending signals to affect the perceptions of other owners. Today, let’s move on to a topic that is a little more near and dear to our hearts – offseason trading.
About 24 hours ago, plus or minus zero minutes, I posted on the topic of elite relievers and when such players should be purchased in a draft. I recommend skimming that first as some of the points are pertinent to this article.
That piece was designed to offer some general tools and thoughts for those in relatively standard leagues. However, FanGraphs offers a custom fantasy game called Ottoneu – perhaps you have heard of it. Ottoneu offers four scoring systems, two of which are scored by points. This article is about the value of elite relievers in those points formats.
Last week, we spent some time talking about what goes into price expectations in an Ottoneu league. The take away point is simple: in Ottoneu leagues, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
