Perusing the names atop early-season leaderboards is always fun. Take, for example, earned run average among all starters who have thrown at least ten innings this year. Three pitchers are tied for first, having not given up a run this year. Mike Clevinger was ace-like last year, and he’s been otherworldly in 2019. Matt Moore was good, and then he was hurt. CC Sabathia was hurt, and now he’s good. But the surprising name is the guy who’s fourth: Jordan Lyles.

Lyles is a former well-regarded prospect in the Rockies system who flamed out because he couldn’t miss bats. After signing on with Pittsburgh this offseason as rotation depth, the righty has suddenly taken off. Lyles checks in with a 0.53 ERA across three starts and seventeen innings for the upstart Pittsburgh Pirates, and has quickly gone from depth arm to third in the rotation behind stalwarts Jameson Taillon and Chris Archer. With pitching always in short supply in fantasy, it’s worth looking at whether ace Lyles is sustainable, or at least worth a pickup.

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Last season I kicked off April with some early trade reviews from the Ottoneu community, and today I’ll do the same, hoping to peek under the hood of some early player perceptions as transactions start to take shape across the fantasy baseball world.

As a quick reminder, Ottoneu is a keeper system by design that shifts the balance just short of traditional dynasty leagues, and offers a variety of scoring systems (including H2H).

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With Ottoneu continuing to grow rapidly, I’d like to dedicate some ink to a few tips I’ve learned along the way.  Entering my ninth season on the popular fantasy sports platform, I’ve outlined a few things that have helped me gain that extra 1% edge, and with the season just now under way, this is a good time to consolidate a few tricks into a quick guide that should benefit new owners and veterans alike.

Resource: What is Ottoneu?

Prioritize Salary Cap Space

Of all the recommendations listed below, I’ve learned to prioritize salary flexibility during the season more than any other strategy over the years.  I’m convinced a smart, active owner can find in-season gold on the waiver wire as players and prospects emerge, so it’s essential to leave yourself some space to shuffle your roster when needed.  But what if you’ve already spent your entire salary cap in the auction? That’s okay, but you’ll want to be conscious of finding opportunities early in the season to free yourself of this roster restriction wherever possible so you have the flexibility to complement your team with mid-season contributions when trades aren’t always an option.  Here are a few specific ideas to help you maximize your Ottoneu salary cap space, which may be even more important for Head-to-Head leagues.

Resource: How to Get Started Playing Ottoneu

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When you play a lot of leagues, things start to blend and you might forget who you have and where you have them. For the last several years, I’ve put together my portfolio to keep track of who I have in my leagues. Over the last few years, I’ve scaled back my league load. Now when I say this number, some of you will still faint, but I promise it’s a major cutback. There are 13 leagues accounted for in my portfolio and only 10 of those require regular work (daily/weekly lineups and FAAB). I think the first time I made a portfolio, it was for 20 leagues.

One aspect to remember when doing this exercise is that the top guys are never going to be the studs from the first couple of rounds unless you get lucky enough to pick in nearly the same spot throughout the leagues. Drafts start to open up after pick 75 so that’s often when you start accumulating your multiple shares of players, often because you comfortable taking them ahead of their ADP since you believe in them. This is even more true of pitching specifically.

That said, my top two guys are hitters this year!

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We reintroduced the Quadrinity to you last week in its original application, to pitchers. As we discovered last year when we looked at 2017, it also works well—perhaps better—with hitters. And it worked great last season as well. So let’s see whom it turns up now.

To review our approach briefly: we look for the inverse of what we looked for with pitchers last week. This means hitters who were in the upper half of Hard-Hit Ball Percentage and Walk Percentage, and in the lower half—in other words, the upper half—of Strikeout Percentage and Soft(ly)-Hit Ball Percentage. The rationale should be apparent. Just as with the pitcher Quadrinity, this approach yields some very obvious hitters. But what we’re really looking for is moderately-priced or cheap guys who might outperform market expectations.

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Another year, another set of bold predictions, and another introduction to The Process^TM. I did well last year, hitting on Matt Chapman and Miles Mikolas out-earning their teammates Matt Olson and Luke Weaver despite enormous divides in National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) average draft position (ADP) as well as Madison Bumgarner being worse than a not-top-20 starting pitcher (with an asterisk for his late start in 2019). I might’ve hit more bold predictions last year than in my previous three seasons combined.

Bold predictions can but don’t have to be a frivolous exercise. As fun as it is to slap a 40-homer prediction on Franmil Reyes (…should I do that?), I don’t find it particularly illuminating unless it’s supported by evidence (…which exists for Reyes?!). You can make bold predictions without being outrageously bold — it’s exactly what I intended to accomplish last year simply by leveraging what I observed to be extreme market inefficiencies at play. I stuck my neck out for Chapman and Mikolas and Bumgarner, but not as far as folks might think. There was enough evidence in their (and, where applicable, in their teammates’) bodies of work for me to make objectively bold predictions on the basis of draft price or market consensus without them feeling particularly bold to me.

While endeavoring to go 6-for-10 this year just to match last year’s hit rate would be absurd, I do think I can hit another three, at least, in 2019 if I pick my spots correctly. So, here goes: my 10 bold predictions for 2019.

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Consensuses make me nervous. When everybody agrees, there’s usually a way to profit with a contrarian approach. This season features perhaps the most monolithic consensus I’ve seen in the last decade. Ace starting pitchers are the key to life, liberty, the cosmos, and a rockin’ bikini bod. You can’t possibly contend without at least one ace. Multiple aces are preferred. This leads me to ask a question…

Is 2019 a LIMA year?

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I’m headed back from a weekend in New York City after participating in the 15-team Tout Wars mixed auction and a NFBC Main Event league. It was great catching up with everyone and meeting some new faces such as our first president. The weekend didn’t completely consisit of bagels and beers. I had work to do and compiled a couple of teams. Here are my thoughts which other fantasy owners may find helpful.

Pre-weekend thoughts (written before either event).

• Historically the Tout Wars hitter/pitcher split has been a steady 70%/30%. With pitchers being taken earlier and earlier this season, I wonder if this split will change. I’m creating my values with the 70/30 split but know I may need to adjust the split on the fly. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend was Tour Wars weekend in New York City. The committee extended me an invitation, likely by mistake, into its head-to-head points league auction. I’ll take a moment to self-indulge and say it’s pretty surreal to finally, like, reach the pinnacle, in a sense. I appreciate and am endlessly grateful for the kind words folks have extended my way in the past few weeks and months and years.

Rudy Gamble, of Razzball fame and a delightful human being whom I finally met in person Friday night, passed along to me positive feedback about my recent draft recaps (NFBC, TGFBI, Rotoballer mock), which seem to have been a helpful prep tool this preseason for some folks. I endeavor to provide a recap that goes beyond a simple list and self-aggrandizement — it would fundamentally misrepresent my rampant self-doubt. Besides, I think it’s helpful to articulate a plan and, when a plan falls apart, how a plan changes mid-draft.

This draft review differs from previous reviews in that the Tout Wars head-to-head points league spawns from an auction draft and not a snake. (A classic auction, each of the 12 teams was allocated $260 to fill 24-man rosters.) Thus, the structure will vary and may be a bit rough around the edges. Still, let’s give this a shot.

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This is FanGraphs which means we’re all predisposed to translating reality into numbers. In our world, every event on a baseball field has a run value, and we can assign credit for these events to specific players. We like things to be tidy. A 3.0 WAR player is better than a 2.5 WAR. It’s right there in the numbers.

Except… well… per Dave Cameron, WAR comes with a +/- of about 1.0 over a full season. These are estimates. When comparing a three-win player with a 2.5-win player, it more accurate to say that there’s something like a 60 to 80 percent chance that the three-win player was better. The math is even fuzzier when comparing players of different positions. Especially pitchers and non-pitchers. And let’s not get started on who will be better. Ooh boy.

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