Redraft leagues are the gateway drug of fantasy baseball. Like other gateway drugs, you could totally stop playing at any time. If you wanted to. You don’t, but you could, and that’s an important thing to know. Once you join a competitive keeper or dynasty league, you’re well and truly hooked. Maybe you can go cold turkey. Maybe…but why? Read the rest of this entry »

The growing game of Ottoneu has a ton of great features that set the fantasy platform apart from the masses, but few are more unique than the annual arbitration process.  Now concluded across all leagues, arbitration (a 30 day process) unofficially launches what is a very busy off-season for Ottoneu owners.

As a quick reminder, Ottoneu arbitration enables each league owner to “correct” the market value of players whose salaries appear too low.  It’s an economic counter-balance to traditional dynasty rules that often let owners dominate a league for years if they amass the right players at the right prices.  Here is the actual arbitration rule:

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With 2016 leagues in the books, I’d like to present some league-wide season-ending stats to see what kind of conclusions we can draw about success in the very data-driven game of Ottoneu.  The focus here is one of the more popular scoring formats, FanGraphs Points (FGPTS), and the numbers you see in each of the first two charts represent the average standings data for all teams/all leagues by final 2016 finish.

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Well, it wouldn’t be much fun if the ball just rolled to the wall every time the pitcher threw it, so obviously the game needs a catcher, even if robot umps take over. But my impression of trying to draft stud catchers from year to year is that it’s folly.

Maybe because the position is so demanding defensively, my impression of their ability to hit is somewhere between ‘American League pitcher’ and ‘Defensive Replacement’. The numbers say that catchers debut later, but even that finding is muddied by late-career backup catcher debuts. Aging for catchers seems about the same, and finding value in a catcher is easy even if they hit 13% worse than league average as a group this year, worse than any other position players — you still need to fill the position, so even an okay batter should be valuable.

Still… am I crazy? It seems that catchers are more volatile, year to year, and I just want to shop in the bargain bin for the most part. Let’s jump in and see if I am loony tunes.

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The fantasy baseball season has closed, but the game of Ottoneu continues long into the off-season (one of the hallmarks of its year-round appeal).  Following Justin’s take on what happened with some of the best teams in Ottoneu this year, I’ll focus today on how one team mastered this game, presenting you with an interview from the of the 2016 Ottoneu Champions League winner, Brent Daily.

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We’ve done a good thing for those of you that still care about fantasy baseball right now. The Auction Calculator now has 2016 stats as an option so that you can look backwards at what has just happened. That’s going to be part of our effort, on the way to the end of the year, to look at last year to learn more for next year.

This is an important part of fantasy that usually gets ignored. Not only does the league itself change year to year, so retrospection is important in that way, but we can learn things about fantasy itself that will improve our ability to value players going forward.

The fourth-best player in the game last year, by this list, has already inspired a possible change to the auction calculator going forward. Let’s see what else it jars loose.

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I will continue to help define how to value a prospect for fantasy purposes. Last week, I examined how major league position players’ production lines up with the standard scouting grades. Today, I go the other way and look at how graded prospects perform in the majors.

I believe I am making this study about two years too soon. I would love for there to be more MLB information after the player received his grades and his 4-5 year production. I don’t have that luxury right now. I feel any answer I come up with will be a nice anchoring point but will need to be adjusted later.

To do this study, I took the grades given by Baseball America (2011 to 2014) and MLB.com (2013 to 2014). With each of these players, I looked at those who had 300 plate appearances in their career. With this fairly encompassing group, I would only able to match of 118 seasons. In some of these cases, the same player was compared. For example, both BA and MLB had their own 2013 grades for Xander Boegaerts. Like I said, a person can shoot about 20 different holes in this study, but I am just working with what I have been given so far.

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The 2016 season was a banner year for the longball and not just in relation to the recent downturn in offense. The 5610 hit this year are the second-most ever. Ever. Per plate appearance, it was even more than the 2000 season that saw 5692 homers hit. Within that surge, we saw an all-time high in 20+ home run hitters with 111. The previous high was set in 1999 at 103. Prior to this year, the top 14 seasons for 20+ HR hitters were all set between 1996 and 2009. Adding the 20+ HR hitters from 2014 and 2015 barely eclipses this year’s total (121 to 111) and this year’s output is nearly 2x higher than last year’s (64 to 111).

Let’s take a look at how this year’s home run surge broke down by position, with catcher and first base, second base and shortstop Friday (forgot I had my chat on Thursday), and then third base and outfield early next week. We’ll focus on the 20+ HR hitters at each position and identify some players who could enter those ranks next year.

CATCHER

Backstop saw one of the bigger surges in 20+ HR hitters compared to recent years with eight this year after just 10 in 2014-15 combined, including a whopping four last year (all who did it again this year).

Evan Gattis (32), Yasmani Grandal (27), Jonathan Lucroy (24), Wilson Ramos (22), Salvador Perez (22), Gary Sanchez (20), Russell Martin (20), and Brian McCann (20).

Gattis, Martin, McCann, and Perez were the four who also achieved the feat in 2015 as well. Notice the consensus #1 catcher, Buster Posey, didn’t make the list as he hit just 14 homers this year. He could find his way back in there next year, but it’s no sure bet with just one 20+ HR season over his last four (22 in ’14).

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Joe Camp won his league, probably because he reads us and listens to our podcasts here, I dunno, but that’s my guess, totally not because he’s an Associate Professor of electrical engineering. Anyway, he won his league, and his leaguemates started chirping about a couple trades he made that year that may have appeared lopsided at the time — my personal opinion is that vetoes suck, and are a dampener on league activity, and we should all be active and talking to each other as much as possible, so if you were on it, you would have made that lopsided trade first — and so Mr. Camp set out to prove he would have won the league anyway.

The way he did it? He took the worst team in the league and replaced everyone on the team with the best free agent pickups of the year. He then compared that team with everyone’s originally drafted teams. The free agents easily won — 96 points to 87 for the best drafted team.

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A week ago, I was able to hold on a win to win my first Tout Wars league. The extremely gratifying experience was the culmination of too many years of managing fantasy baseball teams. From the early auction to the results coming down to a Christian Yelich at bat, the season was great. I am not going to talk about the team in detail because no one wants to hear about someone else’s fantasy team. Instead, I will stay away from the details and go over some of the keys to winning the league.

Know and exploit the rules

This idea is hard to implement in leagues which have the same set of rules for years, but in new leagues with unique rules, this is the biggest key to winning. Since it was my first year in Tout Wars, I was added to the lower/experimental league. Tout Wars has four other leagues, AL-only, NL-only, mixed-draft, and mixed auction. If any rule is being considered for any of the other four leagues, like moving from batting average (AVG) to on-base percentage (OBP), it is done first in this league. The league got hit straight on with new rules this year with net steals, net Saves, K/9 vs strikeouts, and a head-to-head format (detailed in a previous Rotographs articles).

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