Early Ottoneu Prestige League Analysis

We are less than a month into the season, meaning we have yet to hit the first Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL) cut. But it’s time to do your roster analysis, as Thursday will be the last day to start auctions in time to add players to your second-round roster – if you survive the first cut.

I have been analyzing my two OPL rosters by looking at how often I leave a spot open in my lineup and what positions are most likely to end up benched. It turns out one of my teams has a clear issue at middle infield, while the other needs to replace lost 3B depth.

But, at a broader level, I was curious to see if any strategic roster decisions were paying dividends for teams near the top of the standings. To do this, I created a table that showed the average number of players at each position for multiple cohorts of teams.

OPL Cohort Roster Construction Data
Position C 1B 2B SS MI 3B OF Total Pos SP RP Total Arms
Overall Avg 1.96 5.22 4.81 3.77 6.54 3.98 10.22 36.50 9.65 6.39 16.04
Top 10 1.50 5.90 4.90 4.10 6.80 4.10 11.00 38.30 11.90 4.70 16.60
Top 32 1.84 5.97 5.44 4.00 7.25 4.38 10.94 39.81 11.09 5.66 16.75
Top 100 1.90 5.66 5.11 3.86 6.96 4.34 10.83 38.66 10.15 6.37 16.52
Top 170 1.96 5.40 5.03 3.81 6.77 4.16 10.64 37.76 10.02 6.43 16.45
1st Quartile 1.85 5.68 5.15 3.88 7.07 4.27 10.95 38.85 10.40 6.20 16.60
2nd Quartile 2.05 5.28 4.83 3.87 6.63 4.22 10.60 37.48 9.72 6.52 16.23
3rd Quartile 1.93 5.38 5.03 3.60 6.55 3.92 10.17 36.58 9.62 6.55 16.17
4th Quartile 2.00 4.52 4.23 3.72 5.92 3.53 9.17 33.08 8.85 6.30 15.15

Some quick context: First, I manually removed all players I considered stashes – guys who were either hurt prior to the season or who managers would have assumed would be in the minors through this window. For example, I kept two prospects (George Kirby and George Valera) on one of my rosters, while plenty of managers held Ronald Acuña Jr. or Jacob Degrom despite knowing they would not help. Second, I allowed players to count at multiple spots. Trevor Story shows up on this chart as a 2B, a SS and a MI. Daulton Varsho is a C and an OF. That is why you’ll see teams with almost 40 bats and more than a dozen arms. Third, I assigned every pitcher to be a SP or a RP based on what I suspected managers intended when they kept them, so there is no overlap there.

A couple of things stand out from this. As we learned last year, there isn’t much need for more than two catches and one may be plenty. Sure enough, this year the top ten teams are evenly split 1 vs. 2 catchers, while the rest of the pool is more likely to have more than one catcher.

Second, as we also learned last year, while you can easily roster 10+ RP without wasting innings, adding more than four RP didn’t necessarily return value. Last year, in the second round, out of 170 teams, just one team carried four relievers and just 41 carried six or fewer. This year, in the first round, 31 teams carried four or fewer and three teams didn’t carry a single reliever. And this act of taking a low-reliever strategy to the extreme seems to have paid off. As of when I pulled this data, two of those three teams were first and second overall. The teams with three or fewer relievers averaged 2,483 points through April 25; the rest of the teams averaged 2,364.

This doesn’t suggest there is a massive advantage to ditching all your relievers – in fact, the team in third place had nine relievers on their roster – but it does seem that an extra reliever is rarely more useful than an extra player at another spot.

Looking at the bottom quartile, they mostly stand out for having fewer offensive positions overall. Those teams have two challenges. One is that they stashed more players.

Quartile Breakdown of Stashes
Quartile Prospects Injuries Total Stashes
Top Quartile 1.37 1.08 2.45
2nd Quartile 1.62 1.35 2.97
3rd Quartile 2.12 1.58 3.70
Bottom Quartile 3.95 1.97 5.92

Remember, these are not players who were hurt after the season started or surprisingly sent down – these are players any manager should have assumed they would not have during the first round. These were strategic tradeoffs made by teams to set themselves up for the future, to hedge for their home league, or for some other reason. The lesson here seems to be that 2-3 stashed won’t hurt you too badly, but much more than that is an issue.

I also suspect that as OPL advances, teams will be more ruthless about dropping or trading stashed players, which will make the “penalty” for carrying each stashed player higher relative to the rest of the field.

The second problem the bottom quartile had is fewer multiple position players. Even if we add back the stashed players, this quartile still has a gap to the total number of bats in the first table. And remember that stashes can be pitchers, too. The reason teams in the top quartile can have 39.03 bats and 16.60 arms is because I am effectively measuring positions covered, not players.

You can also see that at MI – the top 32 teams have 2.19 dual-eligible MI per roster; the population as a whole is at 2.04.

This doesn’t change a ton for me from where I was pre-season. I will be less precious about my RP if there is a more useful piece out there, happily going down below the four I was targeting for April. But I’ll also be okay keeping myself at five relievers if it is better for the team outside OPL – in April I was not comfortable with that.

I was also debating adding a third catcher to one or both of my teams, but I definitely won’t be doing that.

And I am exploring a couple trades to add 2B/SS-eligible players and scouring the waivers to other multi-position guys. Some players less than 50% rostered who could be worth looking at for OPL: 2B/3B Sheldon Neuse; 2B/3B Santiago Espinal; 3B/OF Brian Anderson; 2B/SS Jose Iglesias; 1B/2B/3B Matt Duffy.

Anything that jumps out at you? Or anything we should be diving deep into?





A long-time fantasy baseball veteran and one of the creators of ottoneu, Chad Young's writes for RotoGraphs and PitcherList, and can be heard on the ottobot podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @chadyoung.

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dudleymember
1 year ago

as OPL strategy evolves, will it be harder to both compete in your regular league as well as the prestige league?