Examining Ottoneu Championship Rosters

Niv Shah, creator of ottoneu, was kind enough to provide me with the end of season rosters for every ottoneu league/team, and I’ve been playing with the data on and off for the last week. For today’s post, I’m going to start simply and look at some of the players most often owned by ottoneu champions, the players most drafted by champions in first year leagues, and some of the average finishes by player in those first year leagues.

Up first, a look at the players most owned by teams that won their leagues, as of the end of the season:

To be clear, these counts represents players that ended up on championship rosters, and I’m making no distinction between players that may have been kept, won at auction, traded for, or picked up in 48 hour auctions. That means that some players are over represented on this list (like the SP and RP, which were likely popular trade targets), while others are under represented (Aaron Judge was likely traded away mid season by a handful of championship teams to acquire more win now pieces- he ended up on only 21 championship rosters, just barely in the top 50).

This list is pretty well dominated by pitchers, with seven SP and six RP in the top 21 most owned players, which is hardly a surprise given the landscape this past season. Stephen Strasburg was easily #1, with his 35 roster appearances amounting to 26% of all title teams.

It’s one thing to know how often players ended up on winning teams, but wouldn’t be more interesting to know how often players were drafted by champions? I think so, but unfortunately I don’t have keeper/auction data for all 130+ FanGraphs points leagues, but what I do have is the auction data for every first year league in 2017 (30 in all), so let’s take a look at that now:

Most Drafted By 1st year champs

Aaron Judge is probably the most notable name on this list, if only due to his absence from the first. It makes sense that teams that drafted the players who most outperformed their draft capital would do well, and most of the names on this list fit that mold (Judge, Ozuna, Bellinger, Wood, Sale, and Severino especially). There still seem to be more RP than I would have expected, and Matt Holliday jumps out as a player that really had a poor season and was surprising to find on this list. I wonder if that has less to do with Holliday himself, and more to do with the correlation between the types of owners drafting Holliday and how they built the rest of their team.

Next, let’s take a look at the average finish for every team that drafted a given player in a first year league, starting with the players with the best average finish (note, only players drafted in at least 50% of leagues):

In theory, the players who were the best value at auction (relative to auction price and final value) should have lower average finishes, as those players give their teams an advantage in a game where every owner is constrained by a $400 budget. If that’s true, then the implicit surplus that top prospect Victor Robles held was worth more than any other player in first year auctions. As a comparison, other top prospects didn’t fare nearly as well (Yoan Moncada $11.6/8.03 average finish, Gleyber Torres $4.6/7.33 average finish, Amed Rosario $2.8/6.58 average finish, and Rafael Devers $2.2/6.15 average finish, and Eloy Jimenez $2.1/6.12 average finish), so the success of teams that drafted Robles probably has less to do with his prospect value and more to do with his low auction cost.

Brett Cecil sticks out to me like a sore thumb as he was a $0 RP per my 2017 FGPts values, but again just like Matt Holliday on the last list I wonder if his placement has more to do with the types of owners that chose to draft Cecil.

Last, and in this case least, let’s look at the players with the worst average finish:

When you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.