Finding Ottoneu Bats using P/GS vs. P/G

In a points format with a games cap, like Ottoneu, you win by a) scoring the most points per game and b) making sure to use up all your games. That’s an oversimplification but it is also fairly accurate. And so while I often used stats like wOBA as a proxy for player value in Ottoneu points league, at the end of the day, their value is best reflected in their points/game (P/G).

Kind of. P/G misses one key element and it can help you find underappreciated bats to add to your roster.

What is misses is that it treats all games as equal and they aren’t. Some games a player starts and gets 4 or more PA. Some games he comes in as a PH and gets 1 PA. If that player puts up 1.25 points per PA, they will get 5 points (on average) in the games they start and 1.25 in the games where they are a PH. The former is a pretty good score, usable at every position and solid at most. The latter is just plain bad.

As a result, if you are an active manager, you are either tracking lineups to bench guys who aren’t starting or you are using the Ottoneu auto-bench feature (pictured below). This is key because of the games-played cap. If you leave players in your lineup when they come in as a PH (or a defensive replacement or a pinch runner), over time those are going to add up to wasted games – doing that once a week over the season will cost you something like 100 points.

The problem is when you look at a player in Ottoneu and see their P/G, you get those two types of games merged. Here’s an example. Let’s say you are in league 32, like I am, and need a MI. You pull up the top free agent MI on Ottoneu and sort by P/G.

These guys don’t look great. Only two players over 5 P/G and one is not playing baseball anytime soon and the other barely plays at all. Then you have an injured guy having a down year and other than Junior Caminero, it just isn’t that exciting.

But in the middle of that list is Willi Castro at 4.11 P/G. That isn’t good. You do not want that in your lineup. But Castro appeared in 124 games this year, while only starting 92. And in those 92 games he started, he put up 5.27 P/G. That isn’t MVP-level production, but if you need an extra MI you can happily plug into your lineup when he is starting, that is pretty great.

Castro isn’t alone. Across all of baseball this year, players were worth about 0.4 more P/G as a starter than is shown in their overall line. Castro does, however, stand out a bit. He is one of four players who were under 4.25 P/G overall but over 5.0 P/G when they started, along with Connor Joe (5.17 vs. 4.06), Freddy Fermin (4.09 vs. 5.02), and Ryan O’Hearn (5.05 vs. 4.25). And there are a total of 30 players whose P/GS is both >5.00 and more than 0.5 points better than their P/G.

 

A few names worth calling out:

• Wilyer Abreu was getting some prospect hype when called up and his unimpressive P/G may dampen that over the off-season. You want to buy what he will do rather than what he has already done, but some managers will be turned off by what he has done, and they shouldn’t.
• The catcher position looks a lot deeper when viewed through this lens. Guys like Bo Naylor, Luis Campusano, Freddy Fermin, Gary Sánchez, Ryan Jeffers, Yainer Diaz, and Riley Adams all deserve a second look when you are thinking about this position in 2024.
• The Twins use platoons heavily and go to the bench often (third most PH PA in MLB), and that is probably bringing down the overall numbers for Edouard Julien, Max Kepler, Alex Kiriloff, and Matt Wallner. All of them are guys I will be higher on than most for 2024.
• Will Benson and Luke Raley are two platoon OF (among a few on this list) who stand out to me as deserving more attention than I expect them to get this off-season. Raley cooled as the year went on and Benson just seems to have flown under the radar, but both performed better than it looks on the surface.