How Much Ottoneu Standings Still Change

With just six days left in the regular season, it’s probably too late to make too many moves in your Ottoneu leagues. You can still pick up a bat to fill in some games, maybe grab a starting pitcher or two to help max out your IP, but for the most the die is cast and you are just waiting to see how it turns up.

But how much can the standings really move in the final week? How much ground can be made up?

For head-to-head leagues that are still going on, the answer is “a lot” to both the amount of ground that can be made up and how much standings can move. If you are playing in a head-to-head championship right now, good luck! But this article isn’t for you.

In season-long leagues, what hangs in the balance varies by both format and team, but let’s look at all four scoring formats.

FanGraphs Points or SABR Points

The short answer for points leagues is that it depends on how many games played and innings pitched you and your opposition have left.

Pitching points are easier – take a look at the standings page and you’ll see exactly how many innings each team has used. Anyone over 1500 is done scoring pitching points; anyone under still has time to make up a lot of innings. If you aggressively use the free agent pool, you could probably get 2-3 starters per day the rest of the way, and another 15 starts plus full bullpens is enough to get you 100+ innings (as a reminder, the 1500 IP cap is a soft cap, so you want to plan to blow through that on the right day).

Figuring out how many points you can make up (or lose) from pitching, is as simple as looking at the gap in innings used. If you are in second and trying to chase down first, and you have 1475 innings used and the first place team has 1520, you can probably make up the 25 innings up to the cap, plus another 15-25 blowing through the cap, which gives you anywhere from 125 to 250 points in reserve, depending on how strong your pitching is.

In practice, you will likely put up fewer points per inning in the next six days than you have over the season: first, you’re likely to be heavier on SP than RP – the day you go over the cap you want to have 4-5 SP lined up which will pull down your P/IP. Second, you are going to have to get creative and aggressive to fill in those innings which likely means lower-quality pitchers. But even if you assume just 4 P/IP, you can still get a sense of just how much ground you can make up.

As for offense, this is a little more complicated. If you want to know how many games you and your opposition have left, you can use the Team Production page or Standings page (or lineups pages) to see how many games a team has remaining at each position. To calculate games they can still utilize, you add up the games left under 162 for each spot, except OF where you count games left up to 810 (5 OF spots x 162 games per spot). You also cap each position at six more games (one game per day per spot) except for C (which you cap at two games per day per spot) and OF (which you cap at five games per day per spot).

That would allow you to compare two teams and see, for example, that the team in first has 43 games left while the team in second had 61, an 18-game advantage. You can then assume roughly consistent points per game the rest of the way and get a sense of how much ground the second-place team can make up.

That isn’t exact – if the games used up are at C or MI, the P/G the rest of the way might be higher than it has been; if they are at 1B or Util, the P/G might be lower. But it is close enough.

Here’s a full example from league 670, which is coming down to the wire. As of Thursday night, Pass the Popcorn (PtP) was in first place with 16897.1 points and the Sam Beckett Cricket Club (SBCC) was in second with 16763.8. PtP had thrown 1530 innings, while SBCC was at 1499, waiting for a big splash Friday. With 5 SP lined up and a full bullpen, let’s assume he manages 30 innings at roughly 4.25 P/IP. That would be a pretty strong day for those SP, but a decent fall off the 4.97 P/IP for the season. That would give SBCC an extra 127.5 points that PtP can’t match. Meanwhile, PtP can play 65 more games and SBCC can also play 65, so there is no advantage either way, there. With that in mind, while PtP is up by 133.3, we can assume away 127.5 of that will get eaten up by the extra innings – meaning this will be a photo finish that will come down to how players perform on the field. If either team had a games played advantage, that might be a difference-maker.

4×4 of 5×5

At this point in this season, it’s pretty hard to move any of roto stats, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t strategic decisions you can make to maximize your chances of moving up. It’s more complicated than in points leagues to see where points can be gained or lost, because you have to look at each stat individually – the team in first might have a lot more games played used up than the team in second, but if the team in second isn’t chasing that team in R or HR, it doesn’t matter.

For the counting stats, top 4×4 teams are typically scoring somewhere around 5-6 runs per day, hitting 1.5-1.75 HR per day, and striking out 9 per 9 innings. That suggests that if you are chasing a team (or being chased) in one of those categories, you can get a sense of how much the gap will close (or widen) over the rest of the season by assuming the following:

• Every 12 hitter games a team has left should net them ~5.5 runs
• Every 12 hitter games a team has left should net them ~1.6 home runs
• Every 9 innings a team has left should net them ~9 strikeouts

That gives you a sense of how much things will narrow or widen before accounting for teams outperforming or underperforming expectations. For 5×5, R and HR are about the same, RBI are similar to R, and SB are lower than any of the rest.

As an example of this, in league 1, I am one run behind another team – if I can pass that team, I can gain a crucial point, given that I am in second right now and 1.5 out of first. My team has 68 games of offense left; the team ahead of me has 50. That is enough that simply by filling out my games played, I should be able to add 18 more games than him – or about 8 extra runs. That’s great news! It’s not a point I can assume, as one big day by either of us could easily move the needle in a positive or negative way, but it shows I have a clear path to that point if my team performs.

That said, I am also just six runs behind the team ahead of them, but that team has 70 games left to play. I have no built-in advantage which makes closing that gap a lot harder. If that team puts up their typical 5-6 runs per day, I have to put up closer to 7 runs per day to catch them. Possible, but less likely.

The rate stats are a little harder, as they can move in unexpected ways. First, for hitting, assuming a team has about 65 games left to use up, that is about 3.3% of their season total. How much can you move your SLG or OBP over 3.3% of a season?

 

The answer is a decent amount, but it takes some real effort. If my team manages a .700 slugging the rest of the way, I gain almost .010 in slugging for the season, which would move me from six points in slugging to 12! But that isn’t very realistic. What if we look at a more realistic range:

Not as exciting, and this range is large enough to go below the worst slugging team in my league (.397) and above the best (.433). In a small 6-day window, the range could be wider, but a .450 SLG the rest of the way moves me from six points t0…still six points, unless the team ahead of me struggles. Even the .500 SLG from the table above only gains me one point. What that tells me is that in slugging – and OBP is similar – I can maybe gain a point but it probably takes my team being great or another team being awful or both.

For ERA, WHIP and HR/9, assuming a team has my current numbers and can throw about 50 more innings to end up at 1,525 total, here is what could happen:

For context, those best-case scenarios for ERA and WHIP would gain my team one point and zero points. I am already leading HR/9, but the impact is similar. Where this gets more complicated, of course, is that a pitcher imploding can move these numbers significantly. Imagine a team who has the “as of today” rates in the tables above over 1450 innings and has a pitcher start the next and post this line: 3 IP, 8 ER, 6H, 4BB, 3HR. That is a bad start but it isn’t impossible to imagine. That start moves the team’s season-long ERA up by .0428, WHIP by .0045, and HR/9 by .0169.

What that means is that there are points on the table in ERA, WHIP, and HR/9, but your clearest path to earning them is via another team having a bad day. You just can’t really move those rates down very much anymore, but they can go up.

Use this information to your advantage – go hard after small gains in counting stats, because you will most likely not hurt your rates that badly. If you have been cautious with your offense so far, avoiding big power/low rate players, or base stealers who hit for low average and little power, you might want to shift that strategy. Joey Gallo can only hurt your AVG so much at this point and if you need some HR you might be better off using him when he starts than a better hitter with less power. Similarly, if you have nothing to gain or lose in HR but need SB, maybe you consider using Billy Hamilton. He’s nothing more than a pinch runner, but he is running.

On the other hand, if you can’t make gains in strikeouts, think about whether or not you actually want to go big with your SP. One bad blow up might net you 3-5 strikeouts, but meaningfully hurt your rates. If those K’s don’t matter, don’t take the risk.