Jake’s Ottoneu Drip in Review

The theme of this offseason for the Ottoneu wing of RotoGraphs is self-reflection and accountability. I’ve already gone through some of the lessons I learned from the big mistakes I made this year and reviewed my bold predictions. Last week, Chad Young reviewed his weekly Hot/Cold Right Now column to see if the advice he was giving throughout the season was useful and actionable.

Following in Chad’s footsteps, I’d like to review my semi-regular Ottoneu Drip articles. The goal of this column is to identify under-rostered pitchers who might be able to help your team in both the short- and long-term. By its very nature — limiting analysis to pitchers owned less than 60% across all Ottoneu leagues — the hit rate on my advice is pretty low. These pitchers aren’t rostered for good reasons. Still, I was able to uncover a handful of very valuable pitchers who produced excellently over the long-term and there were a few more short-term wins that could have helped throughout the season.

I wrote eight Ottoneu Drip articles during the season with a bonus article written for the final weekend of the season that I opted not to include in my analysis. I identified 64 pitchers in these articles — 54 of them unique — and I graded my advice along the same 1–5 scale that Chad used in his Hot/Cold review:

1. Bad advice, this pitcher was bad over the short- and long-term.
2. Didn’t work out, but there might have been some short-term value there.
3. Neutral, there might have been some short-term value or the possibility of long-term value if you squint.
4. Good advice that had some strong long-term value or extended short-term value.
5. Solidly good advice that had excellent long-term value.

Here’s what I found:

• My average score was 2.53. If you ignore the article posted after the first weekend of the regular season on April 1, the average is slightly boosted to 2.70.
• That April 1 article was a disaster. All eight of the pitchers were busts; the average rest-of-season FIP in that group was 4.85 and the average rest-of-season P/IP was a ghastly 2.91. Two of pitchers identified in that article — JP Sears and Mitchell Parker — returned some slight short-term value over the next few weeks but they eventually turned into pumpkins. I guess the lesson there is to not jump to any conclusions based on a single start and wait for a bit of a bigger sample before making any recommendations.
• It shouldn’t surprise, then, to see that my average score from June through August was 2.74, half a point higher than it was in April and May. Making recommendations with a larger body of work to reference is a lot easier than taking a shot in the dark.
• There was one outlier article in April posted on the 16th. In that piece, I identified Tyler Mahle, Matthew Liberatore, Randy Rodríguez, Phil Maton, and Gabe Speier as pitchers with plenty of short- and long-term value. Mahle and Liberatore eventually succumbed to injury and fatigue, respectively, but they were solid pitchers for most of the spring and early summer. Rodríguez was one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this year but Tommy John surgery will keep him from providing any value next year unfortunately.
• I had a lot more success identifying relief pitchers (3.0 average score) than starting pitchers (2.3). Along with the trio above, I also called out Will Vest, Brendon Little, Garrett Whitlock, Louis Varland, Reid Detmers, and Seranthony Domínguez as helpful relievers before they were snatched off the waiver wire. My most successful starting pitcher recommendations included Trevor Rogers, Ryne Nelson, Ian Seymour, Chad Patrick, Quinn Priester, Mike Burrows, Mahle, and Liberatore.
• If you had somehow managed to follow every single one of my recommendations, you would have added 3.28 P/IP over the following 30 days after the article was published. And you would have added 3.46 P/IP over the rest of the season.

I have no idea what any of these results mean in context. That amount of analysis will have to come next year with this year as a baseline. I do think I need to be a bit more careful about recommending players so early in the season. It’s easy to take one strong start with some interesting velocity readings and assume the pitcher is about to breakout — I’m looking at you Jordan Hicks. I also think I need to follow Chad’s lead and evaluate fewer players more deeply. A deeper dive into some of these early season picks would have likely revealed that nothing under the hood had really changed.

What’s your feedback? Is this column useful? Is my 60% rostered threshold too low (or too high)? Any changes you’d like to see?