Late Season Bidding in Ottoneu

By the time the calendar flips to September, the game has changed in Ottoneu. Head-to-head leagues have entered the playoffs. Season-long leagues have standings split between those still competing (whether for a title, for a prize or for Ottoneu Prestige League eligibility) and those whose 2025 is now just prelude to 2026. By now, managers are even more aggressively going after titles or focusing on the future, and that has a real impact on auction bidding.

Over the last week or so, I have seen a few auctions take place with surprising, confusing or otherwise interesting results, and that has me thinking about bidding strategies for different scenarios. Even just looking at one league – the FanGraphs Staff league – can be instructive.

The Pitchers I Need

Innings are at a premium late in the season. Whether you are trying to max out innings in a points league, chase categories in a roto league, or fill out a H2H rotation, you are balancing pitchers being shut down, pitchers being prepped for the post-season, or pitchers emerging late in the year. As a result, we see bidding like this, where three teams bid double digits for Trey Yesavage, including bids of $31 and $20, resulting in a $21 Yesavage.

Now, Yesavage looks fun. He looks like he could be a valuable pitcher for a while. He also has an unclear role today. Is he going to stay in the rotation after this weekend? Will he be used out of the pen in October? But pitching starved teams needing innings just need innings and Yesavage looks like he might provide high quality innings.

The $31 bid in that auction came from Eno Sarris and fits the “pitchers I need” model. Eno is in the championship, looking to win his first title in this league to cap off a first-place regular season. He had a $41 Austin Riley burning a hole on his IL and Riley was not so much an expensive 3B as he was a holding spot for $20 in cap space if/when Eno needed it. Yesavage came up, fit a need, and Eno bid-to-win. I am sure he was hoping to get Yesavage at a keepable price, but his $31 bid makes it clear, he was going to do whatever it took to win Yesavage and get his help right now.

And when you are fighting for a title, that is what you have to do – go get the guys who might push you over the top. Proper value ceases to be based on projections, long-term value, etc. and is entirely a question of how much that player means to your title chances right now.

The caveat to that is if you don’t have cap room. If Eno were up against the cap and didn’t have an unhelpful Riley to drop, he would have had to think harder about the cost from a second direction: who do I have to drop and how much will losing that player hurt my team? In this case, that wasn’t an issue.

The Option Value

That same auction featured $20 and $14 bids from teams that are not still competing in the playoffs. So what were they doing going so big on a guy they can’t even use until next year? They bid so high that he was almost assuredly not a keeper for them if they won, so why do it?

I do this quite a bit, actually, and there are three thoughts in mind:

1. Just because I bid $20 (or $14) doesn’t mean there will be other bids over $4 or $5 and ideally I get this player nice and cheap and can hold them for the future.
2. If I get stuck paying $20 (or $14), I now control the player and even though I won’t keep him, I can find out if there is a trade market or at least be assured the player will be back in the player pool for the draft.
3. If I get outbid, at least the winning bid doesn’t have a keeper, and I can again be confident the player will be back in the player pool for the draft.

Again, the only limit on my bid is who I am willing to cut to create cap space.

The Block

In the last few days, the league Commissioner, Robert Sanchez, has bid on an immediately cut two players – Jameson Taillon and Max Kepler. The most common reason for the bid-win-cut is when you are clearing a cap penalty, by re-auctioning a player who you previously cut. But that wasn’t the case here. Kepler was a $1 cap penalty on my team and Taillon had not previously been on Sanchez’s team either. So what was he doing?

This is pure speculation on my part, but I think he was simply throwing up blocks. Sanchez is in the third place matchup, and making even small bids here may have been a way to prevent an opponent from getting these players and using them against him.

That is my speculation because that is something I have done in the past – you know your opponent is trying to find innings, so you make a play for Taillon not because you want him but because your opponent may suffer as a result. This stuff is, to some degree, a zero sum game. Points you take away from your opponent can matter just as much as points you score for yourself.

This may seem H2H-specific but it is not. If you are in a fight for the lead in a roto league or a season-long points league, it is worth taking the time to see what your opponents might be trying to do. Are they behind the innings pace and desperately seeking SP? Are they chasing someone in SB and auction speedsters as a result? If so, you might want to throw up a bid to block them from those players, if you have the cap space to do it.

The Lottery Block

This is something of a unique form of a block bid, kind of a variation on The Option Value. On September 11, a contending team cut a $26 Cole Ragans. He went unclaimed at $26 and someone immediately started an auction for him, with a minimum bid of $13. Seven teams bid, with offers ranging from $18 to $41, with Ragans going for $28.

At first glance, this seems kinda wild. Eleven different teams could have made a waiver claim and guaranteed themselves a $26 Ragans and yet TWO teams bid $27 or more. Why do that? Why not just make the claim?

I am going to speculate again, by trying to explain how I think I could have ended up in this camp. When Ragans was cut, I didn’t make a claim. Ragans is still working back from injury, had not yet made his return to KC, and while I could squint and see a world in which keeping Ragans at $28 next year made sense, I would be eating up a lot of cap space on a guy with some big question marks.

Then the auction started and I placed a $19 bid. There were three factors my co-manager and I considered in setting that bid:

1. What price do we feel good about Ragans next year? We thought $22 was starting to get borderline.
2. What price would I prefer someone else NOT have Ragans? This isn’t something I put a lot of weight on, but it does exist. If I thought $19-$20 was a fair price but didn’t want someone else to get him at $25, maybe I bid $25? That didn’t move the needle for me here.
3. What kind of cap space do we have? We have a decent amount and can create some more, but it’s not unlimited and there is an opportunity cost to burning it all on Ragans.

That third item is important as the team that bid $41 (the aforementioned Sanchez) still has $53 of cap space right now after winning a bunch of auctions including Ragans. That matters because it allows him to bid basically any price without any opportunity cost. A $41 bid on Ragans would have prevented Niv and I from bidding on other expensive players (see: Yordan Alvarez, currently up for auction) but had no meaningful impact on Robert. He can still bid as he sees fit on other players.

So again, why not just make the waiver claim and lock in the price? That’s why I call this a lottery block: claiming at $26 means you get Ragans at $26. Bidding $41 might land you with a $40 Ragans (or a $28 Ragans, as happened) but it’s also a lottery ticket to try to land a $20 Ragans, or maybe even less expensive than that. If Robert thought a $26 Ragans was too pricey, but wanted to control the market, his huge chunk of free cap space gave him the option to effectively guarantee he gets to control Ragans while still having a shot at a nice low price that would make Ragans a keeper.

The Speculative Bid

This is a semi-unique case, but not entirely. Emmanuel Clase had been sitting on the wire in our league since August 13, when an auction was started on September 17. The minimum bid was $8. Two teams matched that minimum bid and no one else participated.

Valuing Clase proved a challenge for Niv and me. There are effectively three paths Clase’s situation can take, as far as I can tell:

1. He never plays MLB again.
2. He gets a hefty suspension but is back at some point next year (or maybe 2027).
3. He is cleared and ready for Opening Day

How much you want to bid is based a bit on how you weight those possibilities, but at some level, that doesn’t matter. The reason is you don’t have to make any permanent decisions until January 31. If you think he is 100% for sure going to be banned, then there is no need to bid. But if you think there is any chance he is back, how high that of a chance he has of a return is secondary to what you think he is worth if he returns.

We landed on a $10 bid, which it turns out would have been enough to win Clase. We decided AGAINST making that bid because of the opportunity cost – $10 Clase means we can’t be in on other expensive free agents who pop up before the end of the season, and we determined he wasn’t the target we wanted to focus on.

But we landed on $10 because, even coming off a down (partial) year, and even though his relatively-low K-rate limits his upside, he is pretty easily a $16+ RP at auction in March if he’s fully cleared and ready to roll.

For us, bidding $10 now, and having the option to keep at $12 in January gave us a reasonable amount of “upside” in exchange for taking the risk. If we had more cap space available, we would have made that bid and been happy to sit on a $9 Clase, waiting for news before we had to make a keep or cut decision in January.

Now, this may seem like a thing that only applies to Clase and Luis L. Ortiz, but it’s also true of injured players. Is Gerrit Cole a free agent in your league? He is supposedly targeting a return in the early part of the 2026 season, but that’s just a target. How willing are you to gamble on him returning to form? How many innings do you expect in 2026? These are, effectively, the same questions I asked about Clase.

With players like this, you first need to decide if you want to pull a Ragans and do the Lottery Block – am I just going to bid the max I can bid and make sure no one else gets him, hope the price is good, and deal if it is not?  If so, go for it. If not, find that price point where you think the upside (the potential surplus you will get if he is back and effective for most of 2026) justifies the risk and cost (not having that cap for someone else today), and make that your target bid.