Lessons in Obsessive-Compulsive Fantasy Management

Entering the 2014 season I knew my fantasy team was setup to succeed.  After all, I had just spent the entire 2013 season tearing it down and building it back up again, so I had the benefit of a full year of preparation, collecting as many assets as I could along the way to ready myself up for another shot at the title.

Unsurprisingly, at least three other teams in my league also appeared to be possible front-runners, so I knew it was going to be a hard fought battle towards the top.  My roster looked great on paper, but what I really needed was an edge, a small but real advantage that would work in my favor and help me outlast some very savvy Ottoneu owners.  So, I decided I would be obsessive about daily roster management…and I built a spreadsheet to help me track my team’s performance (by player) over the course of 180 days of baseball.  If I was going to win a tight race, I would need more than just excellent players.  I needed to know that I was effectively managing those players, too.

I ended up winning the championship in 2014 and owe a ton of credit to the daily roster tool I built to help me track it.  You can view the tool here.  I’m doing the same thing this year, so here are four roster management lessons I’ve learned that might be helpful for anyone playing daily fantasy baseball.

Roster Flexibility Is Essential to Winning

By design, Ottoneu uses 40 man rosters (12 teams), but I actually cycled through 98 unique players over the course of the 2014 season, including 21 different starting pitchers.  The lesson learned here is that I used a lot more players than I expected, and between trades and waiver wire transactions I juggled an unbelievable amount of players on and off my roster throughout the year.  This essentially makes multi-position eligible players like Ben Zobrist, Brad Miller, and Josh Harrison (2014 version) more valuable than I think fantasy owners usually give them credit for pre-season, and has taught me to target these types of players in drafts and auctions more than I normally would have before.  Building a flexible, versatile roster with lots of depth has essentially become my #1 fantasy baseball strategy.

A Great Bullpen Makes a Big Difference

Just a few seasons ago it was pretty clear that relievers were being criminally undervalued in Ottoneu points leagues, so tracking my daily bullpen usage was a big reason behind my decision to track my entire team in 2014.  My hypothesis was simple: even replacement level RP score more points on average per IP than SP, so if was going to gain an edge, I wanted to own the best relievers and throw more IP with my bullpen than any other team.  With just five RP slots, I would need 65 IP from each to get to the common benchmark of 325 bullpen innings.  But what if I could squeeze in a few more IP on off days if I carried some extra RP? What would the impact be?

The plan was a major success.  I maximized my bullpen innings by throwing 375 IP (or 75 IP per RP instead of 65) using 17 different relievers.  More importantly, the high “point per IP” of my bullpen (8.84 P/IP average) helped increase my overall team P/IP by almost 18%.  In other words, the 8.84 P/IP I received from my bullpen over 375 IP helped push my overall P/IP to 6.20 after receiving 5.11 P/IP from my starting pitchers over 1,135 IP.  Lesson: don’t overlook the importance of a maximizing a good (effective) bullpen.

We Usually Overestimate How Effectively We Can Platoon

Platooning players in Ottoneu is a given over a long season since rosters are deep and injuries are almost inevitable, but in general I’d say we tend to overestimate the effectiveness of the platoon strategy in any daily fantasy baseball format. Before tracking my team on a daily basis, I had an naive confidence that platooning just “makes sense” and is pretty straightforward as long as you play LHH vs. RHP, etc. But it’s not always that easy, and players don’t always default to their career splits, averages or tendencies (and sometimes reverse them), so tracking my actual platoon efficiency was pretty eye-opening in 2014 (and has been even more helpful this season).

For example, I deployed a heavy mix and match strategy at 1B in 2014 (used 11 different players), of which Adrian Gonzalez was the biggest part (39 games played).  I used him almost entirely vs. RHP and averaged just 3.89 points per game (P/G), a full season pace of just over 600 points.  For the full season, AGon averaged 5.45 P/G, so clearly I “missed” on this platoon by under-performing what he could have produced had I just left him in my lineup (overall, I averaged just 5.03 P/G at 1B for the season).  Some might call this micro-managing.

The takeaway here is that platoons are necessary and can be very beneficial, but it wasn’t until I actually tracked my sit/start usage that I had a feel for where it can go wrong, too.  This year has been a bit better on offense (averaging 6.0 P/G in 29 games platooning Brandon Crawford vs. RHP has helped offset where I chose incorrectly to start Eugenio Suarez in 15 games at just 2.5 P/G), but I’ve been getting burned badly on various spot start pitching matchups (Hammel, Kennedy, Berrios, De La Rosa).  In other words, I’m still learning this lesson…

Sometimes We Don’t See Our Biggest Weaknesses

Tracking your team over the course of 180 days also helps to reveal your weakest links.  For example, I felt like my catching situation entering 2016 was going to be solid, banking on a rebound from Yan Gomes and a recovered, productive season from Yasmani Grandal.  But even if I was wrong, I felt confident I could piece together a few cheap, slightly above replacement level catchers from the waiver wire to make things work.  Unfortunately, both strategies have failed miserably so far.  Almost two months in, I’m averaging just 2.0 P/G over 56 games combined from Grandal, Gomes, and Iannetta.  That’s about as bad as it gets, but I’m not sure I would have noticed just how bad it has gotten had I not been tracking their production on a detailed, daily basis.  I’ve got to find a solution quickly since I don’t want to lose a close race because I failed to invest in, uncover, or acquire a decent backstop.

Another blind spot: trade results.  When was the last time you really did the math on whether your trade(s) actually helped or hurt your team? Tracking the effectiveness of my trades is something I wanted to improve upon from the 2014 tracking process, and the results so far have been mixed.  I thought I was genius cashing in Miguel Sano a few weeks ago for a package of players that included Anthony Rizzo (yep, I’m still struggling at 1B), but so far the results have been a further drain on my corner infield.  I used Sano 24 times in my lineup  for 6.25 P/G before I moved him, but have so far received Rizzo’s worst 16 game stretch of the year (3.46 P/G). Thankfully I also recently traded myself out of Brian Dozier (4.38 P/G over 25 games) and into Ben Zobrist (9.18 P/G over 13 games), who was invigorated as soon as he landed in my clubhouse. As they say, “timing is everything”, which rings true when evaluating fantasy trades just like it does in almost everything else in life.  Tracking my team on a daily basis has helped this life lesson sink in even more.

Few fantasy owners have the time, interest, or dedication to invest in tracking their team for every game of the MLB season.  No worries, as I’ve gone through the obsessive process for you. Hopefully a few of these lessons can be of value as you search for that small but important edge in your league race.