More Early Ottoneu Auction Prices

It’s officially ottoneu auction season, and with it comes the auction preparation process. I’m in more ottoneu leagues than I can count on two hands, so I’ve developed a sort of system to help me get ready for my auctions. Part of that system is the ottoneu surplus calculator to get a league wide view of teams and keepers, another part is manually creating dollar values using projections, but the final piece of that system is collecting actual auction results to get a sense of how the market of ottoneu owners is valuing players. I’d rather not spend $12 on a player I think is worth $15 if I know I can get a similar player for $10, so having average auction price data is akin to using draft ADP to decide when to wait on (or reach for) a certain player. Let’s take a look at the ten best hitter “bargains” and “reaches”.

Key:
Rankings– Average value from our ottoneu FGPts hitter rankings

wAVGSal– A weighted average of auction prices for five first year FGPts leagues, with more recent auctions weighted higher

Delta– Difference between Rankings and wAVGSal, a positive number indicates a player was a bargain in completed auctions

I already highlighted Holliday, Alvarez, and Travis in my prior post. This list is littered with older veterans (Holliday/Bautista/Walker/Choo/Granderson) and players with playing time questions (Alvarez/Travis/Kang/Pearce). Ottoneu may be a keeper setup, but it functions more like a redraft league than a true dynasty, and sometimes the best way to compete is to acquire bargains on short term assets. Bautista is especially interesting to me, as it is rare to see a projected top 20 hitter going at a discount.

These are the names liable to make ottoneu owner hearts flutter, and it’s certainly reflected in the early auction results. I love Andrew Benintendi as much as the next guy, but you need to put an awful lot of faith on his ability to avoid early struggles to pay him like a top 15 OF. Likewise with Dahl, a player I like a fair bit less than Benintendi.

Russell might be the one player on this list I would be most likely to pay close to the going rate for, given my Cubs fandom, the premium position, and the fact that he just turned 23 with two seasons in the majors under his belt. Even that is probably a half truth, given how value focused I am during auctions.

Buxton and Moncada are/were the top prospects in baseball, so I can understand the speculative bids for both given the massive upside. Polanco and Ramirez are both players that the projections don’t really buy into 100%, but both outperformed those same pessimistic projections last season.

Finally, Cespedes offers an interesting contrast to Jose Bautista. Both players are being auctioned at a similar range ($25-$29), but our rankings have Bautista worth $11 more than Cespedes, and in only one of the five first year auctions did Jose cost more than Yoenis.