OPL Roster Builds in Year Six

This year marks the sixth edition of the Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL), a competition that pits 240 teams from across the entire Ottoneu universe in a best-ball contest for ultimate glory, exciting prizes, a one-of-a-kind t-shirt (the image above is the 2025 t-shirt art), and a fancy bat. Modeled loosely off the UEFA Champions League and other league-spanning competitions in the soccer world, OPL is open to any team that finished in the top half of their league the prior season. Like it’s counterparts in the soccer world, it forces teams to fight on two fronts. You are playing both your regular league and competing in OPL with the same roster, but different competitors and different rules.

The result is a unique roster building challenge. While your standard Ottoneu league will require you to set a lineup each day, OPL is best ball – your top scorer at each position, including up to two starting pitchers and five relievers, each day score points; everyone else doesn’t. Way back in year one, I dug into the data to look at how to build an offense and a pitching staff that could compete in OPL. With round two of the 2026 edition underway, I decided to look back at round one and re-evaluate what I found in 2021.

Changing Roster Shapes

I started by looking at the shape of rosters in 2026 vs. what I found in 2021. The visual below shows eight graphs – one for each position (C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, SP, RP). On each graph, the X-axis is the number of players at that position on a roster and the Y-axis is the percent of teams that carried that number of players at that position. And then each graph has four lines: one each representing 2026 round 1A, 2026 round 1B, 2026 round 2, and 2021 round 2. For example, if you look at the green line on the first chart, it shows that in 2021 OPL round 2, just over 60% of teams carried two catchers.

Before we dive in further, we need to address one major OPL rule change since 2021 that impacts these comparisons. In the current version of OPL, teams are capped at 40 players. Ottoneu teams in general have 40-man rosters, but that is a soft cap as players who are suspended or on the 60-day IL do not count against roster limits. In 2021, a team’s OPL roster was their full roster. Because of the structure of OPL (rosters lock at the start of each round), if your roster included players on the 60-day IL at the time rosters locked, those players would count on your roster if they were activated during the round. This loophole allowed teams to have rosters as large as 55 players in round 2 of the 2021 OPL. That could, in theory, skew the comparison between 2021 and 2026, but the impact was pretty small.

In 2021 Round 2, the average roster had 40.6 players. The median roster had 40, as only 79 of the 170 teams were taking advantage of the old structure. While one team did have 55 players, no one else had more than 44 and only 10 teams had more than 42. For our purposes, we can do this analysis without regard to that quirk.

Pitching

Now, looking at this, you can pretty quickly see how OPL roster construction has evolved over the years. The most obvious shifts are on the bottom row: starters and relievers. In 2021 Round 2, the 170 surviving teams were most likely to carry about 10 starters and about eight relievers; very few carried more than 12 starters and almost no one carried fewer than four relievers.

Fast forward half a decade, and things have shifted quite a bit. These days, 12 starting pitchers is closer to standard, rather than the max, while carrying eight relievers – let alone 10 or 12 – is far less common. Nearly 10% of teams in 2021 round 2 – teams that survived the first cut! – had seven or eight starting pitchers. That was down to 4% in Round 2 of 2026.

How did we get here? Well, back in 2021, Jason Mycoff and I did independent research (though I was inspired by/built off what he did) that found that you didn’t hit diminishing returns on starting pitching until you had at least 11. Jason landed on 11 as a reasonable target, I suggested 11-12, but we both noted that you could go even further. I suspect that analysis moved the needle, as did increasing awareness of the cost of injuries and the need to fill out those games started.

Relievers, meanwhile, are a bit of an odd duck here. Jason and I both found that you could carry a dozen or more relievers and still get value for them – but that the overall impact on your team isn’t huge once you get beyond four. Yes, each extra reliever appeared to be incremental, since the odds of having more than five RP score points on the same day is low, but the loss of depth at other spots cancels out some of that gain.

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said we could ignore the 60-day IL loophole? Pitchers are where that breaks down. Pitchers go on the 60-day IL more often than hitters and their returns are often fairly predictable. The team with 55 players was also the team with 17 relievers, and I suspect (though can’t prove without going through 2021 transaction logs, and I am not going to do that) this team was carrying a lot of injured pitchers.

One other note on pitchers: you can see that the teams that survived to Round 2 in 2026 were more likely to carry more starters than those that didn’t. I wouldn’t read too much into this. The scale is small and it may be an effect (teams that survived added 1-2 SP and therefore carry more than they did in round 1) or a cause (teams that carried more SP in round 1 were more likely to survive) but that requires a different analysis.

Catcher, Second Base, and Third Base

Yes, this is a weird trio to combine. They have very little in common. But on the graphs above, you can see very little has changed since 2021. That doesn’t mean that nothing has changed.

At catcher, the share of teams at two catchers exactly has decreased a bit and there is slightly more willingness to carry just one catcher in 2026 than there was in 2021.

At second base, the two lines from the two second rounds match each other very nicely, suggesting second base roster construction hasn’t change much. One interesting note is that there is a bump on the two second round lines at six players that doesn’t exist on the two first round lines. Again, it is hard to draw conclusions from this, but – along with the final note on pitchers above – this is going to push me into more analysis in a different article.

For the hot corner, four is still the “target” number for teams, it seems, but in 2021 there was more of a willingness to “miss high” by carrying five or more third basemen; this year teams are more balanced. In 2021, teams were more likely to carry a fifth third basemen (21.8%) than to only carry three (10.6%). This year, even if we limit ourselves to the second round, so we are comparing apples-to-apples, teams are just as likely to carry that fifth (20.0%) as they were five years ago, but are more than 2x as likely to stop at three (21.2%).

I believe that is a result of third base simply being a less valuable position. The lack of a corner infield spot means that a fifth third basemen is competing with your extra outfielders and first basemen (and even a second catcher or extra middle infielder) for your utility spot. In 2021, league-wide, third basemen had a .320 wOBA. In 2025 that was .307 and it is down to .306 this year. Outfield was .321 in 2021, .314 last year and .317 this year. First base also decreased from 2021 (.339) to 2025 (.327) but it is up this year (.343). The result of all of that is that there are likely fewer 3B worth rostering and less of a reason to think your excess 3B will score points for you.

First Base, Shortstop, and Outfield

These are the positions where we have seen the biggest swings on offense. First and outfield have both shifted down. Teams are far less likely to 11+ OF today (40.8% in round 1a, 42.1% in round 1b, and 43.5% in round 2 of 2026) than they were in round two of 2021 (56.5%). At first base, the shift isn’t as drastic, as the most common 1B depth chart is still 5-6 in round 2, but in round 1, the lines peak at four. There is also clearly more willingness to risk very few 1B, as carrying just 1-3 1B was much less likely back in 2021. Even if we limit ourselves to just the second round, you can see that 2026 round 2 has an extended plateau from 3-6 first basemen. This could be a reaction to the positional wOBA data I cited for third base.

But it is also notable that teams are carrying more shortstops, typically 4-5 rather than 3-4, with far more willingness to carry 6-8. This could be a reaction to a similar (but opposite) shift in production that may be driving teams away from third basemen, but that shift doesn’t show up in league-wide data. In 2021, shortstops put up a .318 wOBA; that was down to .315 last year and .311 this year. You can look at it by wRC+ and see a similar set of patterns:

Catcher has moved around, as has 1B, but the biggest change is definitely the drop off in 3B. Managers moving away from rostering more to instead roster more shortstops and more pitchers makes sense, given that context.

The decrease at OF is perhaps the most interesting change, as it neither matches a shift in league-wide offense (OF was and is about league average) nor does it reflect what Jason and I found in 2021. We both found that adding outfielders – particularly outfielders who are also eligible at other positions – is a productive way to add points.

Conclusion

Honestly, there isn’t a ton to take from this in terms of actionable next steps. My next step is to look at scoring patterns in the first two rounds, as we get closer to the start of round three. I want to look at how problematic it is to stash prospects or injured players, how many “positions” you need to roster (so, for example, if a guy is 2B/SS/3B, he counts as three), and re-evaluate how many players you need, minimum, at each position. Any other questions you would like me to answer?