Ottoneu and The Impact of Negative Point Performances

NOTE: The stats for this article were pulled on August 18th. Everything in this article reflects that date.

We’ve all done it. Leaving players in your lineup in unfavorable matchups is something that happens for many reasons. Maybe you had to choose between player A and leaving that spot on your roster empty for the day. “Scared money don’t make money!” you screamed as you clicked Joey Gallo into your lineup. But then, Joey Gallo went 0 for 4 and subtracted four points from your hard-earned point totals on the season.

If you’ve had Gallo hanging out on your roster all season long, he has tagged your team for negative points 39 separate times, bringing your team down by a total of 95 points. Now, if you’ve had Gallo on your team all season long, you should be considering changing that. His season-long points-per-game mark currently sits at 3.82, lower than what most would consider rosterable. But what if all of Gallo’s negative point games were taken away as if they never happened? He would technically be a 9.23 P/G player. That’s wild. Too wild. It would never happen. You would be more than a fantasy baseball player if you could predict every bad game and sit a player on those days. But, is there some edge that can be gained from this in a more practical way? Let’s find out.

A hitter can negatively impact your team by recording at-bats without a hit or a walk or a hit-by-pitch. They can also get caught stealing:

So who are the players that don’t look great from a P/G perspective or a total points perspective because they so often have negative point games? Or, perhaps, another way to look at it is, who are the really good players who could be even better with less negative point games? Well, here are the top 10 negative points scorers this season with what their P/G mark would be (Adjusted P/G) had they never recorded negative point games:

Note: In order to keep the P/G mark a little more realistic, I’m going to keep the game totals but zero out the negative games. 

Some of these players are actually excellent Ottoneu points league players despite their knack for dipping below zero with regularity. No one is questioning rostering Bobby Witt Jr. or this year’s version of Nick Castellanos. The table above attempts to forgive these players for all their negative impacts on our teams by replacing negative values with zero. The table tells us two important things. First, these players need to be managed more strictly than others. Javier Báez is over a P/G better when adjusted and that is the reason he is rostered in over a third of all FanGraphs points leagues while still showcasing such low regular/real P/G marks. Fantasy managers just can’t set him and forget him.  Second, the table shows us that a player like Luis García can score both a lot of positive and negative points.

Let’s now attempt an experiment that will help us see if paying that much attention can actually be beneficial to our teams. We’ll use Teoscar Hernández as our subject. You’ll never be able to sit Hernández for every good game and bench him for every bad game. But, what if you could get it right 20% of the time? When I randomly strip out 20% of Hernández’s negative point games, I get the following:

Total Points: 545.6, Games: 112, P/G: 4.87

That’s good. He’s worth about .4 more P/G and a little over 20 more points. But, we’ve also lost the 20% of his negative point games and left the roster spot empty in this situation. We benched him for seven games, 20% of the 35 negative-point games. However, this still assumes that we were totally accurate in choosing the right games to bench. To make this a little more realistic, I’ll also bench a random 10% (8 games) of his positive games (75 total). Here’s a more realistic view of Hernández under those conditions:

Total Points: 474.3, Games: 104, P/G: 4.56

Sadly, we’re worse off with this version of Hernández than if we had just kept him fully in our lineup. Keen observers will notice that we’ve taken 15 games away from our team. Maybe, just maybe, if we bring in a replacement for those 15 games we could do better than a full-time Hernández. You may argue with me about whether or not Adam Frazier is a replacement-level player. That’s fine. But he’s my guy and I’m the one writing the article so nah-nah-nah-nah-boo-boo. The cool part is Frazier actually played in 12 of the games that we benched Hernández for and we’ll just have to be ok with the missing three. Here’s our new version of Hernández. I’ll call him Fraz-nández:

Total Points: 505.1, Games: 119, P/G: 4.24

Dang. The 30.8 points that Adam Frazier scored while Hernández rode the pine did not help us get above the mark that Hernández made on his own, negative points and all. Fraz-nández isn’t cutting it.

Sadly this little experiment has exhausted itself and I’m sitting here wondering why I even started it in the first place. Maybe it sparked some ideas. Maybe it made you realize that you should probably do a better job of managing some of your players. But, maybe you’ll also give benching some of these players a try. And yet, the question of whose negative point games are most predictable does enter into the minds of real gamers and that may just be my next task. Finding out what is most predictive of an individual player scoring negative points could really turn this analysis into strategy. Stay tuned.

Here’s the list of players 11-20 who, like the table above, score a lot of negative points and should be managed with extra precaution: