ottoneu Bidding on Rusney Castillo
This article is not really about Rusney Castillo. It’s about you. Well, if you play ottoneu, it is about you.
See, ottoneu does not allow you to bid on Cuban players, college players, etc., until they are signed by an MLB organization. And Rusney Castillo just hit that milestone, leading to a flurry of auctions. And more than 400 teams placed bids on the newest Boston Red Sox outfielder.
Let’s start with the results:
| 4×4 | 5×5 | FG Pts | SABR Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg Salary | 14.62 | 14.33 | 14 | 13.73 |
| High Salary | 24 | 26 | 33 | 31 |
| Low Salary | 3 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
To those of you on Twitter who I told not to bid more than a couple bucks (and noted that I would not spend more than $1), well, you probably didn’t win Castillo.
Across formats, there was wide-spread agreement on his value, based on salary data. All four formats have him pegged around $14, while his high and low prices are in tight ranges. This surprises me. Castillo, should he prove valuable in fantasy, will likely do it with his legs and a bit of pop. Low average with 5-10 HR and 15-20 SB perhaps? You may disagree with the specifics, but it seems to me his value should be much higher in 5×5, where those steals really carry weight, and much lower in 4×4 where the steals have no value and the low AVG hurts in OBP and SLG.
But where the Castillo bidding gets most interesting is before the final numbers.
As of August 25, 403 teams had bid a total of $4753 on Castillo, averaging $11.79 per bid. The range, though, was huge. Only two teams bothered to bid $1, clearly realizing that he’d never go for that price. 28 more teams bid $2 or $3.
At the high end, one team bid $80 (think about that…) and another bid $67 (too bad they were not in the same league). The next highest bid was $45, and two teams put in that bid. Three teams bid $40.
The most popular bid was $10 (51 teams made that bid), while 36 teams bid $5, 34 bid $12, and 31 bid $4. Which means that more teams bid $4 than $1-$3 combined.
There are a few things I see at play here:
First, 61 teams bid $20 or more, and I find it hard to believe there are 61 teams out there that see this guy as a $22+ player next year. Many of those teams, I imagine, wanted to make sure that Castillo was back in the auction next year, or at least guarantee that none of their league-mates got a steal on the Cuban.
Second, I think we can take a bit of a lesson here on what to expect for future players like Castillo. What does “like Castillo” mean? In this case, it has less to do with his potential production and more to do with his being very close to MLB-ready (we think) and with projections of his performance being very unclear.
From my perspective, I didn’t bid on Castillo in any of my leagues. I wouldn’t have bid more than $1-$2, if I did, and I would have only done it to trade him (or cut him) in the off-season, though there is some option value in having him on my roster. If you bid on Castillo and lost him to someone bidding $20 plus (and many of you did), I would happily let that other owner take on what is now a very over-priced asset.
And for those of you who paid good money for Castillo, if you read this, I’d love to know what your plans are for the off-season.
A long-time fantasy baseball veteran and one of the creators of ottoneu, Chad Young's is the Managing Editor for RotoGraphs, and can be heard on the Keep or Kut Podcast. You can follow him on Bluesky @chadyoung.bsky.social.
A wild-ass guess: The team bidding $80 on Castillo is completely out of contention. Bids $80 to be 100% certain that he is totally overvalued, then will immediately cut him in the offseason and he will go back into the draft when everyone has more information.
You alluded to this yourself, but it’s just a straight hedge against someone getting him for virtually nothing and then him turning into Jose Abreu (even though we know this won’t happen).
Everyone fell asleep in my Otto draft this year, and a guy got Abreu for $1 after everyone was out of money. Just because of that, he has a massive competitive advantage over everyone else in the league for several years.
Bidding a lot on Castillo has virtually no risk. If somehow he lives up to a $30 valuation at the end of this year, that’s awesome and you now have a good asset. If, as is likely, he doesn’t, you cut him. I don’t know game theory very well, but it only takes one person with budget space pursuing this strategy to cause this to happen, so I assume it is probably fairly likely this happens in many leagues. If nobody else bids higher, you get him for cheap anyway.
Plus at this point in the season, many teams are flushed with cash after dropping injured dead weight. The prices would have been much less if this was in may
I am the other $1 bidder. I am in first place and generally bid $1 on even remotely significant players unless I actually want them, in which case I bid more. Strangely enough, the $67 was also in my league, he took over for a team that had missed the draft and basically gave up, so he had north of $150 of cap room to spend and Castillo is more or less the only player available worth any kind of money, so he wanted to make sure he got him. He ended up getting him for $31 (FG Points League).
not really. Because the highest bidder gets a player at autcion for $1 more than the next highest bid it’s a fairly common strategy to bid an outlandishly high number to guarantee you get the player.
I’m one of the $1 bidders! I started the auction for him in my 5×5 league for the sole purpose of making sure that one of my competitors would be tying up cash and a roster spot on him. He ended up going for $11, which was less than I thought he would go for, but still more than I think he’s worth, and it’s a price point that makes it reasonable to think my competitor keeps him, thus reducing his buying power by one roster spot and $13 for next year (with maybe even another dollar or two tacked on in arbitration). Essentially the same as the old “nominate someone expensive you don’t really want” strategy many people employ at the beginning of an auction draft.
I got him for $14 in my 5×5 league, so I’m average. I don’t really understand the author’s bold stance of paying no more than a buck or two for Castillo – like those who paid the market average are a bunch of suckers. This is a guy with a floor of 20 SB and 5-10 HR, playing most everyday in a stacked Boston lineup next year. No one knows his ceiling, but paying $16 next year for solid production and a lot of upside is not unreasonable in the competitive Ottoneu league that I play in.
Really we know as little about his ceiling as we do his floor. I’m not sure you can pencil him in for 20SB and 5-10HR just yet.
He may be very good. He may be very bad. His Cuban stats don’t translate particularly well, but we don’t how his skills will translate at the game’s highest level. There’s plenty of upside and a healthy portion of risk. I wouldn’t count on either just yet. For owners who can afford it, the gamble is an attractive one. But we really don’t know his floor.
And to pencil him in today for 600 ABs in Boston OF for next year is a mistake too. They already have a too many OFs. They may may room for him, but he also could spend half the year in AAA
I got him for $13 in my FGP league (FPAmateurs), and I plan to keep him next year unless he for some reason draws a lot of arbitration dollars. My bid was $15, so I was not willing to risk tying up a ton of money. My thought process was that I have plenty of cap room for this year and few needs, so I have the dollars to spare. I am in first place with a reasonably secure margin (certainly not a sure thing but I am comfortable without adding any big ticket players at this point) And although he is essentially a lottery ticket, I expect his speed to stabilize his value to a degree.
Having wasted more than $15 each on Nick Swisher, Brandon Belt and Big Time Timmy Jim this year, I do not consider $15 to be a ridiculous gamble on Castillo next year.
Belt was looking like a good investment until injury, at least. I feel like Swish and Timmy both just faced skill erosion
I was one of the guys who got him for $4, it’s a pretty low risk for the reward.
Castillo went for about $14 in Ottoneu 5×5 leagues.
There were two players last year who, according to value estimations, produced close to $14 of value with a similar projected skill set:
2013 Denard Span: (610 PAs) 4 HRs, 75 runs, 47 RBI, 20 SB, .279 avg = $13.37
2013 Michael Bourn: (525 PAs) 6 HRs, 75 runs, 50 RBI, 23 SB, .263 avg = $13.42
Those are roughly the benchmarks Castillo owners need in order to break even.
What’s the real upside here? Excluding some unpredictable outlier of a breakout performance, here is what I see as best case scenario for Castillo:
2013 Brett Gardner: (539PAs) 8 HRs, 81 runs, 52 RBI, 24 SB, .273avg. = $19.12
Boston is not an easy place to play in — and it won’t get any easier with the Sox tanking this year. Here we have a player adjusting to life in a new country, facing major league pitching for the first time, playing in a competitive division and doing so for a team clearly in win-now mode. There are too many outfielders on the roster. It would be a miracle if he hits Gardner’s numbers.
Even if that miracle occurs, it’s all for what? A $5 profit?
All players are risks, but some are riskier than others. I get the whole Cuban fascination thing, but there are two Dayan Viciedos out there for every Jose Abreu. Castillo can outperform expectations, but so can every other player in the pool.
Even with all that can go wrong, I can still see Castillo hitting Michael Bourn’s line from last year and that’s even optimistic considering the adjustments he’ll have to make. For a projected $13 player with a ton of risk, a $7-11 bid seems fine to me. Except in leagues projected to have few real speed threats available in FA, any more (or less) than that is foolish.
I got him for $7 in a 5×5 ottoneau. I’m quite happy with that price as I can’t really see him underachieving at that investment. Not to mention I took over my team that was abandoned during the draft and so I have and abundance of cap space and a roster of relative nobodies. I’m hoping he’s an Austin Jackson type going forward, (at least what we all thought Jackson would be) and if so I think its money well spent. If not… no big loss on my part.