Ottoneu Cold Right Now: September 12th, 2023

Much like Hot Right Now, Cold Right Now will be a weekly Ottoneu feature with a focus on players who are being dropped or who maybe should be dropped in Ottoneu leagues. Hot Right Now will focus on players up for auction, players recently added, and players generally performing well. Cold Right Now will have parallel two of those three sections:

1. Roster Cuts: Analysis of players with high cut% changes.
2. Cold Performers: Players with a low P/G or P/IP in recent weeks.

There won’t be a corresponding section to Current Auctions because, well, there is nothing in cuts that correspond to current auctions.

Roster Cuts

JoJo Romero, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 33.01%

While a low LOB% helped push his ERA up to 3.68, Romero looked great during his 36.2 IP with St. Louis this year. Among pitchers with 30+ IP as a reliever, Romero had a top-15 ground ball rate, top-25 IFFB rate, and top-60 K% and BB%. None of that is elite, but it adds up to a really good reliever who established himself as a late-inning arm for the Cards. But with an injured knee that landed him on the IL for most of the rest of the season, he became a roster casualty for a lot of teams, including mine.

That said, I am impressed with what he has done and he is staying on my watchlists. If he comes back, I will try to pick him up again. If not, I might still grab him in the final days of the season – if I can add him now for $1-$2 and he looks likely to be the Cardinal closer in January, he is going to be an easy keep.

Julio Urías, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 32.05%

We covered him last week and there isn’t much more to say. He is under 60% rostered and that should keep going down.

Andrew McCutchen, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 26.60%

Back home in Pittsburgh, Cutch was having a resurgent season, posting 5.24 P/G and making him a very useful OF bat for Ottoneu leagues. Now a partially torn Achilles tendon has ended his season and it is hard to get excited about keeping him, even given how he performed this year. He really wasn’t useful from 2020-2022 and now he has to overcome a pretty serious injury just weeks before he turns 37 years old. That will raise questions of retirement, though at 299 career homers and coming off a solid season, I expect he will sign another one-year deal with the Pirates. And I might check him out for a dollar at the end of auctions.

Luis Severino, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 19.23%

Severino at his best was so, so good, and now you just wonder if we will ever get to see that again. He turns 30 before the start of next season, and his 2023 is now over thanks to an oblique strain. To give you a sense of just how snake-bitten his career has been, Severino’s reaction to the injury included him saying, “I’m happy it’s not going to take a full year or two [to recover],” as reported by Peter Sblendorio of the NY Daily News. It’s not great when your reaction to a season-ending injury is, “well at least this time I didn’t lose NEXT season as well.” He’s an easy cut, given how poorly he was pitching before getting hurt. If you are drafting later in draft season and he has looked good in spring, I could see taking a flyer on him, but the risk is high and the reward is probably not what it once was.

James Paxton, Leagues with a Cut (7 days) – 18.59%

Last week I speculated that he might have just run out of gas and that Red Sox have now shut him down for the year due to right knee inflammation. He’s a bit like Severino, in that he isn’t a guy you can rely on enough to want to keep him, but I am much more interested in him come March, at least based on what we know right now. This doesn’t sound like a serious injury and so there is reason to believe he can be ready for the start of 2024. I again wouldn’t want to count on him for a full season, but could he go more like 100 innings next year? Maybe.

Cold Performers

To measure cold performers this week, I’m looking for players with low P/G or P/IP in the last 14 days.

Brett Baty, -0.33 P/G:

I was a big Baty believer but this year has been ugly and it isn’t getting better. Baty was given a real shot to claim the 3B job early in the season and struggled – much like he did last year before being sent down in August. He was back on September 1, but the performance has only gotten worse. Baty appears to have a power hitter’s plate discipline – decent walks but a lot of strikeouts – but he isn’t punishing the ball enough to make that work. That’s what made things go for him in the minors, and until he finds some real pop, he won’t be playable in the bigs.