Ottoneu: Get Your Money Right! Hitter Edition

Now that you’ve gone through the keep or cut process, are you ready to draft? Do you have a big board on your wall with your targets? Do you know how much you’ll pay and how much you won’t? The FanGraphs auction calculator will tell you what a player is worth based on your league and whichever projection system you prefer, but which players do you need to get to fill out your roster? In this post I’ll detail my process for targeting players in an Ottoneu FanGraphs points league re-draft auction.

Let’s start with three big questions to ask yourself prior to setting your draft targets:

1. How much money do you have?

2. Where do you need to spend?

3. How is inflation impacting your league?

The question I ask myself multiple times per day in various scenarios is, how much money do I have? I’ll use one of my leagues as an example and hope that no one in that league knows that I write for FanGraphs. I’m in year number two of a quasi re-build which I won’t detail, but it’s the reason I have $231 to play with in this draft. I came out of cuts with 21 players on my roster.

Roster: 21 of 40
Cap: $169 of $400

I’m going to budget $10 for in-season bidding, giving me $221 for the draft, but you should decide how much you want to stash depending on your roster construction. Before I start thinking of who I want to draft, I need to take a look at who I have and how many points I’m working with already. Since this is a rebuild-like team, I have a number of players already on my bench but they are mostly prospects with limited projected playing time. I’ll break down my targets into starters and bench roles like so:

Needed Starters:
OF – 4
3B – 1

Needed Bench:
OF – 1
3B – 1

With these targets set, I need to see who’s available, and to do so, I’ve spliced a bunch of datasets together to make some informed decisions. First, I downloaded my league’s “FanGraphs Free Agents” csv. You can find this by clicking on the “Players” tab within your league and then looking at the sub-menu that appears. This is helpful but the stats that come along with it are last year’s stats. I want to see these players that are available and what they have to offer in the upcoming season, so I’ll need to download projections and auction calculator results. If you do this yourself, make sure your auction calculator settings are accurate and they match your league, and that your projections download is the same system you set in the auction calculator. Don’t output the auction calculator on the BATX and have a projection file for Steamer, that will confuse things. Here are my three datasets:

-league free agents
-2023 projections (steamer)
-2023 auction calculator values (steamer, FanGraphs points leagues)

From there I merged them together on player name (“Name”) and kept only the columns I care about. But I don’t want to look at an endless spreadsheet, I want the best available players. I sorted my entire dataset by descending projected point totals and I grabbed the first 10 outfield eligible players and the first three third base eligible. Here’s the output:

There’s a lot going on in the table above, so let me break some of it down. First, I included projected points, plate appearances, and games to give the projected points per game column some background information. For example, if I only look at projected points per game I would be targeting an injured Bryce Harper. Second, the difference between Dollars (raw auction calculator outputs) and Adj. Dollars are important. Again, Harper looks like an undraftable player for the 2023 season because his low projected playing time kills his dollar value. However, you would be crazy to think no one else in your league would want him, especially those building for 2024 and beyond. Since I can’t really evaluate his value for this exercise, I gave him a dollar value. Lastly, I increased all my player values by 12% to account for inflation (that’s the reason $1 players become $1.12 or $1.1 rounded) which is a very liberal percentage. Inflation for this league is likely closer to 20%, but I would rather give a lower take on inflation to all of my players at first and then bump up players I think will go higher. Think of my adjusted salary column as an educated starting point.

Note on inflation:
The Ottoneu team at FanGraphs is probably due for a more detailed piece on inflation, but this is all I can offer for now. Check out this post from Justin Vibber from 2018. As always you can utilize the keeper function in the FanGraphs auction calculator to generate dollar values based on the inflation rate of your league.

Yes, the table above is so specific to my league and my standing in that league that you probably don’t care. However, if you replicate this process for yourself there are a number of things to pay attention to. For example, is Ryan McMahon really that much more valuable than D.J. LeMahieu? Well, they both have capital letters in their last names, so that’s worth something. What’s not shown here is that D.J. is actually being adjusted as a second baseman and is given even more points to his value than McMahon. However, from a plate appearance standpoint, McMahon is the better player and that means that if I am targeting a starting third baseman, I should go for McMahon. LeMahieu is an excellent bench target because he bests McMahon on a points-per-game basis. Add that to the fact that D.J. plays all over the place and I want them both on my team. For simplicity’s sake, I’m only showing the best players in this process, but there are plenty of intriguing free agents not shown. For example, take a look at Cody Bellinger:

Just like the McMahon/LeMahieu comparison, Bellinger actually looks like a better option for a starting role with Thompson looking like a decent bench player. Thompson wins out on a points-per-game basis, but Bellinger looks like a better accumulator. His pedigree will make him go for well over $1, but if he’s somewhere under $7 I’ll go for it.

Now that I have this baseline, here are my targets and a scale of what I’m willing to pay:

Needed Starters:
OF – 4
George Springer $35-$38
Byron Buxton $23-$26
Starling Marte $16-$19
Cody Bellinger $3-$6
3B – 1
Ryan McMahon $10-$15
Possible Max Cost: $104

Needed Bench:
OF – 1
Mark Canha $1-$4
3B – 1
D.J. LeMahieu $2-$5
Possible Max Cost: $9

Possible Max Total Cost: $113

If inflation spikes the cost of these players, especially McMahon considering he’s the only third baseman available for a starter role, I can push my max just slightly. Take that $113 from my $221 budget and I’ll have $108 to spend on pitchers. I’ll detail that process using this same method next week. There you go, league mates. You know who I’m targeting and what I want to pay. Let’s see if you’ve been keeping up with your reading. If you’d like more detail on how I merged these three tables together, just reach out in the comments or on Twitter.