Ottoneu: How to Cope With the Crushing Disappointment of a Mid-Level Finish

Writing about fantasy baseball twice per week typically comes with a self-inflicted expectation of actually being good at playing fantasy baseball. I had some “W’s” this season (also known as dubs) and plenty of “L’s”, as the kids like to say, but being right in the middle feels worse. You can be the derelict, the scummy sewer rat who dwells at the deepest depths of the league standings. Or, you can be the king, looking down upon the peasants who hunger and thirst. But, being in the middle? It doesn’t lend itself to much insightful advice or analysis. “Write something actionable!”, I hear in the deepest REM parts of my sleep. Well, here I now hover, attempting to write something of the sort. In four parts, I’ll help you understand your options, if, like me, you are stuck in the metaphorical bathyal zone, swishing your dorsal fin back and forth hoping to make it up a few levels.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Then beat ’em.

How many points per game/points per inning pitched did your team accomplish this season? Here are this year’s place finishers and their P/G and P/IP marks. The data is based on every Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL) eligible team across all non-roto OPL eligible leagues:

Side note: You down with O-P-…L? The Ottoneu Prestige League is a place where Ottonue managers can enroll their teams to, “utilize best-ball FanGraphs points scoring.” Manage your team in your league just as you always would and from there the “platform will determine a team’s most possible total points on a given day given its roster and will set its lineup accordingly.” Find out more here and consider entering your team in 2025.

In the table above, I noticed how the gap between P/G and P/IP changes by place finish. To evaluate this further, I subtracted P/IP from P/G for each team, and then took the average of that differential by place finish:

Teams that finished in first place recorded more P/G than they did P/IP on average. Another way to write that; first place teams gained more points from offense than defense. Furthermore, teams with a larger differential between P/IP and P/G, focused more on pitching than hitting, finished worse. Even still, teams that finished first scored high marks in both hitting and pitching. Balance is key. Evaluating your team’s end-of-season P/IP and P/G marks may give you a sense of where to focus your efforts this offseason. If you’re toiling away with a mid-tier P/G mark but posted a high P/IP mark, you have some data to fuel your trade strategy.

Tear it down. Tear it all down!

This is the most tempting of all the options when you finish nowhere close to the top. Ottoneu makes it easy to start all over again, stripping the room down to the studs. This can be a lot of fun if you have a strong understanding of how to roster prospects, but it can also mean you’ll be toiling in the bottom of the league for years to come while those prospects work their way to the big leagues. Before you run into the locker room like Billy Beane (“Is losing fun?“), consider a few things.

First, assess how many of your players are being rostered above the average and or median salary. A simple way to do this is to click the “Players” tab followed by the “Avg Salaries” tab (to the right), and finally download a .csv/.xml file that you can isolate to your team. Combine this with an assessment of your players’ P/G from 2024 compared to a replacement-level player at each position. Here is an updated version of the positional replacement levels by position with full 2024 season data:

I wrote an article last season detailing how you can calculate your league’s points above replacement measures. For now, just keep in mind that the “League Rosterable (12-team)” column is open to interpretation and finageling. Now that you have these baseline marks, you can create a custom table for your players that looks something like this:

Creating the table above helps me realize Aaron Nola needs to be evaluated this offseason. I’m paying more than the average and he didn’t even return above replacement level marks in 2024. This season’s 4.26 P/IP mark was Nola’s worst since 2015 when he first came to the big leagues and only pitched 77.2 innings. Maybe it’s time to say goodbye?

Become a Trade Bro

A successful trade is much easier to accomplish in the offseason. Once arbitration is over, you can identify players rostered by your competition whose salaries may have gone up, but you still think worth the price. You’ll have to hope your potential trade partner doesn’t think so. In addition, you can look for teams hit hard by arbitration and who will have to cut players to get below the $400 cap. Lastly, try trading away players you think snuck through arbitration unfazed. Just be careful when trading before projections come out, as you won’t have a strong analytical sense of what to expect from a player before then.

Take a Deep Breath

You don’t need to do anything yet. Utilize your “Roster Organizer” tab and play around with different scenarios. Take all your best players, move them down to the “Cut” assignment, and watch your expected salary change. The biggest question to ask when considering cutting all your high-priced talent is, can you get them back for less in a re-draft? Secondly, if you drop all your good players in hopes of starting fresh, will others in your league do the same and add talent to the draft pool? You certainly don’t want to cut good players, miss out on re-drafting them, and then have no good players left to draft from. It’s a cat-and-mouse game that reminds you how important it is to not show your hand to your league mates and cut players prior to the deadline.