Ottoneu: How To Use The Board and Your League Free Agents to ID Top Prospects

Building for the future in Ottoneu leagues is both exciting and disheartening at the same time. On one hand, you’ve admitted defeat, and you’ve decided that there is no possible way you will climb the ranks to even a respectable, third-place, finish. On the other hand, you get to shed salary, auction young exciting players, and reimagine what your team could be in a few years. So, where do you start? The most logical way is to find a ranking list of prospects and start searching on your Ottoneu players page for the top players to see if they’re available. You’ll probably find that they are not, that the best prospects have been gobbled up by your league mates. So, how do you find good, available prospects in your league without clicking and searching forever? Follow these easy steps to simplify your process.

Step 1: Decide whether or not you actually want to do this.

I should first point out that rostering young stars who have not yet debuted can be risky, but you probably already knew that. I’ve written in the past about how rostering minor leaguers at anything more than $1 is almost always not a good idea. Don’t get too overexcited when you find a prospect available who you really like. Just click “Auction” (automatically bidding $1) and hope no one else is in rebuild mode.

Step 2: Download two CSV files.

Prospect Ranks

You’ll need to head over to the FanGraphs prospect ranking page and download “The Board!” You can alter it however you like, but I kept the default settings and clicked “Export Data”.

Your League’s Free Agents

Next, you’ll go to your Ottoneu “Players” tab at the top of your league page and find the link that looks like this:

“Searching for free agents? Try out the FanGraphs Free Agent Leaderboard”

and click the link. Alter the page slightly by clicking from “Major Leagues” to “Minor Leagues”. Next, select the level you want to target using the “League” drop-down menu. It may be too much data to select “All Leagues” and you may get an error. I recommend isolating down to “AAA – All Leagues” as these are the most seasoned, ready-to-play in the big leagues type of players and I don’t want to wait three years before I can start plugging players into my lineups. Perhaps you don’t mind waiting longer and would like to target AA players. Lastly, make sure the season is correct (2023) and that you are only targeting free agents by choosing “Free Agents” in the “Fantasy Team” drop-down menu. Click “Export Data”.

Step 3: Merge the CSV files.

Now we have two files that we need to merge together. The common column between the two files that you should use is the “PlayerID” column. The way you want to merge the files together is up to you. You can:

(1) use Excel

LINK:https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/merge-multiple-csv-files-excel/

(2) use VLOOKUP and Mac Numbers

LINK:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aISGWDPdDXo&t=31s

(3) use Python

#Bring in your two datasets and subset the columns
board=pd.read_csv('theboard.csv')[['Top 100', 'Org Rk', 'Name', 'Org', 'Pos', 'Current Level', 'ETA', 'FV','Risk', 'Trend', 'Age', 'PlayerId']]
freeagents=pd.read_csv('freeagents.csv')[['Name', 'FPTS', 'playerid']]

#Merge the columns and return only those players available as free agents and ranked on “The Board!”
df=pd.merge(board, freeagents, left_on='PlayerId', right_on='playerid', how='inner')
df.loc[(df['Top 100'].notna())].sort_values(by='Top 100')

NOTE: This is the hardest part and will take some time to learn how to merge CSV files together. But, learning how to do this is probably the single most important thing you can do to be a better fantasy player as it will allow you to combine datasets from all over the place.

Step 4: Take stock of who’s available and start those auctions!

Now that we have merged our tables together we should have a list of all the available AAA players who are also ranked by “The Board!” Since I used an “inner” join in my Python code in addition to isolating down to those with a ranking, I am given a short list of players with the most value. From here, I can head to my Ottoneu player page and start auctioning off the players I like. I can even bring in the “Report” column from the board and read about each player before I decide who I want to auction. I also like to see the ETA and Risk factors associated with these players as it will help me decide who is the best to target for my situation.

Conclusion:
This process allows you to make more informed minor league pick-ups in your Ottoneu league. You don’t necessarily need to be in “re-build” mode to take advantage of it. I have leagues where I’m still (somewhat) competitive, not interested in a full deconstruct of my roster but need to add a few pieces that may be trade-able assets later on down the road. Good luck!