Ottoneu Keeper Deadline Advice
The ottoneu keeper deadline is just a little over a week away. You must have your roster trimmed to shape by Friday, January 31 at 11:59pm ET. Today I’m here to give (mostly reiterate) some advice related to the impending deadline.
Don’t Cut Early
I usually keep all my players right up to minutes before the deadline while I work the phones. In general, I recommend hanging onto all of your players until you’re done trying to make trades. For me, that’s 11:50pm ET on deadline day. If you’re done making moves today, fine. Later is better in my opinion. While I caught some flak for saying so last week, I like to squeeze every opportunity for an advantage.
As near as I can tell, the top reason cited for cutting players early is aesthetics. People like a tidy roster. Meanwhile, it’s possible you’ll cut players somebody else would keep. I wept when I saw a $10 Griffin Canning tossed to the scrap heap the other day. Even better, if you can find a match for an overpriced, soon-to-be-cut vet, you might sabotage an opponent’s budget.
There is a secondary benefit to leaving your roster crammed with the full complement of players – even if you only plan to keep 16. The more untidy your roster, the harder it is for your rivals to easily map your keeper plans. If they think you’re probably keeping a $10 Jesse Winker, they’re more likely to pay a reasonable price for him (assuming Winker is somebody they covet).
If they can easily see you need to cut Winker for wriggle room, then you can expect weaker offers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been met with the old “you’re going to cut him so I’ll just try to pick him up in the draft. Or you can take this pointless tidbit.”
It’s Not Only About Value
At its heart, ottoneu is a value maximization game. Can you use $400 to get $550 of production? If so, you have a good chance of winning. As such, there is a razor sharp focus on finding players who are projected to outperform their contracts. A $15 Juan Soto is a beautiful thing. An $80 Mike Trout is a difficult building block and has minimal trade value relative to his ottoneu-best points per game.
However, there is an important wrinkle to consider – you need enough premium talent to actually reach that $550 ceiling. And the supply of premium guys is limited. If you focus only on value, you’re going to wind up with a $200 keeper roster with $250 of output. At auction and via waivers, you can expect to run a loss on your invested dollars. So you’re spending $400 to get… $415?
If you’re sitting on a lot of extra payroll, it can sometimes pay to trade a sweet nothing or two for top end talent right now. That $80 Trout for example. Or a $50 Kris Bryant. These aren’t surplus value machines, but they will lend a little extra juice to your point total. And if it comes time to throw in the towel during the season, they’ll return attractive keepers.
When you keep inefficient top-end guys, you increase the variance of your outcomes. Spike enough cheap guys in-draft and youĀ can contend. Especially if you convert some $10 talents on $1 contracts into more Trouts and Bryants (with loans) during the season.
Using FGpts as an example, a ho-hum $400 roster will produce around 16,000 to 17,000 points. To win, you must find a path to the 19,000 to 20,000 point range. Trout is more likely to help you get there than four $20 outfielders, but only if you spike several $1 productive players. Thus, there is a lot of pressure to turn straw into gold.
The Draft Is Deadly
Every so often, an ottoneu draft room is a calm sea of values. Usually though, it’s a nightmare where even the most middling players go 20 percent over their projection. Every year, I see people make aggressive cuts on the premise they’ll acquire this and that during the draft. Almost always, other owners have the same plan. Bidding wars ensue.
That $40 Manny Machado is a bitter keeper pill to swallow. However, if your early draft plan is to win him back for $30, you might want to consider keeping or trading for him. Your $30 projection could quickly turn into a $50 winning bid.
This keeper deadline – not the draft – is the easiest time to acquire talent at slightly inflated prices. During the draft, you’ll often pay at least the same price, and you’ll have to compete with a rival or three.
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āWhile I caught some flak for saying so last week, I like to squeeze every opportunity for an advantage.ā
Again, you are completely missing the point of the flak you received. Nobody criticized you for trying to squeeze every opportunity for an advantage as a team owner ā the criticism was for using your status as commissioner to do so.
And I know what you are thinking right now ā ābut I did not do that.ā And the response to that, which you steadfastly refuse to accept despite being told overwhelmingly by tons of fantasy veterans, many of whom are commissioners themselves, is that when you take advantage of confusion as to whether you are acting as a commissioner or an owner, that is exactly what you are doing, especially when you are the one who wrote the rules.
Every once in a while as commissioner you have to forego squeezing advantage out of a situation because your duty to the other owners as commissioner supersedes your ability to squeeze advantage as an owner. If you still do not see that, you have a different morality than almost everyone else, and you need to at least stop blaming your own moral gap on other people just not seeing the genius of your advantage-taking.
How about we talk keeper strategy and avoid turning a fun topic into a sob story.
You literally didn’t offer anything helpful for people interested in getting keeper advice.
Honestly, I *did* forego seeking advantage. I played my third-best hand to start (were I not commish, I would have just cajoled the guy into not using the rule by citing precedence). Then, when a few people threw a fit, I switched to… I don’t know… my worst hand? I would not have agreed to that were I not commissioner. There was always plenty of time to review the options. I did so and chose what was best for the league.
I feel what you are missing is that as commissioner you have to be above reproach in anything related to the rules ā especially if they are the rules you created. You can’t find a “grey area” then think “I will manipulate this to my advantage but only use my third best hand to do so therefore everyone will be good with it”. You have to be 100% clear and open in your actions. This, can often be hard when trying to reconcile against your instincts as a team owner who understandably wants to win at all costs (within your interpretation of the rules you wrote yourself.).
That’s why I explained exactly what I was doing to everybody throughout the process just in case anybody objected. I thought what I proposed was perfectly reasonable and exactly what the rules allowed. Others disagreed so we went with another interpretation.
This was addressed at the end of the first post: “you need to at least stop blaming your own moral gap on other people just not seeing the genius of your advantage-taking.”
I totally agree with everything you said about not cutting players early, there is definitely a lot of advantage/strategy that can be gained by waiting.
That said, I’ve been cutting most of my guys early this year. We have 4 new owners in a league entering its third year, 3 of whom are new to Ottoneu completely. My thinking is that by cutting early it will help the new folks make more informed decisions. I’d really like to not have to replace people every year, and I’m hoping that if the first keeper selection goes well, people will stick around for the long, long, long haul.
I also try “trickle” cutting players as an attempt to keep some activity rolling. It seems to me that transactions tend to come in flurries, likely as a result of thoughts triggered by the initial maneuver.
My dream is a league where all 12 managers are actively trying to out maneuver and extract value from each other year around, without getting offended and quitting.
I’m convinced the way to keep owners around is to have a mini-auction around Memorial Day. That’s a time when some teams are close enough to non-contending but there’s also a lot of drafted players who were clearly overdrafted but good enough so the 30-day lockout window (which to my thinking is more designed to stop streaming) is pretty extreme. Nothing kills ownership like the prospect of their team turning into a multi-year rebuild.
My idea is an auction where a team has to ante up (maybe kick back $40-60 of player costs into FA) to participate. Those teams near the top will be reluctant to upend anything – and if they don’t they can’t participate in the auction either. Those teams near the bottom get to free up cap or reprice players and such. And the auction can take place in an hour or so in the auction room before it reverts back to FAAB. Keeps the FAAB prices more viable – rather than concentrating $1 pickups among only teams that remain active. Makes trades more competitive for a bit longer rather than just turning into salary dumps so early. And may even keep the season competitive a bit longer.
If this is a thing you are currently doing in a league, Iād be very interested in it.
i dont really see the value in not cutting
its obvious to me who is overpaid IE a $15 spot starter guy i grabbed at the end of the year just to get innings, whose avg salary is $3
its obvious to other owners as well, they wont trade for these guys
just cut and be done with it, let your opponents spend the mental nrg on the players you cut.
No doubt there are obvious cases, but I think you’re underestimating how many guys could go either way. On my roster, for example, there 5-6 “obvious” cuts (Leake at $4, for example). But based on league inflation, positional need, traditional lack of deals during the draft, and individual valuation of players, a case could be made to keep 80-90% of the players on my roster. Trout for $86? Rizzo for $50? Khrush for $26? I have my opinions on each of those players within the context of my roster, but others might judge their value completely differently. The opportunity cost of cutting early is that you may cut a player that could have netted you something valuable in return. There is absolutely no opportunity cost to holding all of your players until the deadline.
tl;dr: I error on the side of caution so I’m not the guy that cut potentially valuable trade chips.
In my league, the biggest reason to hold your cards — and wait until near the deadline to drop players — is not to generate trades. Most fellow owners know the relative value of players, so keeping a player in the hope of inducing a trade offer from a rival is a bit like trying to bluff in poker when all your cards are face-up.
It is true that a few less knowledgeable owners might be taken, but my approach has always been not to seek an advantage over a less knowledgeable owner; while I forego the short-term benefit of a favorable trade, I also create a long-term benefit that my fellow owners appreciate my fair dealings, and that appreciation leads to trades in the future or the mutually beneficial variety that help my team more in the long run.
The biggest reason to wait until the deadline to cut players is to
(1) Better assess category and positional shortages when you are making choice among cuts that are otherwise very close.
(2) Better sort out playing time considerations that become more clear as the season approaches (more true when the deadline is closet to opening day).
Yeah I think #2 is the reason most of us would cite as to why you want to cut as late as possible in a keeper league: every day closer you are to the season the better the sense you have of who has a job, who is hurt, who the new closer is, who’s signed and where, which rookies are going to be up in a week, which you’ll have to wait a few months for, etc. It’s the same reason why it’s nice to have the draft as close to Opening Day as possible.
I totally disagree with the draft close to Opening Day. Spring training really is the best time to make trades. Everyone is still competing and all the variance of ‘is this real performance or small sample size’ makes things interesting/fun. Offseason trading is only valuable for keeper stuff. Late season trading is all about team stripping and this year v next year. Good for MLB but not so much for fantasy.
the reason late season trading is better for real MLB than for fantasy is because prospects are far far more valuable in MLB than they can or should be in fantasy.
I can’t even begin to tell you how much I disagree with the “keep everyone until the last possible second” concept. If youre still sitting on a $550++ roster right now trying to convince people you are going to be able to keep everyone,…. It is much easier to move the guys you WANT to move by cutting the guys you CAN’T move and showing a roster that COULD be kept together.
Also, sometimes getting rid of that $45 Kershaw and that $30 Joey Votto nobody wants that you so desperately want to shove off on someone is the best was to clear your mind of focusing on sending crappy blind offers with those guys and turning off the rest of your league.
This is the week to RED PAPERCLIP trades. (google it). the key to the last week of the deadline is to make sure youre not sending key roster pieces that cant be replaced at auction, and filling as many actual starting spots as possible to avoid auction as much as you can,
Perhaps the adjustment is not spend time shoving bad contracts on others. I let people come to me. It’s not a time investment on my end.