Ottoneu May Power Rankings

With another month of the baseball season gone, it’s time once again to present the ottoneu power rankings. Much of the history and methodology of these rankings was explained with last month’s post, so be sure to read that if you haven’t already.

Without further ado, the FanGraphs points league team rankings:

Top 10 FGPTS Teams by Pace
LgNum TeamName Points Pts/G Pts/IP pGP pIp PACE
194 The Murder Boners 7,143.5 5.91 6.53 1,934 1,500 21,224
240 Miguel’s Caballeros 6,795.0 5.94 6.45 1,942 1,498 21,200
207 King Kang 6,912.1 5.90 6.46 1,933 1,500 21,098
430 Britton rYu Crazy Diamond 6,815.7 5.78 6.55 1,944 1,500 21,061
562 Free Agent Fodder 6,939.5 5.87 6.39 1,944 1,500 20,996
184 The Gold Standard 6,979.5 5.85 6.34 1,944 1,500 20,882
198 Blue Suede Schus 6,663.4 5.96 6.75 1,919 1,386 20,790
357 Larry Bernandez 7,082.4 6.38 5.55 1,944 1,500 20,728
40 The Summer of George 6,587.0 6.43 5.63 1,912 1,467 20,551
107 El Festival de Batazos 6,596.9 5.92 6.02 1,944 1,500 20,538

Three teams retain their top 10 ranking from last month, including the reigning #1 team. In addition, ten teams are on pace to eclipse the ottoneu FanGraphs Points league record of 20,530, an increase from the eight that were on pace to do so after April. Offense continues to be up from last year, with a 5.13 Pts/G average across all teams versus 4.92 Pts/G in 2015. Pitching, predictably, is down with a 5.09 Pts/IP average this season against a 5.14 Pts/IP last season. Congratulations to RotoGraph’s own Brad Johnson, whose team in the FanGraphs Staff Two league is ranked #6.

Now for the FanGraphs points league rankings, but first I want to explain a change in methodology I made for this month. Based on some feedback I received, and the very subjective nature of the components and relative weights of the old league rankings method, I’ve decided to simplify things a bit. All league power rankings for all four ottoneu scoring types will follow the same process, and that is a simple average of the individual team rankings for all teams in the league, and then scaling that average against the average league (think of wRC+). I believe that this method better represents what I have been trying to accomplish with the league rankings (identifying which leagues have the greatest collection of team quality), is more consistently applied month to month, and also allows us to compare league quality across different scoring types directly.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

FGPTS League Power Rankings
LgNum LgName AvgRnk Rnk+
347 MVP Baseball 2005 455.9 132.2
649 Brinksmanship 468.2 130.4
195 Wins Above Figgins 482.7 128.2
93 ottobros 488.2 127.4
380 Don’t Be Chi 507.5 124.5
532 A Small Sample 512.0 123.9
530 Ottoneu Champions 539.1 119.8
120 Fourteenth Inning Stretch 549.0 118.4
637 So…Ottographs is a thing? 553.1 117.8
389 >League Name Goes Here< 555.9 117.3

Let’s take a look at the #1 ranked league, MVP Baseball 2005. The twelve teams in that league have an average overall team ranking of 455.9 (there are 1,344 teams), so the league receives a 132.2 Rank+, which is the same as saying the teams in that league are on average 32.2% better than what we expect from a completely average league (672.5 average team rank).

Up next, the SABR league team power rankings. I’m only going to show the top five teams/leagues as there are much fewer SABR leagues than FanGraphs points leagues.

Top 5 SABR Teams by Pace
LgNum TeamName Points P/G P/IP pGP pIP PACE
301 SABRmagician✨ 6,587.1 6.29 5.75 1,944 1,433 20,466
331 Yeah Jeets 6,524.4 6.10 5.57 1,944 1,500 20,213
37 The Naturals 6,390.1 6.06 5.39 1,930 1,500 19,780
412 Surplus or Minus 6,434.9 5.72 5.75 1,944 1,500 19,745
164 BI 720 6,465.1 5.47 5.87 1,943 1,500 19,432

And the top five SABR leagues, using the same method I did for the FanGraphs points leagues:

SABR League Power Rankings
LgNum LgName OvRk Rnk+
25 Super Serious Fantasy Baseball 83.5 127.1
159 Cooperstown – The Jack O’Ryan Memorial League 87.3 123.7
571 Effectively Wild (Dynasty) 95.8 116.3
186 Fantasy By the Book – An OttoNeu Experience 102.2 110.8
164 B. Selig Blue Ribbon Glee Club 106.8 106.8

For context, there are 228 SABR teams, so the average league would have a 144.5 average team rank. One quick note, league 25 actually has only 11 active teams, but even after assigning the empty 12th team a ranking of #228 they still grade out #1.

Up next are the two rotisserie ottoneu formats, starting with the traditional 5×5 leagues. To calculate the top teams, I treated the entire population of teams as one big league, and gave every team points for every category based on where they ranked against every other team.

Top 10 5×5 Teams
LgNum TeamName R HR RBI SB AVG IP WINS SV K WHIP ERA POW
56 Blue Whales 379 112 380 61 0.290 481.2 36 51 456 1.08 2.86 455.2
326 NY Swallows 355 108 368 47 0.269 547.1 44 44 556 1.14 2.94 442.8
101 Beam Me Up, Piscotty 348 106 348 52 0.264 512.0 34 64 522 1.08 2.99 429.2
83 5TOOLERS 331 107 342 38 0.268 495.2 47 40 579 1.06 2.71 417.9
328 The Lollygaggers 340 93 341 46 0.270 552.2 41 43 527 1.12 2.91 416.8
491 Meekrats 332 84 339 56 0.280 477.0 35 68 487 1.06 2.58 413.1
586 Deal It & Duck 379 114 355 48 0.288 476.2 33 61 452 1.20 3.30 412.6
362 Dr. Boom 356 103 337 35 0.293 504.2 37 40 495 1.09 3.19 411.9
87 Wally 31 386 102 374 48 0.293 422.0 28 62 427 1.09 3.05 410.3
326 The Black Sox 356 98 370 39 0.281 513.1 36 39 529 1.16 3.52 403.3

And the 5×5 league rankings based on the same average team ranking method as previously discussed:

5×5 League Power Rankings
LgNum Name OvRk Rnk+
495 Ultimate Foul Balls 200.3 120.6
225 Hard Core Baseball 204.2 119.1
537 Roto style 211.4 116.2
328 Old School Hardball* 213.3 115.5
672 Church of Baseball 214.8 114.9
642 5×5 Champions 215.6 114.6
569 Mark Convoys Pepper Palace 217.5 113.8
678 Dynasty League 220.3 112.7
450 Hughes Your Daddy 221.5 112.2
580 You Gotta Be Bleeping Me! 221.9 112.1

Please note that league #328 has only ten active teams, and teams #11 and #12 were assigned a rank of 500.

Last, but not least, here are the rankings for the top teams in ottoneu 4×4:

Top 5 4×4 Teams
LgNum TeamName R HR OBP SLG IP K HR9 ERA WHIP POW
72 Gas House Gorillas 360 103 0.348 0.481 510.1 605 0.78 3.05 1.04 212.6
1 Last Years Leftovers 341 109 0.350 0.497 509.1 526 0.58 3.23 1.09 212.4
317 Master of the Domain 354 107 0.369 0.530 489.0 497 0.81 3.33 1.15 208.6
16 Cal Rikken 329 110 0.344 0.476 529.0 608 0.80 2.81 1.08 206.0
34 Zeezils 355 100 0.348 0.470 571.1 647 0.84 3.06 1.14 202.4

And the rankings for the top 4×4 leagues:

4×4 League Power Rankings
LgNum Name OvRk Rnk+
123 Wendy Peffercorn Fantasy Baseball League 90.9 120.5
1 original ottoneu 97.6 114.7
645 Surplus or Scrub 98.3 114.0
170 Triple Fantasy 98.8 113.6
366 For Centaurs Only… 98.9 113.5

Feel free to leave any comments or questions about these rankings!





Justin is a life long Cubs fan who has been playing fantasy baseball for 20+ years, and an ottoneu addict since 2012. Follow him on Twitter @justinvibber.

16 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
chrisbMember since 2015
10 years ago

I am in so many of these leagues. My deepest apologies to parity.

sakiehl
10 years ago
Reply to  chrisb

Burger time!

Trey Baughn
10 years ago

Good post, sir. ?

Joe WilkeyMember since 2025
10 years ago

I would be interested to know how the team rankings would change for the points leagues if you adjusted for league quality. I don’t know how that would work, exactly, maybe something like (TeamPace)*(LgRank+)/100 or something like that. If you’re putting up reasonably high point totals in a good league, you’d think that would generally be better than putting up a ton of points in a weak league…

Joe WilkeyMember since 2025
10 years ago
Reply to  Justin Vibber

Sounds great, but only if it doesn’t kick me out of the top 10. 😉

Brad JohnsonMember
10 years ago
Reply to  Joe Wilkey

Ditto. I know it would since one of our teams is tanking. We don’t follow the rule about maintaining a full active roster.

nielsie
10 years ago

I like the spirit behind these rankings, but the pace measure seems flawed. Why would you assume that teams will maintain their current production until the end of the season?

nielsie
10 years ago
Reply to  Justin Vibber

Appreciate the reply. Ok, that’s reasonable. I make the same adjustments to the rankings in my leagues for the same reasons.

It’s just that when you put end of year totals under “pace”, it looks like your projecting forward, as opposed to just making a statement about where things stand right now.

And yes, it would be a nightmare, especially when you factor in how different owners manage platoons, and all the other idiosyncrasies of roster management styles.

joecatzMember since 2024
10 years ago

Justin,

Great work. Is it possible to add a column for salaries? Maybe salary used and cap space?

I think it would be interesting as all hell to see how many of the top teams are close to $400 in salary, and how many have traded for talent. I think the results will surprise tbh.

joecatzMember since 2024
10 years ago

What I find extremely interesting: of the top ten teams in FGP:

2 teams had $132 and $204 of incoming loans (each had at least $10 available)
2 teams had $41 and $44 of incoming loans (very little cash to spend)
1 team had $11 in loans ($3)
4 teams didn’t need to buy a championship or make a loan trade. (Not much cash)
I team was able to get $57 in loans and has $42 to spend.

The real tell for me though was to go look at those leagues in general and see the ridiculous amount of money left out of the player pool at midseason. Just a lot of cash to spend on not a lot of people.

Brad JohnsonMember
10 years ago
Reply to  joecatz

I tried to tell people they’d be stuck with leftover cash (or forced to waste it) when I was shopping Trout, Kershaw, and Goldy over the winter. Everyone thought they’d have a chance to spend.

joecatzMember since 2024
10 years ago
Reply to  Brad Johnson

That’s rare. And I think a big lesson of the surplus discussions

joecatzMember since 2024
10 years ago

also noticing a LOT of vote off leagues for the top teams with 0 trade dollars. Also,

8 OF THE TOP TEN TEAMS OWN CLAYTON KERSHAW.

IN 9 OF THE 10 LEAGUES OF TOP POINT TEAMS, MOOIKE BETTS IS OWNED BETWEEN $7 AND $16, AND HIS HIGHEST PRICE IS $25.