Ottoneu: Offensive Points Per Game Tiers 2023

It’s important to know what a good points per-game mark is and what kind of price points are attached. In this post, I’ve taken all offensive players and isolated down to those who played in more than 75 games in 2023, an arbitrary cut-off. Then, I placed them in decile groups according to their points per game marks in 2023, creating tier groups. Each decile contains 32 or 33 players. I chose to only present the top six deciles, bringing the player totals to 196. That doesn’t necessarily cover a full league of rostered offensive players, but it gets close. Here’s a look at the spread of tiers one, two, and three:

Tier one shows us the largest spread due to outliers like Ronald Acuña Jr.‘s 9.11 P/G season, Corey Seager’s 8.31 P/G season, and the Dodgers combo Mookie Betts (8.14 P/G) and Freddie Freeman (8.1 P/G). Those were the four offensive players who held P/G marks above eight in 2023. The crazy part is that there’s no qualifier involved beyond the 75-game cutoff, meaning, the best players in 2023 stuck around and accumulated their way to the top. Each of these top of tier-one players played in at least 119 games. The spread of games across these top three tiers doesn’t differ much. However, the average price certainly does:

Average Games Played and Cost by Tier:
Tier 1: 138 G, $29
Tier 2: 141 G, $18
Tier 3: 129 G, $10

These prices are specific to my league but still give a good sense of what a top-tier player should cost. Once we get into Tier two, the price goes down and we’re left with very good everyday players who aren’t going 70-40, but are still contributing daily. Tier three is where I’d like to live. Here are max, min, and median players by P/G within each tier:

Let’s move on to tiers four, five, and six, where a tight four to five points per game range is the norm:

Now, we get down to the player pool where the really tough decisions get made. Does the player have more to give? Or, will they forever be a tier six player who you swap between bench and starting position? Are they likely to fall out of tier six and drop down into the dungeons of lower tiers? These are the questions that we’ll be asking ourselves all off-season as we click them back and forth between “cut” and “keep” on our “Roster Organizer” tab:

This analysis does not take into consideration the players who showed up for 75 games or less and crushed. Players like Davis Schneider, Royce Lewis, Evan Carter, and Zack Gelof are omitted from the box plots above. However, a big takeaway for me is how similar players in tiers four, five, and six are from a points-per-game standpoint.

Having a solid handle on what a good points per game mark is for full-season players is important and hopefully, it will give you some benchmarks for your offseason decisions. Next week, I’ll take a look at the distribution of position eligibility across tiers to get a sense of how valuable, for example, a tier one shortstop is over a tier four shortstop. See you then.