Ottoneu Power Rankings: April 2017

Starting in July of 2015 I began posting monthly power rankings for ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues, taking up the mantle of work previously done by Nate Emmerson (who was gracious enough to share his process and python scripts with me). I’m posting this a little later than I meant to, but with April in the books, it’s time for the first edition of the 2017 power rankings for all four ottoneu scoring formats.

The first ranking I’m going to present shows the top individual teams in all FanGraphs points leagues based on their Pace, which is a metric I calculate by taking each team’s current Pts/G and Pts/IP and multiplying them by their projected games (max of 1,944) and innings (max of 1,500).

First, a couple observations regarding macro scoring trends. FanGraphs points teams averaged 5.09 Pts/G (up from 5.04 in April ’16) but averaged just 4.85 Pts/IP (down from 5.19 in April ’16). The slight increase in offense is more than offset by the significant decline in pitching, leading to lower overall scoring. Last year at this time three teams were on pace for 21,000+ points, and eight were on pace for 20,500+, this year just two teams are on pace for 20,500 and none for 21,000.

Exactly one team on this top ten list is a repeat from the final 2016 rankings, and that is the 10th place Spa City Thoroughbreds, who also finished last season 10th overall. Based on my back of the envelope math it looks like approximately 20% of teams to appear on the April 2016 power rankings also appeared on the final 2016 rankings, so expect most of these teams to drop off through the summer as player performances begin to stabilize.

Before I show the league power rankings, I want to paste in the description I posted in May 2016 when I changed the way I calculated the rankings:

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.

Note- there are a whopping 1,640 teams across 137 FGPts leagues, making it by far the most popular ottoneu format.

Four of the leagues in the top ten this month also appeared in the final 2016 league rankings: A Small Sample , UZR Friendly, MVP Baseball 2005, and Brinksmanship (last year’s #1 league).

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

None of these teams are carry overs from the final 2016 rankings.

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

Note- There are 204 teams and 17 leagues in the SABR points format.
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.

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

Note- there are 540 teams and 45 leagues in the 5×5 format

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

And the rankings for the top 4×4 leagues:

Note- there are 240 teams and 20 leagues in the 4×4 format

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