Ottoneu Rankings Season – What do you want to see?
With arbitration behind us, trade season upon us, and cut decisions looming, it is rankings season for your favorite team of Ottoneu writers. The last couple of seasons, you have gotten tiered rankings for Ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues both from Jake Mailhot and from me. We’ve focused on FanGraphs Points because it is the most popular Ottoneu format, and because the combination of our rankings and 5×5 rankings from other writers are enough to create a decent set of rankings for 4×4, 5×5 and SABR Points Ottoneu leagues. But you know what we haven’t done? Asked you what you want?
My initial thought for this off-season was that I should present rankings for all four scoring formats – FanGraphs Points (FGPTs), SABR Points (SABR), 4×4, and 5×5. But the reality is there are actually at least six formats:
- Season-long FGPTs
- Season-long SABR
- Season-long 4×4
- Season-long 5×5
- H2H FGPTs
- H2H SABR
Why did I say “at least” six? Because you can play 4×4 or 5×5 for the “regular season” with a H2H points-based playoffs in September. Because the H2H leagues can use a games-started-per-week cap or can have unlimited starts but only two SP slots. Because the H2H games-started-per-week cap can vary by league. All of those things can impact player values.
Now, I am not going to offer to create tiered rankings for dozens of different combinations of settings, but there are a few different things I could do.
- Stick to FGPTs tiered rankings, with comments on every player, as I have done in the past. This likely means you get two sets of rankings (mine and Jake’s) for the same format.
- Do the same tiered rankings but for a different format (likely 4×4), with the same player comments. This would give you my rankings for 4×4 and Jake could still do FGPTs.
- Cover all four scoring formats with individual rankings, though likely without the depth of individual player comments (simply due to how time-consuming that process is and how much my wife and kids still prefer to see me).
- Cover the six formats listed above with their own rankings, again without the individual player comments.
If I do #1 or #2, I would try to write an article outlining what I would do differently for the other formats, so you can adjust on your own. If I do #3, I could talk about how H2H differs, as well.
I am also working on something on the FanGraphs Auction Calculator, which would help you think through creating your own values based on projections available at FanGraphs.
I am also open to feedback that the tiered rankings aren’t that useful and something entirely different would be better. But let’s use this comments section (or you can ping me on Bluesky or anywhere else you know to find me) and let me know what would be most useful.
A long-time fantasy baseball veteran and one of the creators of ottoneu, Chad Young's writes for RotoGraphs and PitcherList, and can be heard on the ottobot podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @chadyoung.
I think one thing that might be nice, in addition to the tiered rankings for the upcoming year would be an additional ranking of prospects, or players who we anticipate may not contribute or will contribute only minimally in the coming season. We know that the standard strategy would value most of these players at a fairly low dollar amount, and so the ranking can appear somewhat flat, but I’d love to have a top 25 or top 50 of how you all would rank them for this format. Would take into account proximity, floor, ceiling, context, etc. Just an idea!