Ottoneu: Ryan Mountcastle, Points Above Replacement, and Why You Should Wait Until the Last Minute to Make Your Cuts

I don’t really want to cut Ryan Mountcastle. I think he’s a good first baseman. I’m an Orioles fan so I’m biased. If he got traded I’d be sad, but I would be happy for him. Happy for him? Yes, happy for him. The new dimensions at Oriole Park at Camden Yards have been unkind. Imagine being an aeroplane pilot and showing up to work one day being asked to fly a helicopter. That’s what happened to Ryan Mountcastle. My fellow correspondent Jake Mailhot detailed this well in his Cut Decisions at CI. With the trade season still a stewpan on top of a cold stove, things could change for the big dog. Let’s say he goes to Chicago in return for one, Dylan Cease. Let’s just say. Here are all of Mounty’s Camden Yard flyouts, singles, and doubles, superimposed over Comiskey Paarr…I mean, U.S. Ceell…I mean, Guaranteed Rate Field:

Mounty, we’ll miss ya babe, but you’ll be better off. How many more home runs do you see in the graphic above? I see two. If you take off your readers, you may be able to see more. Add in maybe two or three more doubles and you’re turning 18 2023 home runs into 20 while pumping up a .452 slugging average. If he’s an Oriole, he’s probably a below-replacement level first baseman in Ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues. If he’s a Chicago White Sock, he’s probably slightly above-replacement level. Let’s imagine you are holding onto Ryan Mountcastle and you don’t know:

1. if he’ll stay in Baltimore for 2024 and continue to be hurt by that far-away, nasty wall.
2. how many first-basemen will be available that are better than him going into your re-auction draft?

Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to wait and find out the answers to some of these deep, intense questions? That, my friend, is why you need to wait until January 31st, 11:59 PM.

Points Above Replacement?

Many smart writers have come before me and many of them have written this same type of article. Chad Young did it back in 2013. I hadn’t even begun playing fantasy baseball yet! Google “ottoneu fantasy baseball auction values” and you’ll be brought to a helpful list of resources courtesy of former FanGraphs writer, Trey Baughn. Of course, one of his recommendations is Tanner Bell’s always helpful tutorials on Smart Fantasy Baseball. All of these writers explain how to get to the point where you can calculate your auction values specific to your league and all of them start with some version of “Points Above Replacement” (PAR). Here’s Chad Young’s description:

PAR – Points Above Replacement
On FanGraphs, when we value players, we typically use WAR — Wins Above Replacement — because the value a player provides is not relative to zero, but to the production you would get from a random waiver wire acquisition used to replace that player. The same is true in ottoneu….Rather than look at pure points, I look at how many points a player would earn above a replacement level player that could be picked up for a dollar at any time. The first step to this is finding a “replacement level” for each position….

In an article I wrote back in November, I calculated non-league specific replacement level “Points Per Game” (P/G). It’s likely that the assumptions I made about how many of each position players on each team’s roster were off. Again, Chad Young:

…to do that, you need to know how many players at each position will be owned. Should the replacement level 3B be the 13th 3B? The 15th? The 33rd? Based on an analysis of a handful of leagues, plus a consideration of what set of players will create the most points possible for the league as a whole, I came up with these numbers:

Position	Players
C	35
1B	27
2B	30
SS	32
3B	18
OF	84
SP	108
RP	73
Total	407

This table can fluctuate by league and year, but it is a nice starting point. So, if each team roster holds 40 players and there are 12 teams per league, why isn’t the total 480? As Young points out, there are most certainly under-replacement-level players being rostered in your league in the form of minor-leaguers, prospects, and sleepers. You could certainly edit those numbers to match your league. However, it would take a lot of “nose-to-the-keyboard” type of work to count how many minor leaguers and below-replacement-level players are rostered in your league. Let’s just use Chad’s table, what do you say?

Calculating Points Above Replacement

According to the table above, a typical league will roster 27 players at the 1B position, so now all we need to do is identify who the 28th first baseman is according to total points accumulation in 2024. We’ll use steamer projections and the FanGraphs auction calculator with it’s Ottoneu FanGraphs points league presets to get our total points per player calculation (rPTS). You can download a .csv file of it here. Now, it’s as simple as sorting the file by “rPTS” descending and marking the 28th player on the list. In this case, we have Spencer Steer at 692.3 points. Now, we can create a table that looks like this:

Now, all we need to do to fill the “PAR” column is subtract RPL from rPTS (rPTS – RPL) to calculate how much higher a player will score than what we consider to be replacement level:

Finding Keep/Cut Players

Making keep/cut decisions can be difficult when you don’t have the full picture. But, no one will have the full picture until the cut deadline, January 31st @ 11:59 PM. Remember Ryan Mountcastle, from paragraph one? He is technically, by this calculation, under replacement level. But, we’ve done all this calculating on a running, mid-operation league. What if the other managers in my league start dropping first basemen in the days leading up to January 31st and I have a plethora of draft options at my disposal? That will completely change the way I view rostering Ryan Mountcastle as an Oriole. The table below shows that he is 15.2 points below replacement level as it stands.

Waiting Until the Very End
15.2 points? I mean, that’s a two-home run game. Mountcastle could go off on a two-home run game any day of the week. Projection systems tend to have a small, bite-size bit of error in their predictions and if you didn’t notice the bite-size bit of sarcasm in that first section of this long sentence, I just can’t. Even if Mountcastle stays in Baltimore, the Orioles don’t get Dylan Cease, and the crushing blow of having an un-updated starting rotation in B’more becomes a reality, he could still jump up 15.2 points above his overall points projection.

I don’t really want Ryan Mountcastle to get traded, but I do want Ryan Mountcastle to be above replacement level if he’s going to be on The Zombie Runners in 2024. Going to almost any other park will boost his overall value. But, right now there aren’t many other good options going into my auction. So, I’ll be up late on January 31st, and I’ll be up early on February 1st, too.