Ottoneu: Three Lessons Learned in 2023
The winner of the FanGraphs Staff Two Ottoneu League (1327) won by a minuscule two-tenths of a point. With 18,670.7 total points, “Roy Donk?” outlasted “Trial By Drury” by sheer force, maximizing all of his positional games played and missing his innings mark by only two. What a feat! Could it have been different had “Trial By Drury” maxed out on their OF and UTIL games played? We’ll never know.
I certainly can’t pass judgment on any team’s ability to maximize their points. My team, “The Ghost Runners” missed positional game maximums for 2B, SS, MI (by a lot!), OF, and UTIL. Oh, yeah, and I missed my IP totals too. I had a lot of injuries, played in too many leagues, dealt with cap space issues, yada, yada, yada! Yet somehow, I finished fifth. Luck? Probably. This season in our little free league, teams that reached their maximums were much more likely to finish higher in the standings, and that brings me to my first lesson of 2023…
Reach your maximums!
In FanGraphs Points Leagues that do not have playoffs, teams are allowed 1,500 innings pitched (soft-max) and 162 games per position with a higher 810 games allowed total for OF slots. This is a free league and it’s very possible that some of my league mates are playing in other, paid and possibly high-stakes, leagues. But, I should have used that to my advantage. Take a look at how teams finished, on average, when they reached their max compared to when they did not:
| Number of Teams Reaching Max | Max Reached Average Finish | Number of Teams Missing Max | Max Missed Average Finish | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 8 | 6.5 | 4 | 6.5 |
| 1B | 5 | 4.2 | 7 | 8.1 |
| 2B | 2 | 1.5 | 10 | 7.5 |
| SS | 6 | 4.8 | 6 | 8.2 |
| MI | 2 | 1.5 | 10 | 7.5 |
| 3B | 5 | 4.8 | 7 | 7.7 |
| OF | 1 | 1.0 | 11 | 7.0 |
| UTIL | 2 | 2.5 | 10 | 7.3 |
| IP | 5 | 4.4 | 7 | 8.0 |
1500 soft cap IP
It’s illuminating to see how many teams did not get to their max. My MI situation was a mess all season long, but I still should have put a player, any player, there more often. I noticed it was an issue mid-season, and tried to trade away one of my extra outfielders for a middle infielder, but couldn’t find any takers. Being left with low points-per-game (P/G) targets on the waiver wire sucked the motivation right out of me and I continued to ignore the missing slot in my lineup. Shame! Lack of effort is to blame, but I also hit maximums too early last season and may have been too conservative this season because of it.
Home runs hurt your pitching, but accumulation is more important
You’ll notice in the scatter plots below that the best teams in this league hit the most home runs. Though the first-place finisher did not hit the most home runs, they finished in the top five. On the other side of things, teams that gave up fewer home runs than everyone else didn’t necessarily show tremendous gains. That’s mostly due to the fact that when you accumulate innings, you accumulate home runs given up. Those teams whose pitchers aren’t giving up home runs are likely avoiding them because they are starting pitchers less often.
Each day matters
Total all your points and divide them by all of your games started among your position players, and you have your season-long points per game (P/G). Do the same with your innings pitched (P/IP) and then add the two together. The sum of P/G and P/IP is telling of how your team did on not only a daily basis but also a decision basis. Obviously, having good players is what you’re after, but scoring points each and every day throughout the season is the name of the game:
Teams that finished in the top three spots had the highest sum of P/G and P/IP. That generally translates to good, quality players, but as we’ve seen, it also translates to accumulation. This season, teams that had a handful of everyday hitters and regular pitchers above six points per game were much better for it. Here are all pitchers and hitters placed into decile groups by P/G and P/IP:
This reflects all players regardless of games or innings pitched or whether they are a reliever or a starter. In upcoming posts, I’ll build out these decile ranks with more specificity, but for now, this will do. It gives us a clearer picture of how P/G and P/IP relate to your team as a whole. We all want decile one and two players. Heck, I’ll take decile three players any day. Those are the quality players that contribute to your daily points at a high level.
Taking stock and analyzing your league as a whole is an important step to improving. I, personally, have a long list of things that I need to do to win this league next season. Now, sadly, I have six months to think about it.
Those are all the same lesson. Participation matters!
But there are more relevant questions:
1) “Reached Max” is a binary result. There is a big difference between a team that missed the maximum but put up 160 because their starters missed a couple of games down the stretch and a team that put up 145 because they couldn’t be bothered to even try.
2) There’s can be a chicken/egg thing that happens with participation. Non-competitive owners regularly fall behind on games played because they stop trying. That’s a result, not a process problem. It would be more interesting to track an owner’s games played pace as the season goes on, to see if it’s the (lack of) participation that leads to the poor result, or the poor result that leads to the lack of participation.
…in my leagues it tends to become obvious pretty early on, which owners are going to place well based on accumulation, and which owners are going to fall off the pace because they don’t fiddle with their lineups often enough.
I agree it is quickly obvious what teams will stop playing for the current year win. It isn’t so much about lineup fiddling imo as it is about over-emphasis on the draft v in-season. If a player can’t quickly figure out which replacement level players (broadly) they drafted – and can thus be dropped quickly (or just shouldn’t be a slot filled in draft to begin with), then they lose out on the early pick-ups who surprise. That loss quickly gets worse because the low-hanging fruit of in-season pickups just disappears.