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.
Given the topic, the Trial By Drury team name got my attention.
In a friends-and-family head-to-head, the championship went to the team that got Brandon Drury’s 2 home run game on the last day of the season to eak out a point in HRs and a tie in RBI.
I had a “reached max” fatal error in league 120 this year. I went into the season with a loaded roster but a known issue at MI. Unfortunately, even my drafted solutions went sideways quickly. I traded for Jose Altuve, but he was still on the IL — a stint that ended up taking longer than expected. During the first half of the season I fell about 25 games behind at 2B and 10 behind at MI. Despite rostering McMahon, Muncy, Turner, Altuve, Bichette and Seager by the end of season, I ended up about 25 games shy of max across my 2B/SS/MI spots. It was the difference as I lost by about 100 points despite the clearly stronger EOS roster. (One note: I still have not totally ironed out the playoffs-style bias remaining from ten years of playing that format before joining full-season leagues. Points earned at the end of the season do not count more than points earned at the beginning of the season.)
I was trending pretty far off my max in my otto 5×5 league, so in August I traded a low-end prospect for a $30 underwater contract w/loan. I then used the cash to stream the last few roster spots, finding ways to squeeze 2-3 extra games out of Mondays and Thursdays. Note that you can get multiple games from the same roster spot by timing day games and night games. I finished with only 6 unused games and used over 90 players on the season.
It would have been far less work if I hadn’t fallen behind in the first place, and of course other teams can simply outbid you, but I’d expect this to work even better in a points league.
i’m not sure i have any idea what you’re talking about here: “note that you can get multiple games from the same roster spot by timing day games and night games.” ???
Let’s say the Orioles play at noon and you start the day with Aaron Hicks. You can start Hicks, win an auction for Robbie Grossman in the afternoon, cut Hicks, and start Grossman at 7. Then if the Padres play at 9, and your auction for Trent Grisham ends at 8…
It requires a lot of cash and advance planning, but it’s straight up impossible in every other platform I know of.
If you have better players you are more likely to get more games and PA out of them. Matt Olson played pretty much every day. A guy like Abreu sits for 20+ games. It’s hard to know when someone like Abrue is going to get a rest or rebound (never) so it becomes a bit of a guessing game or you replace him for someone who at the beginning of the year was already thought of as not as good of a player and who himself might not be playing every game. So long sentence shorter, it may be that a worse team has worse players at certain positions and thus gets less playing time or needs to try and find better ‘worse’ players who also don’t max playing time. Correlation is not causation in this case.
There’s also the dreaded moment when you get hit with multiple injuries at once involving guys who are too good to drop. I got caught in the blender this year in May/June when a ton of my key performers all went on the IL at once (at one point I had nine guys on the IL), fell way behind in GP at a bunch of positions, and never made it up.
Never been thru arbitration before, any pro tips? Don’t really understand it.