Ottoneu Trade Deadline Prep

The All-Star Break isn’t officially a milestone in the Ottoneu season – it doesn’t represent the mid-point, it doesn’t start the playoffs, it doesn’t line up with the trade deadline – but it is a moment to stop, reflect, and figure out where you stand as we head into the home stretch. For me, it’s always a time to think about the upcoming trade deadline (August 31) and get myself and my team’s ready for a flood of trade offers, both incoming and outgoing.

The first thing I do during the break is to be very honest with myself about where my teams stand. Ottobot Podcast listeners will recognize this advice as something we hit repeatedly on the pod – no plans will work unless they start from a position of an honest reckoning of the direction of your team. You may have done this in May or June, but it doesn’t hurt to do it again. Sometimes a team I thought could compete as of Memorial Day just can’t by the time the All-Star Game rolls around. Sometimes (fewer times) the opposite happens.

For points leagues, this starts with points per game and points per inning pitched rates. Regardless of where you are in the standings, how do you look on a rate basis? You can recalculate standings as 1500*P/IP + 1944*P/G (assuming every team maxes out their games played and innings pitched) and see where you land.

If you do that and you think you are in the mix (say you are top 3-4), take a look at your games played and innings pitched pace, as well as those of the teams you are competing with. You can find this at the bottom of the lineups page for any team. What you are looking for are places where you or an opponent will be unable to max out – are you 20 games behind the pace at 2B? Is an opponent 20 games behind at 3B? If so, there is a good chance those games are just plain lost. A decent rule of thumb is that you can make up one game per week at each position by filling out a full lineup daily. You can make up a bit more in the OF (5 games a week, perhaps) and a lot more at C (using the two C spots, you can make up 7+ games a week). If you are on pace to finish 2nd, but an opponent is going to lose 5 games at 1B, 5 games at 3B, and 10 games in the OF, that could easily be 100-120 points off their total – and you want to know that.

Being behind the pace also likely means having to play less advantageous matchups in the second half, decreasing points per game or points per inning the rest of the way.

The last step is to figure out how much you can improve your team – do you have an OF at 4.75 P/G that you could replace with a guy at 6.5 P/G via trade? If so, that could be 125 or more points added to your total. Do you have a stud MI who has been underperforming or injured, who will increase your MI spot from 4.5 P/G to 5.5 P/G? That’s another 70-80 points. Let’s pause and detour to other formats, but we’ll come back to this point.

In roto leagues, the process is a little different. Rather than looking at your per game or per inning rates, go category by category getting a sense of how many points you can realistically gain. If you are only getting 6 points for HR, but there are five teams ahead of you within 15 HR, there is real ground you can make up. For your rate stats, make sure you are realistic about how much progress you can make.

For example, in league one, I entered play with an OBP of .33439, worth seven points. How much can I move the needle? Well, I have used up about 55% of my games on the season, so far. Let’s say via trades and improvements, my team is able to post a .35206 OBP the rest of the way (that is what the top OBP team in the league has, so far). That would be a pretty drastic improvement and would leave me around .34420 at the end of the season. That would help me jump from seven OBP points to nine OBP points. That’s a lot of work to make up limited ground.

Now, whether you are in roto or points leagues, you should have a sense of what it would take for you to move to first (or second or third, or whatever you deem to be a valid goal). In points, that might look like, “I need to add about 500 points between offense and pitching.” In roto, it might be, “I need to increase my HR and K, while bringing down my ERA.”

And now you have to make up your mind: is that possible? And this is where you start to scour the trade market. If you need to add HR and K, while decreasing ERA, are there a couple of aces and a big-time power hitter available for trade? If you need four aces and three power hitters, the answer is probably no, but if you just need one of each? Maybe that’s out there.

Related to that is confirming that you have trade chips that can pry those pieces away. Only need one ace but honestly don’t believe you have the right pieces to get DeGrom from the last-place team? Then you better determine how confident you are that you can win without DeGrom.

The “is it possible” answer will tell you if you should buy or sell. If there is a path to winning (or placing), go for it – start buying the pieces you need. The nice thing is, you have already identified targets (remember when you looked at the trade market to see if the pieces you need exist) and the trade chips you can offer (remember the last paragraph) so you can start to make offers. If there isn’t a path to winning, it is probably time to start selling.

To really understand this, it helps to see it in action. To that end, next week, in this space, I’ll have two articles, each looking at one of my teams and running through this process.