Puzzling Through Ottoneu Arbitration
It’s time to dust off those ottoneu rosters. Offseason arbitration begins today and will run through November 15. While you don’t need to make your selections immediately, it’s never too early to start formulating your plan of attack.
We’ve been down this road a few times here at RotoGraphs, so we have a lot of excellent content to help you with your decisions. My Guide For 2014 was quite complete and a good place to start for allocations leagues. For more background and voting leagues, turn to Chad Young’s helpful voting strategies, detailed description of the allocation process, and advice on how to use your allocations. Chad also examined prospect allocations in more detail on Monday.
Our past content (those links above) contains all the necessary tutorials for your ottoneu league. Rather than rehashing already complete content, let’s examine arbitration from another perspective – yours. If you’re unfamiliar with ottoneu allocations, I recommend glancing through the “detailed description” mentioned in the previous paragraph before reading on.
Last week, I offered an arbitration puzzle, using part of my own roster as a guinea pig. I listed eight of my best 15 keepers and asked how you’d allocate your $3. My goal was to ferret out any unique strategies. We’ll get to my findings in a moment.
Owners usually take one of two main approaches with allocations. Since players can be kept indefinitely, it’s possible to create a multi-year effect. Imagine it’s 2012 and a rival has a $3 Mike Trout. Let’s say you allocate $3 to him for the 2013 season and another $3 for the 2014 season. Functionally, you’ve stuck your rival with an extra $9 ($6 from the 2013 bid and $3 from the 2014 bid). In the third year, you could up the burden from your allocations to $18. When a player is cut, that burden vanishes. I consider this a safe, long time horizon plan. It’s like infecting your rival with a nerve disorder, they’ll feel an ever-increasing amount of pain.
The second approach is to push a player from marginal keeper to cut. Usually, you want to do this with high value talent. Ideally, you’re either trying to acquire that player via the draft, or you think he’ll distract from one of your true targets. I’m a big fan of this strategy, even though the use case is somewhat limited. It’s a risky, short time horizon plan. This is more like amputating a finger (perhaps a finge that can re-grow). Your rival loses a tool, experiences a lot of immediate pain, but can also immediately move on.
Our puzzle participants mainly used these two strategies. Some advocate “wedging players away.” There is certainly merit to the thought process. If an owner has to make a decision, they could make a mistake. If you bid my $31 Paul Goldschmidt to $34, I don’t have to make a decision. I won’t make a mistake; I’ll just keep a really good player for slightly more money. Here are a few comments along that line.
I really enjoyed the next set of comments as both David and Spa City bring up great points.
David points out the supposed value of having more options in the draft pool. For a team solely focused on 2015, this is an attractive viewpoint. As Spa City notes, how do you quantify the value of a deeper draft pool? It’s seemingly an extremely variable benefit ranging from zero to several dollars. Meanwhile, we know pumping up a rivals commitments has quantifiable, long-term implications.
If you’re taking the long view, Patrick walked through the decision criteria as I would.
In short, your goal should be to select young, stable players. George Springer could be fantastic, or he might be Brett Jackson in disguise. In the latter scenario, he’d hit the waiver wire within a year or two and I’d be free and clear from those allocated dollars. At the other end of the spectrum, who knows how many more years Edwin Encarnacion has in him. One, two, five? It’s anyone’s guess, but he already appears a little injury prone in a partial designated hitter role.
There was one other point buried in a few comments. If you’re one of the better analysts in your league, it can be beneficial to get your picks up early and focus on non-obvious players. The roster in the puzzle has some other players potentially deserving of an allocation. A $10 Corey Kluber was obviously the best pitcher on the staff, but $14 Jon Lester and $10 Hisashi Iwakuma could also deserve a ping. Similarly, a $6 Christian Yelich or $4 Steve Pearce could be stealthy alternatives to bid upon.
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very nice. Thanks. This is my first arbitration and I haven’t played a full ottoeu season yet so this is very helpful.
it would be great to figure out a strategy to prevent other owners from adding dollars to your cheap players!!
I don’t understand how forcing a cut by bidding up a borderline keeper affects the draft. Sure, if you force a cut on Gattis he gets added to the FA pool for the draft, but his owner now has a catcher roster spot to fill in the draft that they wouldn’t have otherwise. That means you’ve affected supply as much as you’ve affected demand. Regardless of how many players are free agents at the time of the draft, you can expect the top 24 catchers to end up rostered, and it seems dubious to assume that there’s a big difference between your league collectively having 14 catchers to draft instead of 13.
Adding to Dave’s point here, if an owner would keep Gattis for $10 but not $12, wouldn’t that owner now be looking for a catcher but also would presumably still be willing to pick up Gattis for $11 or less? Unless I value Gattis at $12 or more this strategy doesn’t save me any money, and might just allow that owner to get Gattis back for a similar price and avoid the arb dollars.
It might help if you want the player. In your example, if the owner keeps Gattis at $10, you would presumably have to trade for him if you want him. And that would be subject to you having something the other wants. Might be preferable for you to pay $12 in the draft to get him rather than to trade one of your own players to acquire $10 Gattis.
That makes sense if you need *specifically* Evan Gattis on your team. If you just want to have the best team possible, you should just draft a different catcher.
Devil’s advocate time:
I’ll list my own scenario since it makes a good use case for forcing cuts on expensive players. In other words, Posey rather than Gattis.
I have about $200 committed to 30 players and need a 3B and a couple SP. I can afford four elite players and still fill my roster. But those players have to be available to me in some way. Many high priced keepers are clustered on very expensive rosters that went for it last season, so they probably won’t be able to afford to re-hire the guys they choose to drop. I can try to influence those decisions and then win the bid in draft. That’s easier said than done.
The simpler strategy is to simply trade average players on cheap salaries for elite players on high salaries. If an owner is going to be forced to cut a $50 Stanton (just an example), then he might be willing to acquire a $7 Hamilton to take him place.
I don’t want a $7 Hamilton, Brad 🙂
But I generally agree with David and Kris. I think when add dollars to a player and the owner cuts that player, that is a bad outcome for you. You are just as likely to make your draft situation worse, not better.
I can have another owner needing X players and having Y dollars to do it, or I can let them cut that player and now they need X+1 players and Y+some amount of dollars (my arb allocation and their player salary) to do it. In the Gattis example, if that owner can fill their catcher spot for $10 or less, you have now wasted your arbitration dollars and given that owner MORE money to spend, making other players (potentially including Gattis) more expensive for you to acquire.
The economics of it are not as simple as I am suggesting, but if you raise a players salary past the point an owner is willing to keep said player you have a) wasted at least $1 in arbitration and b) made an impact on the draft that is just as likely to hurt you as help you.
Ha!
re b: I think saying “just as likely to hurt you” is a bit misleading. The effect is unknown but related to your position in the league and draft skills relative to the competition.
I agree with your general point, just have that little nitpick.
Depends on who else is on the roster of the now cut player. It’s possible the Gattis owner originally picked up Gattis as a back up to Buster Posey, who he’ll be keeping.
If that’s the case, he might not get in on the bidding on Gattis this time around since he won’t want to allocate more than a few dollars to a backup catcher.
I’m not a fan of the strategy, either, but I think there is some effect on the draft pool. I just don’t think it’s worth foregoing the strategy of dinging other teams’ clear keepers to raise their payroll.
Why wouldn’t you just allocate the money to Posey in that case? If he were to be cut, surely he would affect the FA market for catchers more than Gattis. Forcing a cut on a backup player also seems far from optimal.
Even if we’re talking about forcing a cut on an elite player like Posey, I can’t imagine it changes things much. For example:
Let’s say each team is planning to keep one catcher and cut another. That means that if Posey is one of the keepers, teams would have a combined 12 catcher roster spots to fill in the draft. In that case, we’d expect the 12 best free agent catchers to get auctioned off for market value.
If you force a cut on Posey, teams now collectively have to fill 13 catcher roster spots (and one team will have an addition ~$40 to spend). Posey will probably be auctioned off for close to his original salary because the owner wouldn’t have cut him if he were still below market value. Then there will be 12 more catcher roster spots to fill in the draft — exactly the same situation you would have been in before Posey was cut.
Unless you have reason to believe an allocation towards a player will force a sub-optimal decision to cut (in which case you should probably be allocating to that player anyway), I can’t understand the rationale for trying to force cuts.
Again, I also don’t prefer the strategy, but I see the logic.
In the posey/Gattis example, you’re presuming you could push posey to a cut, which might not be the case. Also, there’s a difference between empty roster spots and empty starting spots. Just because the posey/Gattis owner would need a backup doesn’t mean he would play in the starter level market – let’s say $10 and up players – since he already has one starting caliber catcher. So, if you need a catcher, you might be able to increase the supply of starting caliber catchers without Increasing the number of teams that would be willing to pay for a starting caliber catcher.
I agree, typically forcing a cut is not the best method to allocate dollars. That said, there is a situation where I can see it as worthwhile. If you are a team with a lot of cheap assets, (Lets say you have 30 spots filled with $200 in salary), but do not feel you have enough expected performance in the coming year to compete, then it certainly could make sense to bid up a player to the point of forcing a cut specifically if you doubt that there will be talent worth the $200 you have to spend at auction. (Do you really want to have a lot of extra money to spend at the auction if the top hitter is Albert Pujols? Not likely). This is a uncommon circumstance, but if I felt that I would have more money than other teams at the auction (from examining all other squads), then I could see this tactic as advantageous. I discussed this on a podcast last night.
“Imagine it’s 2012 and a rival has a $3 Mike Trout. Let’s say you allocate $3 to him for the 2013 season and another $3 for the 2014 season. Functionally, you’ve stuck your rival with an extra $9 ($6 from the 2013 bid and $3 from the 2014 bid). In the third year, you could up the burden from your allocations to $18.”
I must be missing something here. How is that functionally $9 and $18? If I add $3 to Trout in both 2013 and 2014, haven’t I only given him an “extra” $6? My allocations didn’t have anything to do with his original $3 salary…
I think the idea is that the three dollars you allocated in 2013 stick around and Trout’s owner had to pay those dollars in each year that they don’t cut him. Trout’s owner had to pay $3 extra in 2014 because of your allocations, but $6 extra because of you in 2015 (the $3 you just allocated plus the $3 you allocated in the previous year, which still affect his salary).
The strategy should be to close the gap between price and post-inflation value while maximizing the number of years your dollars stay rostered.
Keeping Gattis at 14 versus dropping Gattis once he hits $16 because his post-inflation value is 15 doesn’t do much for you or the rest of the league.
Another argument for the “wedging” strategy is to look at catgories (in 5×5). If you finished 2nd in HRs and are well set up for next year, and the leader had a 25$ David Ortiz. Maybe he considers dropping a 28$ Ortiz and he spends the money on a player who wont get him 30HRs.
Typically I will allocate my money to individuals who I believe will be kept so that team then has $3 less to work with in the draft. Often times $3 can be the difference in adding a player or letting him pass in the draft. However, I have used the “force a cut” strategy when it is a position of need for my team. To continue the Posey/Gattis strategy, let’s say that the majority of catchers in your league are going to be kept but you went high on two guys who underperformed this year. That means you will likely cut both and need 1-2 C for next season. If it appears that only a handful of Cs will be on the market I’ll try to add to that pool so I don’t have to spend $12-14 on Gattis just to have a quality player at that position.
but will your pushing the salary of another manager’s catcher up $1-3, really help you that much? It adds a catcher back to the player pool, but it also adds a manager who needs a catcher.
Thanks for condensing my point. 🙂
I agree with the aforementioned idea the allocating money to try to make an owner cut a player is usually not the best use of your allocation money.
However, I do see cases where it would be worth it to allocate money on a player so he is cut. Among them:
1. You feel strongly that a certain player will have a breakout year and you want to get him.
2. You have a very solid team playing for this year with have a big hole to fill and the market is weak for that position/category.
For example, say you need a power and a 1st baseman and it appears the top one is going to be Billy Butler. I would think it would be worth it to allocate money to bring the 1st basemen to market value so that he will cut. The follow up would be that you have the money and are willing to spend over market value to acquire the player. If someone bids $10 over market for the player, you just turned $2-$3 in arbitration into $10 for this year.
“If someone bids $10 over market for the player, you just turned $2-$3 in arbitration into $10 for this year.”
+1
If you’re going to target the player, you need to be prepared to spend more than his cut price in draft. It’s just how the draft usually works out with inflation. And if you miss on the guy, you could still bloat somebody else’s roster.
I feel like you should never want to cut a player that will get auctioned for more than you have him for. If someone cuts a player that ends up going for $10 more than he was signed for, then the decision to cut that player was a big mistake, as if the league or someone in the league viewed him as having that much excess value, you could have traded him for another (potentially cheaper in price) player or players with equal excess value.
In the Billy Butler example, if I see someone in my league needs power and a first baseman, and the best option out there is going to be Billy Butler, and he adds $3 to my David Ortiz to try to push him to the point of being cut… well… in that market you’re going to have to push him a lot higher than $3 more than what I already have him for in order for me to cut him, as that would result either in a bidding war to get Ortiz back, or me ending up stuck with (a possibly overpriced) Butler. If he’s adding $3 to Ortiz, then I see that as an indication that he thinks Ortiz at whatever price I have him at is undervalued, and if the market is demonstrating that an asset of mine has excess value, why in the world would I just dump that excess value with the chance of getting nothing in return?
Again, nicely put.