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.