Relievers and OPL

by
May 18, 2023

There have been fluctuations in how teams think about relievers in the Ottoneu Prestige League over the two years OPL has been around. And it seems the pendulum has swung once again.

Early in OPL, we learned that you can have basically as many RP as you want without hurting your team. Then we saw a number of teams have success last year carrying no RP and zero-RP became the fashionable approach to OPL.

The logic behind that makes sense – relievers don’t score a ton of points in OPL, while ensuring you fill out your five OF spots or your two SP spots daily can return a ton of value. So that 7th, or even 6th, or even 2nd RP might not be as valuable as an 11th OF or 12th SP.

But now, as we hit the mid-point of round two of the 2023 edition, the top three teams are carrying 6, 6, and 4 RP, plus a handful of swing arms that are relieving now but may have been kept as starters. It seems that, at least in 2023, having zero relievers isn’t the dominant strategy.

7th Which takes us back to what we saw early on – that the number of relievers teams carried in 2021 didn’t have a huge impact on how much they scored. Whether you carried four relievers or 12 relievers or any number in between, the impact was minimal. Replacing that 7th RP with an 11th OF, it seems, was more a wash than a gain.

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The thing is, relievers are not a wash in your home league. In any Ottoneu format, RP absolutely have value and it is harder to contend without them than it is to contend with them.

For me, that means that I might as well roster relievers on my OPL rosters. They’ll help in my home league while having little to no effect on my OPL team. I still want to have enough depth at other spots to fill out games as often as possible, which means I probably won’t carry the 7-8 relievers I sometimes carry in non-OPL leagues. But honestly, the data doesn’t tell us that carrying 7-8 RP is a bad idea.

I’ll do a deeper dive on positional impact as we get closer to the next snapshot deadline, but for now – don’t feel like you need to drop your RP just to contend in OPL.





 

A long-time fantasy baseball veteran and one of the creators of ottoneu, Chad Young's writes for RotoGraphs and PitcherList, and can be heard on the ottobot podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @chadyoung.

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rustydudeMember since 2021
2 years ago

Interesting. It would be cool to get a rebuttal here in the comments or in a separate article by one of the triumvirate of partners who won it all last year.

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