Reviewing Chad’s Hot/Cold Right Nows

Over the course of the season, I wrote 17 Ottoneu Hot or Cold Right Now articles. These articles, which Lucas Kelly and I tried to get out weekly, cover players who are being added, being dropped, being auctioned or just performing particularly well or particularly poorly. The goal is to analyze why the player is Hot or Cold at the moment and offer advice on what you should do. I have been writing these for a number of years now, but have never written a recap. That changes today.

This recap is, to be honest, maybe more for me than for you. I wanted to go back and look at all the advice I gave in these columns and get a sense of what went well and what didn’t, so I can learn, adjust, and do better in 2026. I am sharing it here not because it will be actionable for you, but because I want to hold myself accountable.

Over the course of the season, I touched on more than 110 players in these articles, though I identified 98 pieces of advice that were worth evaluating. The ones I didn’t include in my review fall into a few categories:

• No actionable advice – for example, in June, I called out Judge as a hot performer. I have no idea who that could have helped. I said so at the time. But he was playing so well, it needed to be mentioned.
• Too soon to evaluate – I gave some advice on prospects I would add (or not add) and while there is limited grounds to review that advice (for example, if the prospect has more trade value today, that might be worth something), in general, it’s too early to judge whether paying up for Carson Benge or others was a good or bad call.
• Advice wasn’t necessary – This is maybe a variation on number 1, but telling you to cut an injured reliever in September is both good advice and not that helpful. You probably already knew.

I call this out because that group represents more than 10% of the total and all of those would have qualified as “good” advice in my book. But I didn’t want to give myself credit.

I took the other 98 and rated each piece of advice on a scale of 1-5.

1. Bad advice and I hope you ignored me, like when I was tepid on Cam Schlittler
2. Didn’t work out, but I warned you it might not; or didn’t work out long-term but there was value there, like when I said you could ride the hot streak with Lance McCullers, and the hot streak was immediately over
3. Neutral, advice that was neither good nor bad, such as when I said JP Crawford looked to be a good depth option and he kinda was, if you needed a reliable MI, but he wasn’t as good as I hoped
4. Good advice that I could have been stronger on, such as when I said I was buying Andy Pages, but expected he wouldn’t still be on my team by the end of the year
5. Solidly good advice, like when I said to buy the rebound on a poor performing Salvador Perez

I did this grading on my own and I tend to be hard on myself. A couple of examples:

• When Romy Gonzalez was being auctioned heavily in July, I said I would only roster him where I know I can start him vs. LHSP, because he is merely a small-side platoon guy. Turns out he was less than that (and was better vs. RHP the rest of the way), so I gave myself a 2. Given my analysis was that he had limited value except in specific circumstances, maybe a 2 is harsh?
• When Kerry Carpenter was cold in June, I said I was holding, but was open to trading him. He was great the rest of the way, so I gave myself a 4 – docking a point for being proactively open to trading him. But holding was clearly the right advice, so maybe that should be a 5?

With that as prelude, here is what I found:

• My average score was 3.84. Including the excluded players pushes that to 4.00, for what it’s worth. Is 3.84 good? I have no idea. I haven’t done this before so there is no baseline to judge against. This is going to serve as a baseline and it’ll help me set a goal to be a 4 on average next year. But for now – 3.84 means my advice was useful more often that not, which seems at least acceptable.
• My score was higher in March/April (3.92) vs. the rest of the year (3.76). This is a bit skewed because most of the “incomplete” types that I excluded came in the latter part of the season, but I think this is an okay result. It might be nice to feel like I am improving as the season goes on, but those March/April calls are arguably more important. Those are where you get early breakouts, lots of interesting names are free agents, and you have a chance to buy-in early on guys who can make a big difference.
• I surprised myself with how often my advice wasn’t as clear as I would like. The previously mentioned Romy Gonzalez is a good example. I said, “I would happily roster him in leagues where I know I can start him vs. any LHSP.” What does “happily” mean there? I intended it to mean if I had a roster spot, sure I would pick him up, but I don’t need him. But maybe people read it as, “Go get this guy if you have room!” That made it hard to evaluate some of these, but it’s also just not productive for you as readers.
• I was better on Cold Right Now (4.06) than on Hot Right Now (3.73). Cold Right Now includes players who are being cut due to injury and a lot of those are easy calls. Pitcher has Tommy John surgery? Cut. We are not 1-6 months out from those cuts and the pitcher is still 6-12 months from maybe being back, so yeah, those cuts look good. But even excluding those, I did better on CRN than HRN. I am not really sure why.
• I did about as well going against consensus (3.85) as I did overall. I like this, because it means I wasn’t overly swayed by groupthink. It’s easy to see a guy being auctioned a lot, or cut a lot, and think “there must be a reason for this.” And, in fact, this is why I started writing these articles – who are other managers intrigued by or out on and why? But once I get into my analysis, I want to do my analysis.
• I gave myself 15 scores of one and 48 scores of five. Of the ones, only two – passing on Schlittler and not expecting Geraldo Perdomo to keep it up – really hurt. The others, I mostly get the process and even if the advice was wrong, it didn’t hurt much. I need to dig into those two and figure out what I missed. Of the fives, many were pretty straightforward, but nine stood out to me as strong advice that really helped – buying Ben Rice, Brett Baty, Connelly Early, Alejandro Kirk, Salvador Perez, Brandon Marsh, Nick Lodolo, and Jorge Polanco, plus trading Emmanuel Clase. All of those pieces of “buy” advice came when those players were either available or performing poorly, or both, and all of them proved super valuable. The Clase advice is a bit of a weird one, but if you followed that advice and shopped him at that moment, you did quite well.

There may be more to glean from this, but those were my big insights. A few things I plan to do next year, based on these learnings:

• Compare potential breakouts to prospects and value them accordingly. My advice on Schlittler and Perdomo was basically that I didn’t think they would be difference-makers this year. But at those moments in time, adding either of them was perfectly logical and, if you had the roster spot, low cost. I need to find a better balance between taking strong, defensible positions and explaining when you should ignore those positions and gamble anyway. Cutting some random 40th dude off your roster for a hot Perdomo was a good bet (even if he did come back to Earth, it would have been a good bet) and my advice should reflect that.
• At the risk of contradicting what I just said, I also want to take more strong, clearly defined positions. I am going to spend some time this off-season thinking about format, but I think it would be helpful if I both issued a clear verdict on what I would do and offered scenarios in which I would do the opposite.
• Related to this, I want to more often make clear predictions on what I see happening. I want to be careful not to give a false sense of my own confidence, but “He’s worth riding while hot” isn’t as useful as “his next three starts are against weak opposition, but as soon as there’s evidence of the command wavering, it is probably time to get out.”
• Evaluate fewer players more deeply. Some of these articles I went through too many names at the expense of giving them a more detailed review. Cutting back on quantity to provide higher quality feels like the right move. Early in the season I did this and then offered “quick hits” so that I was still giving thoughts on players being added or cut a lot. Maybe that format works better?

That’s what I came up with, but I would also love your feedback on these articles, in general. Are they useful? Do they cover the right players and topics? What would you like to see change?