Archive for daily fantasy baseball

2018 is here, and the dawn of a new year is the best time to reevaluate your overall fantasy strategy.  But before digging into the finer points of roster construction, auction value calculations, and post-post-hype sleepers, January is also the perfect time to step back and ask whether it might be time to trade in your entire fantasy experience for one of the more advanced, up-and-coming fantasy platforms around.

This is a shameless plug for Ottoneu, a fantasy sports platform so addicting that it has also launched a community of more than 1,000 hardcore baseball fans that sleep and eat baseball year round.  But don’t take my word for it.  There are many reasons why you should try Ottoneu (including some exciting new features launching in 2018), but today I want you to hear from some of the “rookies” who just finished up their first full year of Ottoneu in 2017. This growing community of raving fans is a big part of the Ottoneu experience, and their Season One feedback may help you make the final decision to drive your own league to Ottoneu in 2018.

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The Japanese sensation Shohei Ohtani is finally coming to MLB (and more specifically to the Angels), and in doing so will become the trailblazer that sets a new expectation for the future of the (possible) “two-way” player.  Because salaries and injuries continue to escalate in the game, a true double threat major leaguer is still hard to imagine in baseball, but if the 23 year old Ohtani does become the first player since Babe Ruth to make a regular impact on both sides of the ball, he will change the landscape of fantasy baseball, too.

Ohtani 😱 pic.twitter.com/YXJJ8954Hs

— Vladimir Guerrero (@VladGuerrero27) December 8, 2017

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For those following along, Ottoneu is at it’s busiest during these winter months leading up to the start of the next baseball season.  It’s designed that way, and the year-round activity of Ottoneu is one of the features that help set it apart from other fantasy platforms.  As Joe mentioned recently, there are plenty of reasons why you should give Ottoneu a chance this year, but today I want to assume you’ve already seen the light and are ready to sign up.  So, what’s next? Here are a few practical ways to get started once you plug into this great game.

Select Your Game Type

First things first: you’ll need to decide which scoring format suits your interest. Ottoneu offers a nice range of scoring options that include:

Classic: This is rotisserie-style 5 x 5 built into the basic foundation of Ottoneu, which (like all formats) includes 40 man rosters, $400 salary caps, daily lineups, off-season arbitration, and auction-style economics.  If you’ve been playing traditional Roto for years and have interest in Ottoneu, this is a great place to start.

Old School: This is considered the original Ottoneu  (4 x 4) format, and was designed with a sabermetric bent and geared toward power hitters and power pitchers (OBP, SLG, HR, R and ERA, WHIP, HR/9, K).  You can find an example of 4 x 4 standings here.

SABR & FanGraphs Points: Based on linear weights scoring, these two sabermetrically-inclined options are very popular, and it isn’t uncommon to see owners playing in multiple points leagues. Tons of resources and tools are available if you decide to try your hand in one of these advanced scoring leagues.  Standings for a points league look like this.

New: Head to Head is coming to Ottoneu in 2018!

ICYMI, head-to-head will be an option in @ottoneuBaseball in 2018. https://t.co/UsTO21a9kE

— Ottoneu Fantasy Sports (@Ottoneu) December 18, 2017

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So, what is Ottoneu?

Ottoneu is a smarter, better brand of fantasy baseball.  By design, it’s a fantasy platform engineered for the hardcore baseball fan that doesn’t enjoy the term “off season”.  Ottoneu is the perfect fit for FanGraphs readers looking to join a competitive fantasy baseball league with a lot of cool features, a sabermetric-economy, and a massive community of raving fans.

You can read first-year feedback from Ottoneu players here.  You can also learn a lot more about the game from the FAQ, but here are the top 10 reasons you should consider joining or moving your fantasy baseball league to Ottoneu this year:

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I’m really not privy to the whole daily fantasy baseball thing, as proctored by FanDuel or DraftKings. It’s probably good that I’m not because I’m 98 percent certain I would immediately fall in love with it.

Still, I’m intrigued, mostly because it takes streaming to the extreme. And I love streaming. It’s a tedious, somewhat painstaking process, what with combing through splits, looking for the juiciest matchups that are also cost-effective.
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The 12:15 P.M. EST slot here on Mondays is supposed to have something to do with shortstops. Jhonny Peralta went 1-for-5 with two strikeouts last night, and Starlin Castro went 1-for-4 with a strikeout. Quota met?

I’ll get back to shortstops in short order, but without any 2015 results to parse or season long fantasy advice to give, I’m going to discuss some daily fantasy strategy. I typically play on DraftKings but have plenty of followers who play on FanDuel, and I’m taking part in an expert daily fantasy accuracy contest this season that will take place on FanDuel. For that reason, I wanted to take a quick look at how the scoring systems on each site differ. Read the rest of this entry »

Utilizing splits in DFS research is obviously a big part of the decision-making process. The platoon split is all too real, and we’d be crazy not to factor it in to our process. I would imagine the most common way DFS players consider platoon splits is by looking at something like wOBA or wRC+ versus left and right handed pitching to discern which players have pronounced splits or even reverse splits on occasion (cough Adam Jones cough).

But looking at stats like wOBA or wRC+ doesn’t exactly translate to a specific daily site’s scoring system. If a player has a wOBA of .360 against left-handed pitching and a wOBA of .340 against right-handed pitching, how does that translate to the counting stats he might put up on a given day? Read the rest of this entry »