Archive for Ottoneu

If you’ve been following along you’ve probably discovered that the game of Ottoneu is a mathlete’s dream.  It’s an advanced economic system built for fantasy baseball that only gets better over time.  And while the Roto options will feel very familiar, the “points” scoring options (FanGraph Points and SABR) have become popular to the point where they are almost synonymous with the game itself.

Ottoneu is especially designed for the FanGraphs audience, but even the most sabermetrically-inclined fantasy players will find their first season or two of Ottoneu “points” to be a (worthy) challenge.  Navigating a full auction draft, understanding the relationship between player scoring and player values (salaries), and trying to build a roster flexible enough to maximize games and innings over the course of a long season are just a few of the early lessons that need to be learned quickly.  But few things are more puzzling to new owners than interpreting early season league standings, so today we’ll review the Standings Dashboard, a custom tool built to dig deeper into your league’s standings so you can properly evaluate whether you’re a contender or pretender.

Ottoneu Standings Dashboard

Using a first year Ottoneu league (“Brinksmanship“) as our benchmark, here’s a glance at the league standings through May 12th, 2016:

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I find early season performances fascinating (or perhaps it’s our responses to these performances that’s fascinating.) With every owner competitive and paying attention in April – maybe for the only time all year – league wide perception of talent levels can be unrealistically altered. For example, Trevor Story hits 7 home runs in his first 8 games, then precedes to hit .200 over his next 60 plate appearances. That’s about as stark a difference as you can find in a player’s performances this early in the season. Given this, how do your league-mates value him? My wager is that they value him more as the 7 HR guy that the .200 hitter, but that’s just a guess. Would the view of Story be different if those 7 HR in 8 games occurred in July?

This is all hypothetical conjecture on my part, but it does help to show the crazy swings in performance that occur over small samples. If a player (especially a prospect) has a hot start, their trade value can be boosted by that helium all year. However, some hot starts still fall through the cracks, and many players who have performed well can still be bought relatively cheaply. Hopefully this will help you consider buying some of the players who’ve had great starts to 2016. Some of them appear to have made core improvements thus far.

One of the updates I run weekly is to look at the plate discipline and batted ball leaderboards here on Fangraphs. I look for players who are swinging less than last year, while also making more contact. Eno covered some of this in his post last week, but this early in the season it can be difficult to have enough data to make any concrete conclusions about player performances. A disclaimer – at the time I wrote this I didn’t realize how similar it was to Eno’s analysis. His piece goes into more detail and you should definitely read it.

The general premise: I want to find players who are being more patient than last year, but are also making contact at a higher rate. I also track changes in hard hit percentage, but admit that I don’t focus on this nearly as much. I plan to start incorporating exit velocity and launch angle, but have not been able to at this point. This is far from a full proof method or some statistical wizardry, but it’s a quick sniff test. Given that swing% becomes reliable around 50 PAs, and contact rate around 100 PAs, I would put a little more weight on those numbers at this time. I use this to help me bid in the early season Ottoneu FA auctions, or to help target players in trades. The last thing I want to do is waste precious dollars or trade assets on what is likely to be a mirage. (This is probably more important in Ottoneu than other formats where cap penalties can hamstring you if you aren’t careful). Anyways, here’s the list of all players swinging less, making more contact, and hitting the ball with a higher hard hit frequency in 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

This post requires some “class participation”, so if you’re reading along I would really appreciate you weighing in on what has become a highly active debate within Ottoneu leagues.  Even if you don’t play Ottoneu, the concept of ambiguous fantasy league rules applies to all, and today I’m looking for potential (creative) solutions on how to enforce the following rule:

Rule 1a: Each team should maintain at all times a roster of 22 major-league players that can fill out a starting lineup. The remaining 18 roster spots can be used for reserves, consisting of both major and minor leaguers.

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Regardless of whether you’ve been playing Ottoneu for several years or just a few short weeks, you’ve probably realized that a healthy community of saber-minded owners is just as much of a feature of the growing fantasy sports platform as 40-man rosters and annual player arbitration.  That feeling of “community” was strengthened this week with the launch of the “official” Ottoneu Fantasy Sports Community (on Discourse) by game designer Niv Shah.

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Mike talked earlier this week about being patient, essentially arguing that the best moves you can make this early in the season are no moves.  In other words, the season is so young and the sample size so small that you shouldn’t overreact.  While that is probably true, it doesn’t hurt to prepare yourself to pounce on a potential free agent waiver pick up if you see a skill or talent that looks convincing.  Sometimes you need to jump early to find the best bargain of the season, so here are four players that I’m watching closely over the next week or two.

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Ottoneu founder/creator Niv Shah once described Ottoneu as an economic system that just happens to be built for fantasy sports.  The entire platform is finely tuned to bring the stats, rules, and interface together to provide an excellent overall gameplay experience perfectly suited for baseball nerds.

Nerds often like math (which is why baseball nerds love sabermetrics), so let’s spend some time digging into some of the math behind the game of Ottoneu.  This will be a blend of benchmarks and strategy, but overall the goal here is to create a reference for Ottoneu owners looking to win their leagues.

Ottoneu Basics

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Disclaimer: these projections are bold (at least they’re supposed to be), and most are made in the context of Ottoneu fantasy baseball.

1) Yangervis Solarte will outscore Rougned Odor in 2016.

Rougned Odor is an extreme talent.  His breakout last year has been well documented, and his .273/.313/.520 slash all but guarantees no one is sleeping on him in drafts this year (his hot spring hasn’t done anything but boost his stock).  But for all the fanfare surrounding Odor, we should remember that his breakout was mostly ignited by an insane June that included a .390 BABIP and a BB/K rate that looks like a big outlier (1.25).  Odor’s July was equally sizzling so this isn’t an attempt to pump the brakes on a great young player except to say that he’s not coming with much of a discount in new Ottoneu auctions this season (~$20).

Looking for another under-the-radar 2B that could really turn a profit in 2016? Enter Yangervis Solarte, one of the few players to rival Odor’s 2nd half breakout and his 80 grade name.  Solarte started 2015 white-hot with a .321/.387/.500 slash and .385 wOBA, but fell off the map in May/June.  Something clicked for Solarte in July, however, as he rolled off three straight months of excellent production (wOBA’s of .353, .348, and .362 in July, August, and September), finishing the 2nd half with a .292/.336/.470 line.  That line isn’t all that unlike what Odor dazzled us with last year, and there may be room for improvement for Solarte because of his excellent contact skills and slightly better walk rates (he also hit much better at home than on the road).

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Successfully “rebuilding” your fantasy team into a contender is an epic challenge that requires vision, skill, patience, and a little bit of luck.  Since there is no perfect blueprint that ensures success (some people say never rebuild), it’s not surprising that owners take a lot of different routes to the same ultimate goal.

I recently polled a group of savvy, successful fantasy owners to get their advice for rebuilding in Ottoneu, asking five key questions that are related to the idea of effective rebuilding.  Regardless of whether you play Ottoneu, much of the (anonymous) feedback below should be relevant to a wide variety of fantasy baseball leagues and may be helpful if you find yourself in a rebuild this season.

What is the best advice you would offer an Ottoneu owner who is rebuilding their roster for the future?

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These predictions are specifically based on Ottoneu FGpt scoring. Perhaps “Bold” isn’t defined clearly enough, but my hope is that this is structured in such a way that my thought process can provide some benefit (even if the predictions seem a little extreme at face value.)

1. Domingo Santana will be a top 15 OF.

Nelson Cruz, Yasiel Puig, Carlos Gonzalez, Charlie Blackmon, Starling Marte, Adam Jones…  If you looked at our FGpt OF rankings, these are the 15-20^th ranked outfielders. Which is to say, I think Domingo Santana could be better than all of them (and the rest of those listed below him in our rankings) in 2016. The Brewers do not look like a good team (yet…) so – unless he gets injured – expect a full slate of playing time, a great home park, and lots of power (three things that are gold in linear weights scoring.) The obvious hole in his game is the strikeouts (34% in 2015), but if he can reign that in at all, the upside is tremendous.

2. John Jaso will be a viable 2nd OF

The obvious issue has been playing time (70, 99, 70 games played over the past 3 seasons), but given that he slated to play 1B, I feel fairly confident he will play more games than he has in any of the past 3 seasons.  If he does, he could easily produce value which is expected of many #2 OF in FGpts. The Pirates’ outfield is set, so don’t expect him to retain eligibility for 2017, but he should be incredibly useful for this season. Alex Gordon, Starling Marte, Adam Jones, Christian Yelich, Charlie Blackmon, and Yoenis Cespedes are all projected to be within 5 points of wOBA of Jaso. Those players will cost $18-$25 apiece. If he can stay on the field, Jaso has a good chance to be in that tier, and you can get him for about a third of that price.

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Co-ownership. In my 10 years of fantasy experience, it was something I’d never tried before, nor had I given it much thought. It always seemed like a chore, and (given that I tend to have strong opinions) I assumed that if I ever did co-own a team I would end up “running” the squad, while my counterpart would be left to sit on his hands. It just didn’t seem like much fun – for me or my counterpart – or like an experience that would be any different from Ottoneu leagues I had already participated in.

Until recently.

Fellow Rotographs contributor Trey Baughn and myself were paired up in a newly formed Ottoneu league. Neither of us are experts on the topic of co-ownership, but I wanted to talk through several observations we have quickly realized in our month long trial run.

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