Taking Advantage of the Ottoneu/FanGraphs Leaderboards

Like many of you, I fantasy baseball at multiple sites (Ottoneu primarily, but also FanTrax, CBS, and ESPN) and so I find myself navigating leaderboards at multiple sites. Kind of.

Yes, I do use the leaderboards at those other sites to find players, but that’s mostly out of laziness. When I have the time and the desire, my preferred way to find free agents and evaluate players is to come back to FanGraphs and use our player pages and leaderboards. CBS can tell me what a guy’s OBP is over the last 30 days; but it can’t tell me what has changed to drive that newfound on-base talent. So I identify free agents at one place, dig into them back here, and then head back to the other place to make FAAB bids or waiver claims.

The integration between Ottoneu and FanGraphs is one of the best and yet most underutilized aspects of the Ottoneu platform. And there are some little tricks you can use to make them even more powerful.

To start, you can find the FanGraphs Leaderboards on the “Players” tab and there are three links to access them:

You can find the same links on mobile web, under the magnifying glass icon that serves as the players tab. What’s the difference between these links? Not much. The two that say “Free Agents” will filter out all rostered players; the other won’t. But you can change that setting on the leaderboard, too.

Once you click through, you get a leaderboard that looks an awful lot like other FanGraphs leaderboards. Because it is.

You can use splits, timeframes, etc., just like you can on any FanGraphs leaderboard. You can go into the “Stats” or “Pitch-Level Data” tabs (or the “Pitch Modeling” tab for pitchers) just like on any other leaderboard. And you can choose Ottoneu stats and filter by Ottoneu team, as well.

This is already pretty incredible. Being able to pull up a leaderboard of hitters available in your league and then sort them by wOBA, or compare their wOBA to xwOBA or see their barrel rate is something you can’t do on any other fantasy platform, at least as far as I know.

But where the real magic comes in, at least for me, is with that little “Custom Reports” button towards the right side of the screenshot above. That button allows you to pull together reports using stats you may not find side-by-side on a leaderboard. For example, if you are looking for free agent hitters in a 5×5 league, you may be interested in HR and SB, but not want to look too much at R, RBI or AVG. Instead, you want to look at wOBA, xwOBA, K%, BABIP, HR/FB rate, barrel% or other stats that you find more useful in evaluating player talent.

Well, there you have it. The top free agents in the Podcasters League, sorted by wOBA, but with some other numbers I want to look at right there. I can see that Sanoja has a nice high wOBA, but his xwOBA is one of the lowest of the group and he has no HR or SB, plus a nice high BABIP, lots of grounders, and no walks. That feels like empty average that is destined to fall. I can also see that Josh Bell and Garrett Mitchell are striking out way more than I would like. TJ Rumfield isn’t barrelling the ball much.

But Joey Wiemer is walking. He isn’t striking out a ton. Yes, the BABIP is nonsense (as is the HR/FB rate) but his barrel rate is solid and the xwOBA is still quite good. I can also see that Kyle Isbel is getting the ball in the air, but not turning on it much. He is also not striking out, though there aren’t any walks either. And despite the good in there, his xwOBA is lowest on the table.

Does this mean I am running out to add Wiemer, or someone else? No, but it is a great starting place to figure out who is worth a deeper dive. And with a single click, I am on Wiemer’s player page and can make a more complete assessment of what I want to do.

This is even more interested in Ottoneu Points leagues, where you can put points (total or per-game) on a leaderboard with underlying numbers. Here is a leaderboard of relievers available in the FanGraphs Staff league sorted by points per innings pitched:

I have added a bunch of numbers I like to look at. And they are pretty useful! Rico Garcia has a 16.7% chase rate – that feels pretty low. Antonio Senzatela’s 7.2% swinging strike rate doesn’t inspire much confidence, either. Multiple pitchers have below average Pitching+ (Aaron Bummer, Caleb Kilian, Andrew Nardi, Kevin Kelly) while others have questionable Stuff+ (Chase Silseth, Eli Morgan, Jakob Junis, Tim Mayza). It’s way too early to just write anyone off over that, but if I need a reliever right now, this leaderboard is helping me identify some names I like (Erik Sabrowski, Tim Hill, Bryan Baker). It even gives me reason to look deeper at Silseth – the Stuff+ is below 100, but barely, the Pitching+ looks good, and that 20% swinging strike rate at least demands a second glance.

The nice thing is, even if you don’t like the stats I like, you can pick and choose what you want to see. I likely need to upgrade my relief corps in this league and this leaderboard is far more useful to me than one that only has P/IP or one that has other stats I like but lacks P/IP – the combination is super useful.

If you are new to these leaderboards, go check them out. If you have used them, share any tips in the comments. What other FanGraphs fantasy tools make your life better? What tools or Ottoneu integrations would you like to see next?