The Importance of Hitting Games and Innings Caps

Yesterday, Lucas Kelly shared three lessons he learned playing Ottoneu this year, leading off with “Reach your maximums!” Lucas showed that the teams that finished atop the standings in league 184 did so, at least in part, by making sure they reached 162 games played at each position and 1500 IP.

This sparked an interesting discussion in Ottoneu slack around hitting those caps, including questions of just how important it is and how much hitting your caps is a result of being a contender (because contenders actively try to maximize points while rebuilders might be less engaged) vs. a cause of being a contender. And we got some very interesting data as a result.

Before sharing that data, just a quick reminder that Ottoneu season-long league lineups have 12 positions (C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, MI, OFx5, and U) and you are capped at 162 games in each of those spots (810 total for OF). There are two catcher spots on the lineup page, but that is to help teams fill all 162 games – not because you need two catchers or can fill 324 games. You are also capped at 1500 IP, but that cap is a soft cap – all innings thrown the day you cross 1,500 count. So if you are at 1,499 going into a day and your pitchers throw 40 innings that day, you get credit for al 1,539 innings; if you have one RP come in and throw 1 IP that day, you will be done at 1,500. Head-to-head leagues work differently, so we are ignoring those for today.

In a points league where players average positive points per game, filling out your games played is fairly obviously important. You win by scoring more points and leaving games or innings on the table means giving up a chance to score.

And that brings us to the question of “how” important. The fact that it is important is both obvious and not debatable, but whether it is of game-changing importance or just an issue around the margins is less clear.

Enter Justin Vibber, creator of the Surplus Calculator and host of a particularly valuable Ottoneu-focused Patreon. Justin pulled standings, games played and innings pitched data from 145 season-long Ottoneu FanGraphs points leagues. He then added 4 points per game and 4 points per inning pitched for every game or inning any of the 1,740 teams in those leagues didn’t use and re-calculated the standings for those leagues.

We landed on 4 P/G and 4 P/IP because that’s a fairly acceptable number for a replacement level. Only three of the 1,740 teams put up less than 4 P/G on the year and only 25 of them put up less than 4 P/IP on the year. No matter how active your league or how thin the free agent pool, with a little work, any team can manage to find 4 P/G and 4/IP to fill out their caps.

The results are pretty striking. There were 50 teams that finished outside the top 3 in their league who would have finished in one of those spots (thereby cashing if it were a prize league) in the adjusted standings. That is, if we just assume every team does the bare minimum to hit their games and innings caps, more than a third of leagues would have had a change in their top three.

And this understates the importance of hitting those caps. We know from Lucas yesterday and from Justin’s data that a large number of teams do not hit their caps, which means that if you, dear reader, are one of the few to make it a focus, you stand to benefit significantly.

A couple of examples: In league 1350, The New London Whalers finished 4th, just 30.6 points out of 3rd and 142.7 points out of 2nd. If we assume all three of those teams maxed out their games played and fill in the missing games with 4 P/G, the Whalers move up to third. If we assume the Whalers max out their games, but the other two teams don’t, the Whalers would have needed 4.6 P/G from the additional games to finish second – not as easy but certainly not out of the question.

That gives you a sense of just how important it is to fill your games played. As for the question of whether filling your games makes you a contender or whether being a contender makes you fill your games, it is harder to find a clear data-based answer (you can show correlation much easier than causation). We know that some teams miss their caps because they are out of contention, start to rebuild, and stop focusing on lineups. But what Justin’s data shows is that thinking you are out of contention is a bad excuse for not filling your games.

Out of the 50 teams that would have climbed into the top three in our theoretical world where everyone hits their caps, 11 finished 7th or lower in their league. Three teams were 11th or 12th. And again, Justin’s adjusted standings downplay the impact of filling your games because they assume everyone fills their games and we know that won’t happen. If you aren’t focused on getting every single one of the 1,944 games allotted to you because you are “not a contender” just remember that 7.6% of leagues had a team that was “not a contender” that could have finished top 3 just by getting replacement-level scoring to fill out their games and innings.

I am making two changes to my approach in 2024 as a result of this data. First, I am going to be more aggressive about filling games early in the season. The last couple of weeks, rosters expand, players get days off, etc., and it can be hard to fill games. I want to be ahead of the 162-game pace at every position by the time September rolls around so I can hit my caps even if things aren’t going my way with lineups.

Second, I am going to be more aggressive about hitting caps even when rebuilding. Seeing teams languish in the bottom half a league when even minimal P/G scoring could have gotten them into the top-three was eye-opening. I am not going to let that happen to me.