The Ottoneu “player to be named later” Clause

Sometimes you have to shake things up, especially when you find yourself rostering four “1B only” players. I updated my trade block and hoped someone out there needed help at the position. “Ding!” went my laptop from across the room a few minutes later, indicating I’d received an email. It had an extra sharp sound to it like it had come straight from Ottoneu’s automated system with intent.

hey, i’d be interested in Vientos. Let me know what you’re looking for or if you see a fit.

It’s amazing how quickly the re-draft moves in Ottoneu. I couldn’t switch back and forth between draft tab, FanGraphs player pages, and spreadsheets fast enough while sitting in a hotel lobby to fully optimize my fake team as the fake general manager I truly was. Still, the deals just kept coming. I got over-excited and won enough 1B/3B players to populate two or three rosters. I needed to make a move and luckily, the first offer came to me:

Offer #1

Zombie Runners give up:
Vinnie Pasquantino, $10
Mark Vientos, $8
Loan $3

The Competition gives up:
Marcell Ozuna, $7
Travis Bazzana, $8

I went straight to Bazzana’s player page and found an expected ETA of 2025. Not bad, I thought. How’s the outlook?:

Prospects TLDR: The first overall pick in the 2024 draft, Bazzana is a well-rounded hitter with low-ball power, but he’s not a good defender.

Further digging through his most recent Eric Longenhagen analysis forced me to consider it, but Bazzana seems unlikely to get to the big leagues before August, and I don’t want $8 sitting in the “Minors” section of my roster all season long.

Rejected…though not deterred, I messaged my potential trade partner:

Your last offer was pretty good. The price on Bazzana is too high for me at this point. I sent a counter.

Counter #1

Zombie Runners give up:
Vinnie Pasquantino, $10
Mark Vientos, $8

The Competition gives up:
Marcell Ozuna, $7
Cristopher Sánchez, $9

No deal.

not sure i can move Sanchez, my SP is weak. but i think we’re on the right track.

Finally, my competition gives one last counter, attempting to simplify things:

Offer #2

Zombie Runners give up:
Mark Vientos, $8

Enemy gives up:
Marcell Ozuna, $7

It’s not what I wanted. In fact, it doesn’t really help my situation at all. The movement of a “3B” who would have occupied my “UTIL” spot for a player like Ozuna who can only occupy the “UTIL” spot doesn’t seem useful. Rostering Mark Vientos for $1 over his $7 average isn’t too bad either. At only 25 years old, his value could potentially skyrocket well beyond $10 by the season’s end. On the other hand, Marcel Ozuna at $7 is $3 under the average salary and he slugged .546 last year! Even still, he’s going into his age 35 season and the likelihood that he’ll repeat a slugging percentage over .500 in 2025 seems low to not likely at all. If I was going to trade away “future value” for “right now and probably not next year”, I needed a little something more. That’s when I conjured this little beauty up:

I waited…

Could this be too weird? Am I making a name for myself as a known trade weirdo? Will this place me into some sort of trade limbo, blackballed and never to be traded with again? My anxiety cooled, once I received a response:

interesting. i think that works but give me the night to be sure i understand.

Maybe I fired off this crazy idea a little too quickly, the excitement of a new season forced a bad pretend business decision and soon my potential surplus will be gone and I’ll be left with an aging 2024 over-performer and “a player to be named later”. But then, I closed my laptop and thought, that was fun. It can be easy to forget that fun is the whole point. For 10 minutes on a weeknight, in between doing the dishes, taking out the trash, and getting my stuff ready for the next day of going into the office, I was a pretend general manager, wheeling and dealing and working a trade.

In the end, the offer was accepted and I have my trade partner to thank for going along with the “out of the box” idea. The truth is, I’m not sure what will happen. I don’t know this person. I randomly joined this league when I first ventured into the Ottonue Universe. They could easily claim no relief pitchers, offer me no “player to be named later”, and face zero penalties for doing so. If they break the terms, who cares? There is nothing in place to actually force them to do this. All I can hope is that my good faith contract will be honored and that I’ll scoop up an early-season relief pitcher with either holds or saves potential, preferably both.

As the season kicks off and you eye the top spot in the league, remember to enjoy the ride. You’re not a general manager tasked with the incredible stresses of leading a multi-million (sometimes billion) dollar organization to the elite status of World Series Champions. You’re pretending to do so from the comfort of your couch, where there’s no press, no millionaire/billionaire owner demanding results, and no one gunning for you and your job both within your own organization and elsewhere. You don’t have fans critiquing your every decision. If someone is jealous of your team or thinks you’ve made a bad move, they can start their own at https://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/, and they should! It’s fun. Good luck this season and don’t forget to have a little fun yourself.