The Players I Roster Most in Ottoneu

This is the third installment of this annual Ottoneu tradition. In 2021, I broke the 12 players I rostered most into six buckets of types of players I look for. In 2022, I covered the five players I rostered in more than half of my Ottoneu leagues. This year will look more like last year – the 2021 piece still basically holds true, even if the names have changed, so no need to rehash it.

Before diving into this year, one interesting (at least to me) note on the last two years: The players I roster most tend NOT to be big stars – it’s hard to have Juan Soto or Corbin Burnes on more than half your rosters since everyone else wants them, too. So the 17 players I covered the last couple years have mostly been guys I was betting on breaking out, and the results have been pretty mixed.

This year, however, four of the six players I will write about are more established. I am not sure what that means. To be honest, it may just be that I am more diversified in the breakout targets I a going after. Aside from the two names you’ll see below, I have players like Logan O’Hoppe, Hayden Wesneski, Michael Massey, Spencer Steer, Kerry Carpenter, and others on multiple rosters, but not more than half. I don’t know if that is a positive development or not, but it does appear to be a change from previous years, though not intentional.

With that, here are the six players I roster on more than half of my Ottoneu teams.

Daulton Varsho – 5/7 teams – This is pretty straight-forward, as Varsho was on almost half of my teams last year, and then I traded for him in another last August and then picked him up in my one start-up league this year. I suspect this will be short-lived, but we’ll see.

The good is pretty obvious – 27 HR, 16 SB for 5×5 leagues; 4.5 P/G in points leagues, and while his average isn’t great his OBP is acceptable for 4×4, especially for a C. This is what I was hoping for when I added him last year and why I continue to invest now.

BUT (there is always a but), I am not particularly confident he can repeat all of that. He doesn’t hit the ball hard that often (25th percentile hard-hit rate) and his HR/FB rate looks like an outlier. Of the 67 players with 41.5% or lower HH rate (Varsho’s was 35.3%), only two had a higher HR/FB rate: Jose Altuve and Jeremy Pena, both RH hitters who get to take aim at the Crawford Boxes in Houston half the time.

Varsho does elevate the ball well and had the highest pull-rate in the game. From a power perspective, pulling the ball in the air will help you maximize your contact quality, and that shows in his barrel rate, which was 70th percentile. His xwOBA (.298) was well below his wOBA (.323) but regularly getting to your pull-side power is a good way to beat your xwOBA.

Varsho appears to have been a bit unlucky with his line drive rate, so my expectation for this year is that his xwOBA increases with more line drives, enough to allow his wOBA to stay where it was. That’s below projections for him, but I am still happy to have him rostered so much because as a C, that is still enough to make him a star.

I said earlier that I expected my interest in him to be short-lived – that’s because I think he loses C eligibility after this season, at which point he needs to be re-evaluated as an OF. That will be a big hit to his value and likely means I’ll cut him in most of these five leagues in January 2024.

Framber Valdez – 4/7 teams – Valdez is making his glorious return to this list, as he was in the 2021 article, but not 2022. That is mostly due to league shuffling. He got onto a fourth roster this year because I added a new league and drafted him in that league. In my seven non-Ottoneu leagues, I have him on another four rosters and at 8/14 total teams, he is my most widely rostered player in all the fantasy land.

I don’t really think I need to say much about why. He’s good. Very good. Over the last three seasons he has a 3.05 ERA over 406.2 IP (remember, that includes the 60-game 2020). Thanks to an insane 66.7% GB rate, he carries at 0.62 HR/9, which has huge value in 4×4 and points leagues, and if you play 5×5, he pairs the good rates with an elite offense that should net him plenty of wins.

Pablo López – 4/7 teams – I expected the price for López to sky-rocket this year. After years of hearing that the talent was great, but you couldn’t trust him to throw many innings, he went out and threw 180 innings last year, but it doesn’t feel like the narrative has changed.

Which is probably fair. Doing it once isn’t quite enough to completely shake the fear he will miss a bunch of time. Plus, his K-rate decreased in 2022 and his overall production was not quite as good, as a result.

But it does raise his ceiling a bit. It also doesn’t hurt that his velocity is up this spring. You can now see a path to bringing the strikeouts back up over one per inning while putting up 175+ innings, and that would be a special arm.

The new park won’t help, as Miami is a great place to pitch, but I see enough that I like to be excited. In some ways, this may be a make-or-break year for López on my rosters. If the k-rate comes back up and the innings stay high, he’ll be an arbitration target and a clear long-term piece of my rotation, locked in next to Valdez. If the strikeouts don’t return, if he misses significant time, or he struggles in the new park, he may end up being a cut this off-season.

Alex Cobb – 4/7 teams – Framber Valdez-lite. Cobb also carries a great ground ball rate, which makes him an asset in 4×4 and points leagues. I am also optimistic that he finds a way to bring his ERA back in line with this performance this year. The last two seasons his ERA is 3.74 but his FIP is 2.85, his xFIP is 3.08 and his SIERA 3.42. Even his xERA is 3.15.

The issue mostly seems to stem from a high BABIP and a low LOB%. On the former, he has carried xwOBA against slightly higher than his wOBA against over those two years, so he may just be a high BABIP pitcher, which isn’t unexpected given the lack of fly balls.

As for the latter, in 2022 he made huge strides with men on, reducing his FIP in those scenarios from 4.09 in 2021 to 3.04 in 2022, but he still carried a lower-than-expected LOB%. In points leagues this doesn’t matter at all and in 4×4 and 5×5 it really only matters a little – just one of four categories he can impact in either – so even without further LOB% gains, he should be good again. Those gains would just be icing on the cake. Or dressing on the Cobb salad, maybe?

Brandon Marsh – 4/7 teams – we finally get to the two less-established players who emerged as the upside plays on more than half my teams. Before we get into why I like Marsh, I should note that I am paying Marsh $6. Total. Across all four leagues. So part of the reason I roster him so often is that no one else really wanted to. Where I bid $2, no one went to $3. Where I started him at $1, no one bid $2. I never had to make a second bid on him to roster him in four leagues.

Why is no one forcing me to pay to plant my flag on Marsh Island? Everyone else’s case is pretty easy to make. He has 721 MLB PA and calling them bad is an understatement. .296 wOBA and 34.5% K-rate. His 55-grade raw power has netted him 13 HR. It hasn’t been good.

Then he went to Philadelphia and things got better. He closed the season with 138 PA for the Phillies with a .334 wOBA. He brought his K-rate under 30%. He walked less, as well, but for now, I can live with that. What I wanted to see first was progress. And there was clear progress.

The other thing I wanted to see was a change in approach that gives me reason to believe in the progress. I was expecting to see that come from increased patience, but if anything he was more aggressive after the trade. His O-Swing and Z-Swing rates both increased. But so did his O- and Z-contact rates – and the contact rates increased by a lot.

That increase in contact may be attributable to changes he made with Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long. The clip below was shared by Jeff Israel on Twitter. In it, you can see a couple of swings with the Angels and a couple with the Phillies. With the Angels, notice how noisy Marsh’s feet are before the pitch, like he can’t stand still and is trying to get comfortable. He starts a bit more open, feet moving and does a double toe-tap before swinging. With Philly, the stance is closed up and much quieter. The toe-tap before the step is gone, as he takes a single stride into his swing.

Is that the sustainable explanation for Marsh’s improvement? Who knows. It certainly might be and for a buck, I am happy to take that shot. And one final note – by the end of the year, his O-Swing was trending down. There are some very positive signs here.

Kyle Stowers – 4/7 teams – Stowers was not quite as easy to pick up, although he is more available today (Marsh is rostered in over 57% of leagues; Stowers under 25%). I am paying him $8 total and was pushed to $3 in one of my leagues. I might be more invested in Stowers than anyone else in all of Ottoneu.

Stowers is both my favorite type and least favorite type of prospect. He is my favorite because I love to roster prospects who are less-heralded, have good on-field results, and are set to get playing time. Stowers got a 45 FV grade from the FanGraphs prospect team and was outside their top 100. That’s a check for “less-heralded.” Since coming back from the year off due to the pandemic, he has made three stops of >100 PA and posted a wRC+ over 130 at all three. He was even above average (107 wRC+) in a 98 PA cup of coffee last year. Check for “good on-field results.” And after ending the year with the Orioles, he is, per Roster Resource, likely to be in their Opening Day lineup. Check for “set to get playing time.”

That just means I have a guy who won’t cost much, has a reasonable shot at solid production, and who I can learn a lot about quickly. All good.

What I don’t like is the K-rate. I like prospects who can work a count and draw walks (which he can) but avoid strikeouts and make contact at a high rate. That is less clear. That is what drove his 35 current/40 future grade on his hit tool.

Without that wart, though, he would be much more popular. And in MLB last year he kept his K-rate under 30% (yes, 29.6 counts as “under 30”). He needs to show he can take another step in reducing the strikeouts while adding back the walks, but if he can, he has the power to be a very useful fantasy player. And if he can’t? He was useful last year with that K-rate and a sub-5% walk rate. So there is a path to some success even without growth. I’ll take that bet.