The Players I Roster Most In Ottoneu Reviewed
Some years just aren’t your year. Sometimes that is because you don’t get the breaks you need. Sometimes you just run into better teams in a bunch of leagues. And sometimes you load your rosters up with unproductive players and pay the price.
Each year, I take a moment before the season to review the players I roster most. And now, looking back that article…uh…yikes.
To start, I focused that article on two players – JP Sears and Chase DeLauter, who were six and five of my rosters, respectively. They were the only two players on more than four of my seven Ottoneu rosters. And they did not help. I expected DeLauter to debut, but injuries again interrupted his season. He’s back in the Arizona Fall League and I still expect him to be a good Major Leaguer and I still think that happens sooner rather than later, but it did not happen in 2024.
Sears, meanwhile, had some good appearances here and there but simply couldn’t put together consistently strong performances. I saw his impressive minor league numbers and thought we would see some of that translate into MLB performance. We didn’t.
I also listed 10 other players on four of my rosters and many of them disappointed, as well.
- Isaac Paredes – Was exactly who I hoped through July 28 with 5.3 P/G and then went to the Cubs and flipped that to 3.5 P/G. So was that just a cold streak or is playing in Chicago really that bad a fit for him?
- Kerry Carpenter – He was great! In the half of the season he played.
- Spencer Steer – Like Paredes, he was strong for the first half and then fell off.
- Tylor Megill – He had a weird season and while it ended up quite solid, by the time he was performing most of my teams were already dead.
- Drew Thorpe – Unhealthy and ungood.
- Kyle Bradish – My comment on him in March was: “Please be healthy please be healthy please be healthy please be healthy please be….” He wasn’t healthy.
- Luke Little – I worried about the walks but thought the K’s would make up for it. They did not. And he was hurt.
- Max Kepler – I really thought he would repeat his 2023.
- Pablo López – Very weird season for López, who had the K’s, reduced the walks, but didn’t get the results.
- Yennier Cano – Finally, one guy who didn’t actively hurt me. Yay?
What’s the takeaway? A couple of things. First, injuries really caused me issues. I know I am not alone in that, but as bad as that list looks, it would be totally different if Carpenter played a full season, Megill started healthy enough to help out, and Bradish stayed on the field. They didn’t, and that can’t be ignored, but it really hurt.
Secondly, this list is often made up of players who are guys I view as underrated. And that can lead to a higher bust rate. But I think my teams were too reliant on these guys this year, especially on the pitching side. Having Sears, Megill, Bradish, Thorpe, and Lopez all on multiple rosters and all either struggle or get hurt really put me in a bad spot. I needed to either have a quicker cut finger to move on and find guys who were going to help, or I needed to find more reliable arms before the season. Or both.
A long-time fantasy baseball veteran and one of the creators of ottoneu, Chad Young's is the Managing Editor for RotoGraphs, and can be heard on the Keep or Kut Podcast. You can follow him on Bluesky @chadyoung.bsky.social.
Paredes’ batted balls changed dramatically in Chicago; he dropped nearly fourteen percentage points of fly balls in exchange for line drives. And while for most hitters that would be fine, beneficial even, Paredes has no natural power to take advantage of line drives with and isn’t fast either. His entire strategy is to pull his fly balls down the left field line with abandon. His ground ball rate also spiked due to a much lower launch angle (24.2 degrees vs. 18.8).
My thought is the Cubs hitting coaches tried to change him to a more traditional batted ball distribution without changing his pull-heavy ways, not realizing that his power, and essentially his entire value, is entirely dependent on his fly ball percentage.
That would be a shockingly poor job on the part of both the Cubs and Paredes, if true. It’s been very well known among the analytically inclined lay people here and other baseball sites that Paredes succeeds by hitting a ton of pulled fly balls despite not having much raw power. If the Cubs didn’t realize what was making him good and tried to change him, it would be shockingly poor player acquisition strategy. If Paredes also didn’t realize it or didn’t have the conviction to push back, it would be similarly surprising. I suspect that it was more of a matter of small samples and maybe the player pressing/being a bit off in a new environment than some hastily arranged and poorly thought out changes.
To be fair, absolutely no one does it to the same degree that Paredes does. It might have been the idea that they could change it somewhat to add to what he does, rather than effectively subtracting. It was 52 games and 212 PA; that’s not that small of a sample anymore. It did increase his Hard Hit rate meaningfully from the career-low he was sitting at in Tampa Bay, so it’s not like it was a terrible idea from a base standpoint. It’s just that it didn’t develop properly because Paredes lacks the physical tools to actually take advantage, something that is truly bizarre for an athlete of his caliber.
A few of my most-rostered:
Late-season pickups I’m excited about but will have to temper enthusiasm given SSS: Peterson, Tylor Megill, Bido, Boyd, Bradford, Brown