Value Gainers From Ottoneu Mock Auction

A group of Ottoneu experts, including myself, my FanGraphs colleague Jake Mailhot, Surplus Calculator creator Justin Vibber, and Ottoneu creator Niv Shah are in the midst of a mock Ottoneu auction, drafting a full start-up league of 480 players. The goal is to get some insight into how the market is shaping up for the 2022 season before auction season heats up in February. Hopefully we can learn something early about who should have trade value, who you should target at auctions, and who you might be able to cut and get back cheaper.

As of when I am writing (late Wednesday night, December 1), we are 223 players deep and I wanted to start analyzing some of what we are seeing. To start, we’ll look at some of the biggest value gainers since the start of the 2021 season.

To do that, I took the prices from this auction and compared them to the prices paid for players in 2021 first-year leagues. This allows an apples-to-apples comparison: the average salaries from first-year leagues are what the market wanted to pay for players in the absence of any keepers, any inflation, etc. That is the same situation we are in with this mock auction.

While there are still 264 players to be auctioned, money is already getting tight. We started with 480 spots and $4800 to spend, for $10 per spot. As of now, there are 257 spots left and $763 left to spend, or just $3.40 per spot. That makes it unlikely, though not impossible, that anyone goes for much more than $10 the rest of the way. As a result, the biggest salary gainers (i.e., players whose salaries went up the most in this auction relative to the first-year prices last year) are set. Here is the list of players whose salaries were $15+ higher in this auction than their average 2021 first-year league salaries.

Not surprisingly, this is a who’s who of players who broke out in 2021. You have the AL MVP (and the next two highest finishers in the AL MVP), both Cy Young winners (and the NL 2nd place nd AL 5th place vote-getters), and the NL Rookie of the Year.

This data is subject to being a bit flukey – just because someone in this draft wanted a $62 Vlad or a $34 Wheeler or a $33 Semien doesn’t mean they will go for those prices in every auction. It’s also very early – Semien went for $33 before he landed in Texas, we still don’t know where Rodon will pitch, and a number of these players may get traded.

But this does give you a sense of how the market is shaping up. These are players who should have been top targets for arbitration and if their prices are still close to 2021 prices, they are ideal trade targets. If a manager thinks they paid a fair price last year, they may underestimate the player’s gains and be willing to deal.

There is also some risk here that I think is worth discussing. Players like Ohtani and Guerrero are coming off otherworldly seasons and they are being paid to repeat that. I bid $58 on Ohtani, but given his injury history and uneven performance on the mound, there is real risk. Even a fully healthy Ohtani that looks more like his second half than his first won’t meet $58 in value. Guerrero is not only coming off a season that will be tough to replicate; he also lost 3B eligibility and is now 1B-only.

Interestingly, it feels to me like this group paid for the Austin Riley breakout but hedged a bit on Cedric Mullins. Mullins put up 6.49 P/G in 2021; Riley put up 6.33. And while 3B can be tough to fill, OF is a challenge as well. They also came off the board close to each other (53rd for Mullins, 62nd for Riley) so it’s not like the market shifted somehow. Instead, that $7 difference suggests to me that either this group is less convinced by Mullins than Riley or that there is more anxiety about 3B than I realized (and I am pretty anxious about 3B). It could also just be noise? In my massive thread with one Tweet for each player drafted here, I said I thought both Mullins and Riley should go for around $25, so I think these two should be closer together.

Of this group, Rodon feels riskiest to me, given we don’t know where he will pitch or how healthy he is. I am very interested to see what kind of contract he signs. Verlander, who shows up 5th here, got a boost in his value from his contract – the fact that the Astros are willing to risk a $25MM player option for 2023 suggests they and their doctors are pretty confident in him. If Rodon signs something with low guarantees and a ton of incentives, that will make me nervous. If he signs something like Verlander, I’ll be very interested.

Among the hitters, O’Neill feels riskiest. There is so much swing-and-miss in his game and he only earned out this value in 2021 because he made such insanely good contact when he did not miss. I worry about whether he can maintain that rate of high-quality contact on such a low rate of contact. That doesn’t mean he will or even should go for less than he did here – just that I won’t likely be the one to pay for him.

At the other end of the spectrum, I like Wheeler and Reynolds as good bets to put up good years. The price on Reynolds pushed a little high for my comfort, but he was so good in 2019, too.