What to Spend on RP in Ottoneu

If you have been reading my content or following me on Twitter (or now on Bluesky) over the years, you know my stance on RP. If not, here is the TL;DR of everything I have ever written about relievers in Ottoneu: I don’t like to spend on them. Go cheap on the pen, spend elsewhere. But, to be transparent, that was always more a vibes-based thing than real analysis. Until now.

The vibes I based this strategy on were as follows:

1. Relief performance is the most volatile thing in baseball and the hardest to predict. Yes, you can count on Emmanuel Clase to be great. But for every Clase, there are like 15 other relievers who could be Ottoneu relevant but also might stink.
2. If you are willing to take some risk and churn through those 15 others, you can get a lot of them for $1-$2 and if/when you find the ones who stick, you are set. You get most of the production for a tiny fraction of the cost.
3. It has worked for me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix bother questioning your rationale for it.

But I know a lot of other managers like to spend on RP, believing that the volatility makes the reliable relievers that much more valuable, and I have seen managers win with that approach, as well. So I always had questions about this – is my strategy right?

Then Ottoneu player Kenny replied to a tweet and asked me to put some numbers behind my stance that we shouldn’t be paying for RP and, well, it was time to do just that.

A little over a week ago, I used data provided by Ottoneu founder Niv Shah to look at the most and least valuable players in Ottoneu. This data included end of year results and Opening Day rosters for every team in every OPL-eligible, season-long FanGraphs Points league. I used this same data to to evaluate RP spend.

The goal was to figure out if spending on RP as keepers or at auction was a good strategy and, if so, how much spend was a good idea (or how much was too much). I first took every player who was RP eligible and eliminated anyone I could find who I knew to be a SP or a prospect. This was a semi-manual process and while I think I cleaned the data pretty well, there is some risk I missed a name or two. I don’t think there was much, if any, impact.

I then totaled for each team the number of relievers they rostered as of Opening Day and how much they spent on those RP total. Because this was as of Opening Day, there are likely some teams in here carrying a large number or high spend on RP who did NOT leave their auction that way, but made a trade to acquire an ace reliever before the season started. I think this is a small effect in the data but it may make spending on RP look more attractive. A team trading for a $20 ace RP with a loan in March will be treated, in here, as if they spent $20 on that RP, and they didn’t actually spend that $20. But that is something to keep in mind.

Having done that, I cut the data a number of different ways, but consistently found the same result: my original hypothesis was, generally speaking, right. You don’t want to overspend on relievers. But you may not want to spend nothing, either. Let’s dive into some of the data.

Each dot on that graph represents a decile of RP spend. So the dot that is almost off the top right corner of the graph, highest up the “Average Total RP Spend” axis, represents the top 10% of teams in terms of how much they spent on relief pitching, putting nearly $60 into their pens, on average, and finishing around 8th place, on average. The dot closest to the bottom left is the bottom 10% of teams in RP spend, spending under $8 on average, and finishing just a bit outside the top 6, on average.

The average finish for all teams is 6.5 and there are six dots to the left of that line (i.e., six deciles that had better than expected finishes on average): the bottom six deciles. The 60% of teams that spent the least on relievers (all were under $34) finished better than expected. The 40% that spent the most (over $34), finished worse than expected.

But, as you can see, it is not as simple as “less is better” – the two deciles with the best overall finishes are not the bottom two. Here is the data in a table:

 

As you can see here, the 6th and 8th deciles, representing spends of $26-$29 and $17-$21 were the best overall finishers, with the bottom decile (less than $12 spend) next best but a fair distance behind.

It is worth noting that some of these teams had not completed building their rosters and 13 teams had 0 RP on their roster at this point. If we only look at the 106 teams in that decile that rostered at least three relievers, their average finish was 5.82 – better than any other decile. If we up that bar to rostering at least five relievers (a full pen), we are left with 57 teams that finished 5.67 on average.

Lest you think this 3-RP min would impact other deciles, here are the finishes by decile with that minimum applied across the board:

So while spending as little as possible on relievers isn’t a clear-cut best strategy, at least for 2024, if you made an effort to build a bullpen and if you did so on $11 or less, you were better off than if you spent more than that.

Of course, average finish may not be what matters most. Maybe those big spenders had a lot of last place finishes, but also won a bunch of titles, right? Across all leagues, 8.3% of teams (1/12) win a title and 25% of teams (3/12) place in the top three (a typical cut off for leagues that have prizes.

We see a similar pattern. The three highest spending deciles were all less likely than sheer luck to win a title and the top four highest spending deciles were all less likely than sheer luck to finish top three. This time the bottom decile fares well, but not great. The strongest groups are the 5th-8th deciles – very similar to the 6th and 8th that looked so good in the last table. And this time, correcting that bottom decile to account for teams that just never built a pen doesn’t help. Those bottom two deciles (<$17 total spend) simply did not perform as well as the four above them ($17-33 total spend).

So from an overall spend perspective, going big on RP is a mistake, or at least was in 2024. Spending more than $33 on your pen lowers your expected finish in the league while spending more than $37 lowers your chances of winning the league or even placing top-three.

Going too small on relievers, on the other hand, looks like a safe strategy but maybe not a winning one. Those bottom decile spenders are finishing higher than others on average, but are winning their leagues at a slightly-below-expected rate. The finish top-three at only an expected rate.

My read on this is that by going low-cost ($11 or less) on your pen, you can set yourself up to build a strong offense and/or rotation, giving your team a high floor, but you are likely making it more challenging to max out your team’s potential because you are fighting an uphill battle to get strong relief scoring. But spending too much pulls too many resources away from the rest of your roster and leaves you more susceptible to the vagaries of reliever noise.

I should also note that this data is only from FanGraphs points leagues and only from season-long leagues. I suspect we would see similar patterns in some other formats, but there would be some differences:

• Head-to-head leagues should support slightly higher RP spend, especially assuming a GS-per-week cap. In those leagues, relief innings are effectively uncapped innings and a chance to get points without using up any scarce resource (games started or offensive lineup spots; RP slots are scarce but it’s so rare to get >5 RP pitching the same day that they are effectively unlimited if used well).
• SABR Points leagues should support slightly higher RP spend, since the balance of points in those leagues shifts away from SP in that format, relative to FanGraphs Points.
• In 4×4 leagues, I think the “don’t spend on RP” effect would be even more pronounced, given the lack of value placed on high-leverage innings. There is no value to a save or hold in 4×4.
• In 5×5 leagues, this analysis is basically useless. Saves are the only category in 5×5 that are effectively capped. Stolen bases are often paired with saves in this way, but there are 270 offensive players starting on any given day and any of them could steal a base. On any given day, there are only about 30 pitchers in a good spot to get a save. In fact, I think there are only about 20 you can point to as “this guy will likely get a save if his team wins a close game” and another 10-20 who might be that guy but we can’t be sure. This makes RP prices in 5×5 leagues a totally different beast.

Historically, I have budgeted $1 per open RP spot on my team, and rarely kept a reliever who cost more than $5. Even at $3, I would get an itchy cut finger. As I go through off-season cuts and trades, here is how I am thinking about relief pitchers moving forward, thanks to this analysis:

• In my points leagues, I am likely keeping the $3-$5 RP who impressed me last year. These are the guys I picked up for $1-$3 last year and then held onto, rather than churning, because they performed well. Across leagues, I have $3 Hunter Gaddis, $3 Cade Smith, and $3 Ryan Walker, all of whom are guys I would have been happy to trade in the past, but will value more highly this year.
• I am also going to be more aggressive about keeping my high-performing relievers at higher prices. I have a $10 Devin Williams who would have been an obvious trade candidate for me, historically. He isn’t now.
• In FanGraphs Points leagues, I am going to target building a $15-$20 bullpen, but be willing to got up to $25 if needed. This is a big shift from my tendency to build $5 bullpens. I think you can make a case for $25-$30 being a better target, but I think that is still too high for me.
• In SABR Points leagues, I am going to look at more like $20-$25 total.
• In 4×4 leagues, I am sticking with my old-school $5 bullpen strategy. I don’t think this data changes my approach there at all, but I understand if you disagree.
• In 5×5 leagues, I am ignoring this entirely. Go get saves. They are hard to find.