Wrapping up An Unintentional Experiment

A little over three weeks ago, as we passed the mid-first-round roster update for the Ottoneu Prestige League (OPL), I wrote about an unintentional experiment. Due to roster circumstances, I was taking very different approaches with two of my OPL teams: The Hawken Hawks in league 13 and Keep or Kut Chad in 1443. Three weeks later, round one of OPL is over and it is time to see how that experiment worked out.

As a reminder, if you don’t want to re-read the April article, Keep or Kut Chad was doing quite well and making meaningful updates was going to require making some aggressive cuts (Triston Casas, Gerrit Cole, etc.) that I wasn’t willing to make. I decided to just roll with things and see how it played out.

The Hawks, meanwhile, were better positioned to make changes. We had some stashes to hold – Casas, Nick Pivetta, and Chase Delauter stood out – but we made a few cuts and adds.

Both teams were hovering the top 50, up to maybe top 40, through April 25, and my concern was that the Hawks would benefit from the better situation and ability to make upgrades while the other team would stumble.

That is not what happened. As of the end of round 1, Keep or Kut Chad has climbed to 24th, putting them in a great position to survive the second round and, at least for the moment, above the playoff line (the top 32 survive the third round and go into the knockouts). The Hawks, however, sit below the round 2 red line. They fell all the way to 102.

The gap between the two teams at the end of the round is 685.98 points.

It’s not like the pickups went terribly for the Hawks. Three of them scored 91+ points in just three weeks (91 from Andy Pages, 91.2 from JoJo Romero, and 104 from Connor Joe, all of whom were added to my OPL roster for just the second half of the round. Tyler Freeman chipped in 73.5 at a variety of positions, and Joe Ross and Ryan Weathers each pitched well enough to add 50+. Meanwhile, the one add to my other roster, Michael Soroka, added just 46.3 points.

And the top of the rosters aren’t that different. If I look at the top 5 scorers on each of those teams, the Hawks got 1,415 from their top five scorers; Keep or Kut got 1,423. If we go deeper, the Hawks actually got more from the top 10 (2,653) than Keep or Kut (2,652).

The bottom of the rosters explain some of the difference. Among players who were on the roster the full round (so not players cut before the roster update in April), the bottom five scorers on the Hawks put up 169; Keep or Kut got 292 from the bottom five. The way I calculated this (looking only at players on the roster the full round) should favor the Hawks, given we cut out players who were struggling or not playing, while those players hung around the Keep or Kut roster.

Another chunk of the gap is explained by the “weak” players we jettisoned before the roster update. Those players added 313.04 to our score; the players who replaced them added 516.27. If we had gotten as much production from those seven spots in the first half of the round as the second, we would have had an extra 200 points.

That covers about half the gap. Other factors – player talent, player performance, stacking of starting pitchers, etc. – make up the rest of the gap. But that half the gap would move the Hawks from where they are (outside the top 100) to comfortably above the round 2 red line (top 60). They wouldn’t be safe exactly, but they would be in a better position.

As with any experiment that includes no real design, no controls and only two data points, there are not broad conclusions to be drawn. But one thing that stands out to me is that even though these teams performed relatively similarly through the first half of the round, the differences moving forward were almost entirely in how the roster was constructed BEFORE the season. Injuries, promotions, options, and many other things are factors. But at the end of the day, changes we made in April helped, but couldn’t overcome decisions made in January, February, and March.