Coronavirus Update pt 3 / Short Season details

Ottoneu Updates
21

Define then what a completed season is. If they delay the start due to COVID spikes in MLB cities/players refusing to play amidst a pandemic, and they start Aug 24 and play a 35 game season, is that considered completed? If they start on Aug 1, but stop on Aug 15, then come back on Sep 1 and play out a 40-game season is that completed? If they start on Aug 1 and stop the season on Sep 5 after 36 games, is the season completed? If they start play on July 30 and on Sep 10 there is an outbreak and the teams who are not in the playoff chase are removed from the schedule so that only those with a shot at winning finish the 60-game schedule, is the season completed? If the Rangers have an outbreak and they donā€™t play 15 games, and the five teams who had 3-game series vs them over that span play 3 fewer games than other teams, is the season completed?

I submit to you that none of those are a completed season, and that the odds of the sum of them vs a world in which every team plays 60 games and no team has a big wipeout outbreak is about 90:10. I submit to you also that we do not have a completed 2020 season because a season is 162 games. Three Rockies have COVID, and they donā€™t announce who. If itā€™s Story, in his age 27 season, Story owners are screwed. If among the 12 Phillies itā€™s Harper or Realmuto their owners are in trouble. And because of privacy laws, we donā€™t know if players on our teams are infected.

In that last example above, the difference between the Rangers and Ottoneu is that the Rangers roster is the Rangers, whereas all the teams in Ottoneu are composed to some degree of Rangers, and their opponents. So while the Rangers not playing for 15 days is 15 days in which they go a meaningless .000, itā€™s a time in which Ottoneu owners with Rangers field a meaningful 0.

Instead of making an educated guess if Player A will break out, bust, hold, decline, improve, get hurt, have regressed BABIP based on analytics and educated guesswork we have to be epidemiologists now to play Ottoneu, and also hope that weā€™re not heavy on a team that gets impacted by plague. Thatā€™s not what weā€™re signed up for.

One way in which MLB is not like Ottoneu is that if there is a season the owners and players share a couple billion dollars, whereas Ottoneu is just like ā€œyouā€™re out some money.ā€ We as players should have the capacity, since we want this to be just like MLB, to opt out and roll our money if thatā€™s the majority in the league.

If you play in an online poker tournament and at the one-hour mark the software goes down for 45 minutes, everyone gets their money back. If the software goes down before the tournament starts, everyone gets their money back. This is what we have. Weā€™re not playing the full tournament.

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A completed season is defined by MLB and we are legally obligated to pay prizes on the completion of a MLB regular season. If youā€™d like to take this conversation offline we can, but I think all I can do at this point is repeat the prior sentence.

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Iā€™ve messaged you via email Niv, but you should clarify what a ā€œcompletedā€ season means, and if the examples I listed above define a completed season. If MLB plays through to a winner, and someone in my league who is a fan of and therefore overly heavy on Braves or Cardinals sees their team kneecapped for 1/4 of the season and is unable to compete in Ottoneu, how do you tell them the season is ā€œcompletedā€ and that they had a fair shot at winning back their $100 entry fee?

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The 60 game season agreed to by the owners and MLBPA and set by the MLB Commissionerā€™s Office constitutes the MLB regular season for 2020.

I will respond to your emails and we can continue this conversation there.

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25

Thanks for your hard work Niv - looking forward to Opening Day!

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Niv,

I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you!

This is a crazy time with unimaginable challenges for everyone. I know all of us are thrilled that Ottoneu is going to be able to continue and really appreciate all the work you put in that makes Ottoneu the best fantasy platform, especially now!

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Seconded, Niv youā€™re doing great and ottoneu is still by far the best fantasy baseball site available!

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28

Can you point me in the right direction where in the commissioner tools you can get creative with inflation?

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After inflation is applied you would have to make some transactions to undo it. Would take a little work.

30

Niv, thanks for all of the work behind the scenes with Ottoneu. My league voted earlier this month to ā€œfreezeā€ our league for 2020 since we had postponed our draft after MLB canceled spring training in March. We intend to (1) keep our rosters as they are currently composed going into the 2020-2021 off season, (2) avoid arbitration going into 2021, and (3) manually adjust salaries to remove inflation that occurs going into 2021, thus keeping salaries as they were going into the 2020 season. This seems to align with some of the suggestions made above about arbitration and inflation. I just want to check that there are no issues with our league appearing dormant for the rest of 2020 even though we fully intend to pick it up going into the 2021 off season? I realize that some of this flies in the face of the Ottoneu ethos of being more true-to-life to than other platforms but given that weā€™ve had the same collection of league owners for 7 consecutive years, Iā€™m eager to keep the league content. Thanks again for all of your work.

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If this is how you want to proceed you are more than welcome to. Your league will be ready to go in the 2020-21 off-season and will not be affected by having no transactions during the 2020 season. If your league is a prize league, Ottoneu will pay prizes out, so you will have to sort that out with your leaguemates. Other than that, this is a viable way to proceed with this year.

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Iā€™m not in any prize leagues, but for those concerned about such things: If a league decided to skip this year, couldnā€™t they park all players on the bench and the system would just split all the prizes 12 ways, because everyone tied for first with 0 points?

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It should work this way, but I am warning leagues that want this to happen to actively plan for the contingency where it does not work correctly.

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34

3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Multiple matchups per week available for H2H leagues

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Playoffs

If you choose to have playoffs this year, they will start on Monday, August 31.

As a general reminder, commissioners can change league settings right now, including enabling/disabling playoffs.

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Perhaps an obvious question, but: For H2H leagues that have multiple divisions, would the teams with the three best records finish in the money regardless of division?

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From the release of H2H:

Removing playoffs should not destroy your division structure, but the top 3 will be determined by best record without considering divisions.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Multiple matchups per week available for H2H leagues

39

If a player opts out, will his salary remain the same for next season? Or will it go up by $1 or $2? (Not including arb)

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40

This is a good question. The salary inflation of $2 applies to anyone who played in a major league game in the last 2 years. At the end of this season, that would include 2019 and 2020. So a player who opts out of 2020 but played in the majors in 2019 will go up $2. A player who opts out of 2020 and didnā€™t play in the majors in 2019 will go up $1.

All players will have either $1 or $2 inflation applied by the system.