Idea for new league w/ no initial auction

Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball
1

Hey folks —

I’m new to Ottoneu and looking to give it a whirl. I also don’t have a 6+ hour hole in my schedule to do an initial draft. So I have an idea which I’ve outlined below — if you are interested in joining this league, please reply or message me. You can be a beginner or a veteran. Would like to peg this league at $50 or $75 (to put a little skin in the game) and use an allocation system. Would like FanGraph points, ideally H2H but open on that.

The basic pitch is to use average Ottoneu values (https://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/averageValues) to allocate players to start to create roughly equal teams. From there people can trade, claim free agents, etc. Future years would have real drafts but we’d forgo the massive scheduling effort it takes to get a group together to do year 1 before the season starts.

It could work in two ways — feel free to let me know what you prefer if you are interested:

  1. Create 12 teams with 32 players using an automated snake draft (team 1 gets player with highest average value, team 2 gets next, etc). Randomly assign the teams out. Alternatively, if we wanted to get interesting, people could bid on the teams with any money spent going to the prize pool. You could spend $0 at that stage but then you’d just get a randomly assigned team that was not bid on. Note that any players not on a team could be allocated by traditional Ottoneu free agency.

  2. Create random “pods” of players of roughly equal $ value based on averages. Say you do 48 pods of 8 players each. I could create those groupings, send them out to everyone, and then we snake draft the pods over email or at couchmanagers.com. Each team gets 4 pods, 32 players total, and then the rest of the player pool gets allocated by free agency.

Maybe a crazy idea (and need to confirm we can upload “offline” auction results instead of using the systems auction draft) but would help get a fresh league going without the single highest barrier to entry for me which is finding a time to do a massively long auction (as fun as that may be).

Thanks

2

Trickiest thing here is that a snake draft assigning players in order as teams would likely quickly run out of money. If you can figure a way to make equal teams with players valued at average, then this might be doable.

Yes- commissioner can add all players in at whatever salary and assign to teams without a draft.

3

Thanks for the feedback. Just ran a quick simulation of a snake draft using H2H points values on first year leagues and found that for 32 players per team (leaving 8 spots open for FAs), you get an average team value of $364. The first two teams have higher because of Trout/Betts having such high values ($385 for the Trout team and $375 for the Betts team) and then all other teams are between $357 and $363. I would assume leaving 8 free agent slots at around ~$36 of cap room is fine but let me know if you disagree. As for distributing players by position to get a roughly even distribution, that looks tricky, but if one team is overloaded at a position it would just encourage trading. Anyway, I think it could work.

4

I like this idea- the length of a draft on Ottoneu is one of the things that keeps me from doing it more. I’d be in - prefer option 1 and I think it could work.