I’m new to Ottoneu and I’m wondering if there is any way to calculate/quantify the value of players when you consider their platoon splits or changes to where they bat in the lineup? A player like Lane Thomas comes to mind. He was much worse against RHP and he was also much worse when they moved him out the leadoff spot. Can we calculate his overall value compared to what his value was against LHP and when he was batting leadoff? Maybe a team’s overall value increases if you have a replacement level player to substitute in for players with these types of splits? Thanks
This is always a fun question, as ottoneu’s large rosters really let you take advantage of platoons–real or imagined. You can use players in real-life platoons, who may have points per game suppressed by their role, but also players on the margins with everyday roles and real-life splits that can be used to your advantage.
Keeping things pretty general, as I personally don’t have any hard and fast rules, I compare P/G and P/PA for the former, diving into points per start (using baseball-reference to get GS data) for players that jump out in that comparison. For full-time players, though handedness splits take forever to stabilize, you can find marginal overall players with noticeable splits (usually you want to focus on advantageous strong side players, from a playing time perspective), and then build a viable starter Frankenstein-style. If I’m rostering the depth to do so, I’ll also take career splits and use those to inform daily start-sit decisions, with some bias toward current season (the “imagined” platoons from earlier).
For lineup order, there have been a few articles showing how many PA occur on average for each lineup slot. For an ottoneu bent, there’s this older article with a PA/GS chart:
If you want to analyze how lineup order could or should affect your values, you could use the P/PA ratio and then multiply that by the assumed PA of the lineup slot. There are surely values to be found in comparison to non-DC projections (and arguably in comparison to those as well, heh).
I noticed you requested slack access, so once you get on there, there was a discussion of this topic in the ottoneu baseball channel. I believe it was spurred by your post here, though it looks like no one came back to the thread to discuss it, heh, so I hope this helps somewhat.
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I find that platooning players, either due to their real-life platoon or for an everyday player with significant platoon splits, frequently makes the most sense with outfielders. Because you will likely have 7-8 outfielders on your roster, you can fill your lineup with the best match ups on any given day (due to the 5 starting spots), more easily than trying to manage a C or 2B platoon.
Additionally, players with significant platoon splits are also frequently used as PH in games they do not start. This will skew their surface P/G stats. For these players it is better to look at P/GS to better assess the value they would provide to your team, since you would not have them in your lineup for those PH appearances.
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