A boutique, brainy version of fantasy baseball
About the closest you can get to experiencing being a real GM
The world's most lifelike fantasy baseball game isn't made by CBS, Yahoo or ESPN. It's produced by one man, operating out of his Washington, D.C., apartment, whose work has drawn the acclaim of major league insiders and given hardcore fans a beloved underground outlet — a “Fugazi of fantasy baseball,” as some call it.
Ottoneu, founded by former Silicon Valley programmer Niv Shah, is a boutique fantasy baseball platform whose stated aim is “to mimic the job of an actual general manager as closely as possible.” That means 40-man rosters, winter meetings, thousands of minor leaguers, market-based free agency and even salary arbitration — features rare or cumbersome on the major platforms.
With more than 300 active leagues and almost 4,000 active managers, Ottoneu — entering its 10th year — represents the culmination of a vision, buoyed by a generation of fans interested in sabermetrics, to make fantasy baseball more lifelike. In Ottoneu the game, you build for the long haul, investing in players who might offer a better value than flashy stars. Ottoneu the startup endorses a similar long-term strategy, eschewing ads and counting on the loyalty of its often-fanatical users, who pay an entrance fee, starting at US$20 per year — meaning Shah is only beholden to his customers, a few of whom have graduated to jobs in MLB front offices.
He loves it, too. If you could tell eight-year-old Niv Shah, surrounded by baseball cards, that he would run a successful fantasy baseball site, one that would pay the bills and put him in the orbit of real-life baseball teams? “His brain would explode,” said Shah, now 39.
The 2003 publication of Moneyball changed how a generation of baseball fans thought about the game, and Shah and his friends from high school in Cleveland were paying attention. Batting average and RBI — scoring categories in traditional fantasy baseball — were revealed as phantoms. Fans and front offices alike started looking more closely at player value, encompassing both performance and cost.
“People were trying to figure out, `What is actually valuable?' ” Ben Lindbergh, baseball staff writer at the Ringer, said in a recent podcast reviewing that era. “It did lead a generation of people to look at things from the GM's perspective.” That was especially true in baseball markets with spending constraints — such as Cleveland in the early 2000s, which successfully rebuilt by trading ace Bartolo Colon, then nearing free agency, for prospects Cliff Lee, Brandon Phillips and Grady Sizemore, all of whom became all-stars.
That trade impressed Shah and his friends. Under the influence of Moneyball, and inspired by that Colon trade, they started tinkering with their Yahoo fantasy league.
“First off, I want to build an organization, not just a team,” said Chad Young, Shah's longtime friend and fellow fantasy player. “Second, I don't want credit for batting average and RBIs and pitcher wins, now that I know there are better ways to measure the value a player brings to the table.”
They began using spreadsheets to manage rosters larger than what Yahoo allowed. Eager to ditch the waiver-wire method of player acquisition, they held onerous free agent auctions over email. After a heated debate over whether a rookie Cole Hamels had been won fairly, Geoff Newton, a young economist with the U.S. Federal Reserve, suggested they switch to Vickrey auctions, a sealed-bid auction in which bidders are incentivized to bid what they believe to be the true value of the item.
How could they seal the bids? Shah, who studied computer science and history at Tufts University, wrote a quick web app to handle the auctions. That planted the seed that would become Ottoneu.
Value, not simply performance, would be at the heart of their new game. Building on the auctions, Newton proposed a basic economic system: 40 roster spots and a $400 salary cap. Every new player acquisition would be market-based, and teams could trade with one another and loan money, too.
Serving as a GM in baseball is a year-round job, and two of Ottoneu's key innovations occur after the World Series and before spring training. Inflation, incurred annually, would help to break up superteams, a problem that plagued fantasy leagues. Even more turnover comes from arbitration, by which managers get to raise the salaries of their competitors' best contracts — consistently cited as one of the most compelling parts of the game.
“Thinking about player value over a longer period of time — no one else could support that,” Young said. “It starts to feel like this is the way a real team would build their roster.”
Running a business based on baseball (indeed, on the business of baseball) hasn't dimmed Shah's appreciation for the game.
Still a Cleveland fan, Shah's earliest baseball memory may be of defeat — the 1997 World Series lost by Cleveland. His most recent, though, is victory, because last year — for the first time since launching Ottoneu publicly — he won his league.