Screenshot of the new alternate hitters cheatsheet in Draft Buddy 2.5 Beta, with Target Percentages added for standard 5×5 roto leagues. Now available to download.

My normal state managing this website, my office pools website (March Madness Survivor pools now open), and doing web developer work primarily for Dynasty League Football, is a little frantic, pressed for time. I know many of you can relate. That is kind of how we roll as a society these days. Too many things to do, not enough time to do them.

That said, I was very intrigued by Chris Spencer’s Target Percentages article we published earlier this week, and how that could be incorporated into Draft Buddy. Chris asked me if I could add it to Draft Buddy and I even gave him a flat no, not possible, as my first answer. Keeping expectations low, I spent some time yesterday and this morning, and I think we are in business with a really cool concept that could give you one more edge in your fantasy baseball draft.

Introducing Draft Buddy 2.5 Beta with Target Percentages added for a standard 5×5 roto league. You can find the link to the file on the Draft Buddy download page under the “Additional Files” heading below the regular file download links.

I probably shouldn’t even have called it 2.5, as this is not an official release. Hopefully adding Beta does the trick to relay that message. Here is a summary of what you will find different in this file compared to our current version 2.0, all related to Target Percentages (click the images to see them better):

• roto tab
  • A box to add the total team stat target levels, based on 3rd place finish from the prior year standings as explained in Chris’ article. The default settings are from the article, a 12-team league, 5×5 roto with 13 hitters using 1 catcher and 5 outfielders, 9 pitchers and 3 bench spots.
  • A box showing your team’s total target percentage from starters for each stat category, which should change as you draft players.
• hitters data tab
  • Scroll right and find a new (old*) section after the Steamer projections and before the 2017 player stats. These are calculations of each player’s contribution to the target totals based on their projections from the light blue section on this tab.
    * This used to be where I would put the post-All-Star Game stats, but since I don’t have those available, this seemed an adequate place to put some Target Percentage calculations.
  • Further right there are some calcs in the custom fields that contribute to the AVG contribution calculation.
• pitchers data tab
  • Very similar to the hitters data tab, the old stats section is used for target percentage calcs and custom fields help calculate ERA and WHIP contributions. These sections are also used as lookup tables for the new hitters-tp and pitchers-tp alternate cheatsheets.
• hitters-tp tab
  • New cheatsheet! Yes, this was a fair bit of work, and always tricky doing big changes like this and making sure I don’t mess up an existing feature. Here is the main output of the calculations. It is the hitters position cheatsheet with target percentage contributions for every player in the rankings to each stat category.
  • The contributions are highlighted green on the cheatsheet if the contribution is equal to or greater than the target total divided by number of hitter starters. So basically, that player is “pulling their weight” for your team. If you had 10 starters, and that player accounted for 10% or more of your RBI team target, his RBI contribution is highlighted green.
  • The contributions are highlighted yellow on the cheatsheet if the contribution is equal to or greater than 75% of the target total divided by number of hitter starters. Same concept, but the player is not as helpful.
  • AVG is not highlighted green or yellow, but rather ratio stats we are targeting to finish at or above zero, so positive contributions are black text, negative contributions are red text.
  • Your team totals from the roto tab are carried over to the top of the cheatsheet for convenience.
• pitchers-tp tab
  • Very same as the hitters-tp tab explanations.

So there you have it, how Target Percentages are incorporated into Draft Buddy. This is important – this concept is NOT custom to your league in Draft Buddy at this time (and why this is not an official release). It is only added for standard 5×5 roto leagues at this time. That is HR, R, RBI, SB, AVG for hitters and W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP for pitchers. Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to customize it for other league scoring categories this season.

You can alter the targets as needed, so it will work for leagues of any number of teams. It is possible you can follow along what I’ve done and adjust the formulas as necessary to pull in, say, OBP instead of AVG, or QS instead of W. My caution is making changes though is don’t insert or delete columns or rows unless you really know what you are doing. Draft Buddy is fairly rigid with all of its existing features and complexities.

Hope you enjoy this addition to Draft Buddy. Chris’ Target Percentages Part II should be available next week and he runs through a mock draft so we can get some insight how he uses these expanded cheatsheets with all of the new data.