[Help Desk] Compensating for Roto Stat Categories Not Included in Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy

When I answer questions from our Draft Buddy users by email or through our online help desk that I believe are potentially helpful to other users, then I will make an effort to post them. Here is our second Q&A of the 2015 baseball season, question submitted by member rcsurfabides:

Hi Mike,

I just discovered Draft Buddy for compiling cheatsheets in preparation to my upcoming draft. I am in a custom league, 10 team, with depth at most positions (2 players for all infield positions, individual outfield positions and 1 Util player added on, with 3 SP, 2 RP, 3P and 3 bench spots) with several offensive and defensive categories, making it a 10×10 Roto league (head to head).

I am excited about using Draft Buddy to help me prepare for my draft, and finally have a tool that can accomodate my custom settings. However, Buddy only offers 9 of the 10 hitting scoring categories (strikeouts missing), and 5 of the 10 pitching scoring categories (complete games, shutouts, home runs given up, walks issued, and losses missing). Is there any way that I can incorporate these statistics into Draft Buddy to make an accurate custom list for my league?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I am already impressed with all the hard work you have put into this project. I would also like to note I am a total novice when it comes to working with Excel, ha ha, so hopefully any suggestions are user friendly.

My response:

Hi. Thanks for checking out Draft Buddy. No problem on being a rookie Excel user. I will do what I can to help in that respect.

Other people have asked me over the years about valuing players for what would be termed negative stat categories, like K for hitters, or L (losses) for pitchers. Although I have done that for some ratio stats like ERA or WHIP (less is better), it does make things a lot trickier. Truthfully, it would be pretty difficult to get accurate weighting of stats to produce proper values for other categories that are not already included in Buddy.

If it is a straight fantasy points league then I might be able to suggest using an existing category that your league doesn’t use (if there are any! – ha ha), insert some new projections/stats, and use that category as a proxy for the one used by your league. Roto is a different animal and doesn’t really work as well that way.

Here is what I’m going to suggest though… the online Last Player Picked price guide offers more category options than Draft Buddy. For your league lets use that to produce your dollar values, and then export them to Draft Buddy for your draft tracking.

It doesn’t seem to have absolutely every category, such as complete games and shutouts. We don’t even have projections for those. They are rather rare occurrences though, so I think you’re actually better off excluding them from the player values. You don’t want two nearly identical pitchers being ranked potentially far apart from one another because one is forecast a complete game shutout and the other guy isn’t. I would just leave those categories out and when it happens (for your side), consider it a bonus.

You didn’t mention all of the hitter categories but consider the same argument for any of those if they are more of a rare type. For example, grand slams… the players more likely to get a grand slam are the guys who hit more homers, so instead of double counting essentially homers, single-weight homers and it is okay to leave out grand slams.

Once you use LPP, then you can pull the results into Draft Buddy.

Hope that helps, and let me know if you have any questions.