New Fantasy Baseball League Sync Connects Fantrax and NFBC

Today I am happy to introduce a new website feature, Fantasy Baseball League Sync.

Fantasy Baseball League Sync lets you connect Draft Buddy to your fantasy baseball leagues. This powers up various DraftBuddy.com features such as player stats, games played by position, and others to leverage roster data from your leagues. Quickly identify players on rosters, on your team, and available free agents right here without cross-checking your league.

In the gallery below, the first image is our player stats, synced to the Draft Buddy Head-to-Head Fantasy Points league, hosted at Fantrax. Players on my team are highlighted in green. Players on other rosters are highlighted in gray. The second image, I uncheck the “Rostered” option in the League Sync options box (upper-right), and the stats display my team and free agents.

Sync Fantrax and NFBC Leagues

While I understand many fantasy players play fantasy baseball at Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, RTSports, OnRoto, and others, our League Sync feature currently works with Fantrax and NFBC. The primary reason is because I play at Fantrax and NFBC, so admittedly, the decision is a tad self-serving.

Certainly easier for me to test development of the feature at leagues hosts where I already play. As time allows, then I can add more provider options. Yahoo and ESPN are probably the most popular but also complex to implement.

Since Fantasy Baseball League Sync provides a custom experience to our website visitors, then you must create an account and login to use this feature. You won’t be asked for your password at either Fantrax or NFBC, so you don’t need to worry about that personal info saved in our system. We don’t have access to emails of members in your leagues.

Once you are registered and logged in, let’s add a Fantrax league to your account.

Add Your Fantrax League To Fantasy Baseball League Sync

Username and Secret ID

Starting with Fantrax, there are two ways to add a league to Fantasy Baseball League Sync. The first is input your Fantrax Username plus a Secret ID from your account profile. This gives us access to the Fantrax API to identify your leagues.

The Secret ID is pretty secret, as it isn’t obvious how to find it. Go to Fantrax and login. Then under your profile picture in the top menu, click Profile. There, you will see your Username, and in the lower-right of that box, a mess of letters and numbers in small blue text. That is your Secret ID.

Input your info and click the Access My Fantrax Leagues button. If it connected properly, then a box appears with a list of leagues that should be familiar to you. Select the leagues you want to add to League Sync.

After clicking Add league(s), the leagues should appear in the Your Leagues list section of the League Sync page. Use the “Go to:” drop-down to start using Fantasy Baseball League Sync with different features.

League ID

The second way is by grabbing the unique League ID for your Fantrax league. This is found in the URL of every page on Fantrax for your league. Input that League ID into the appropriate box on League Sync, and we check the Fantrax API for that league to add it.

Funny enough, the Fantrax API for a single league does not include the most basic info – the league name! You should be prompted for the league name so you can easily identify each Fantrax league on Draft Buddy.

Add Your NFBC League to Fantasy Baseball League Sync

Syncing leagues from NFBC was not easy, but given I play in TGFBI, RazzSlam, plus one of the EARTH leagues all at NFBC, I was highly motivated to figure this out. There is an API somewhere, but not readily accessible to layperson developer. Maybe I should have asked Tom or Greg or anyone over at SportsHub.

The method I ultimately settled on is this: upload the Player Stats download from your NFBC league to Draft Buddy League Sync. League Sync parses the file, figures out the franchises in your league, saves all of the rosters, and then we are NFBC League Sync enabled.

Step one, download the file using the Download button from your NFBC league as shown above. You can find this from the menu under Stats > Player Stats.

Step two, in League Sync click the NFBC tab to display the upload form. Input a name for your league, and then click the Browse… button in the second input box. That should open a file select box. Browse to where you saved the downloaded Player Stats file, and select it. Now click Add NFBC League.

You should be presented with a similar leagues box as with Fantrax, showing the league name you already input, and a drop-down of franchises. Select your franchise and Add League(s). Now the league is in the Your Leagues list.

Waivers run at most once a week for all NFBC leagues. If you rosters changed since the last time your uploaded the stats file, then upload it again.

League Sync Questions, Feedback

If you notice a player not synced properly, it is usually because we don’t have that player’s ID from either Fantrax or NFBC properly set in our database. It happens as new players come out of the woodwork to become fantasy relevant. Simply let me know the player and league provider so I can track down the number, update our database, and then the player will sync.

I would like to add Yahoo, ESPN, and other sync options, but finding time is tough. I would definitely need some volunteers who play on those sites to help testing. If you have any questions, then fire away in the comments or by email. Feedback is also appreciated.