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Target Percentages in Mock Draft Action

March 10, 2018 By kopasetic Leave a Comment

Target Percentages guided author Chris Spencer to draft Boston Red Sox OF Mookie Betts with the 8th overall pick in a recent mock draft.

Recently, I introduced the concept of Target Percentages, the percentage of the targeted total stats a player earns for your fantasy baseball team based on his projections. Part one explains the concept and calculations in more detail. For part two, I will show you how to use Target Percentages during a draft.

In a perfect world you would like each batter (or pitcher) you draft to, “pull their own weight” by contributing positively to each category. For a simple example, let’s say you are in a league where you start 10 batters. Ideally, each batter accumulates 10% (or 1/10 starters) of your Runs, 10% of you HR, 10% of your RBI and 10% of your SB. In the ratio categories you just want to stay positive. For other league setups you simply identify your positive contribution line by 1/x where x is the number of batters (or pitchers) you start.

For this mock draft exercise I am drafting from the 8th slot using the same settings continued from part one on Target Percentages: 12-team league, 5×5 roto with 13 hitters, 9 pitchers and 3 bench spots. My positive contribution line is 7.7% (1/13) for batters and 11.1% (1/9) for pitchers.

I use color coding to draw attention to the players that are contributing positively and pulling their weight or better on my cheatsheet. Green indicates players that are giving me a positive contribution in that category by scoring 7.7% or more for batters or 11.1% or more for pitchers. Yellow indicates one percentage point away from being green (for batters, 6.7% to 7.69%). This indicator lets me know visually that they are close to contributing positively in that category.

I, personally, don’t color code the ratio categories since I am indicating negative numbers already in red. I suppose you could switch it around and color code positive contributors in green and maybe go down to -0.25 or -0.50 in yellow to indicate they are close to positive. Target Percentages are a tool to use however you see fit.

The last bit of draft prep I do is to identify my Star Players. I add up how many green categories for each player + positive ratio categories and that is their Star Factor. Hello, Mike Trout and Paul Goldschmidt! You will never see a 5-category pitcher. Why? They will never give you enough of what you need for Wins and Saves. These multi-category players are the ones you want to, um, target!

Click the image for the PDF cheatsheet showing target percentages detail used in this mock draft.

Here is a sample cheat sheet for this exercise. Click the image to open the PDF in a new tab. Please refrain from critiquing the cheatsheet (wink). This is meant as a demonstration of how to use Target Percentages during a draft. For this exercise I did a mock draft using FantasyPros’ Mock Draft Simulator. And, away we go…

Pick 1.8 (#8) – I am looking at Giancarlo Stanton, Mookie Betts or Manny Machado, or I can go Matt Scherzer, Chris Sale or Corey Kluber. I don’t like to draft a pitcher this early. Maybe at the turn, but not at 8. It really boils down to Betts vs. Stanton or in terms of categories the decision is SB and AVG vs. HR and RBI. Betts just misses being a 5-category star and I’m partial to banking high AVG guys early so the pick is Betts.

Batter R HR RBI SB AVG
Mookie Betts 9% 7% 8% 13% 2.00

Pick 2.5 (#17) – Ugh, I was really hoping that Scherzer, Sale or Kluber would make it back to me here but they were all taken. I still have one SP on my cheat sheet that gives me a solid starting foundation for my pitching squad in Noah Syndergaard.

I’m not positive that he will make it back to me as his ADP is late second round to early third, but I’m going to take my chances that I get him at pick #32. Looking at batters, I’ve got Machado, Francisco Lindor and Joey Votto remaining as 4-category stars. Much like Betts, Lindor is a few HR short of being a 5-category star and a shortstop, so I take him. Adding him to Betts gives me:

Batter R HR RBI SB AVG
Mookie Betts (OF1) 9% 7% 8% 13% 2.00
Francisco Lindor (SS) 8% 7% 8% 9% 1.50
New Batting Total 17% 14% 16% 22% 3.50

Pick 3.8 (#32) – Well, Thor is still here so I snatch him. The three 3-category batters remaining are Brian Dozier, Marcell Ozuna and Jose Abreu. Dozier is out due to the -2.00 AVG hit. I’m going to be taking enough hits later so I don’t need to do so now. Ozuna and Abreu are twins with the same Target Percentage lines so I’m going to cross my fingers and hope one of them is still there in the round 4.

Pitcher W SV K ERA WHIP
Noah Syndergaard (SP) 12% 0% 14% 1.25 2.00

Pick 4.5 (#41) – Well, all three 3-category guys went off the board. I’m going to snag one of the few batters out there with a high HR% and an AVG that doesn’t put me in a bottomless crater.

Batter R HR RBI SB AVG
Old Batting Total 17% 14% 16% 22% 3.50
Edwin Encarnacion (1B) 7% 10% 9% 1% -2.25
New Batting Total 24% 24% 25% 23% 1.25

Pick 5.8 (#56) – I’m beginning to see a lot of red remaining on my starting pitchers cheatsheet. I want to get a SP2 that will not put a sizeable dent in the solid ratios Thor gives me so I grab an Archer (Chris Archer) to go with the Hammer.

Pitcher W SV K ERA WHIP
Noah Syndergaard (SP1) 12% 0% 14% 1.25 2.00
Chris Archer (SP2) 11% 0% 14% 0.25 0.50
New Pitching Total 23% 0% 28% 1.50 2.50

Pick 6.5 (#65) – Whew, it worked. I was hoping Aroldis Chapman would make it back to me! He’s one of the four closers that are 0.75 or higher in ERA.

Pitcher W SV K ERA WHIP
Old Pitching Total 23% 0% 28% 1.50 2.50
Aroldis Chapman (RP1) 4% 24% 6% 0.75 0.50
New Pitching Total 27% 24% 34% 2.25 3.00

Pick 7.8 (#80) – I’m going with Andrew McCutchen who just misses projections in the green on Runs, HR and RBI. I feel it is important to point out that a player may have 8% for a category but still be yellow. This is due to rounding. McCutchen for example actually scored 7.66% in Runs but rounded up to 8%.

Batter R HR RBI SB AVG
Old Hitting Total 24% 24% 25% 23% 1.25
Andrew McCutchen (OF2) 8% 7% 7% 6% -0.75
New Hitting Total 32% 31% 32% 29% 0.50

Pick 8.5 (#89) – I had intended to reach for DJ LeMahieu here to get his +2.75 help in AVG, but alas, it was not meant to be. I’m starting to notice the lack of green left on my cheat sheet for HR and RBI so I take one of my favorites, Miguel Cabrera.

Batter R HR RBI SB AVG
Old Hitting Total 32% 31% 32% 29% 0.50
Miguel Cabrera (CI) 6% 7% 7% 1% 0.75
New Hitting Total 38% 38% 39% 30% 1.25

Pick 9.8 (#104) – I’m taking Rougned Odor to help me in HR but he is going to put me in the negative in AVG, which stinks. See what I did there? The good news is that there are some positive AVG guys still available in the outfield.

Batter R HR RBI SB AVG
Old Hitting Total 38% 38% 39% 30% 1.25
Rougned Odor (2B) 6% 8% 8% 8% -2.00
New Hitting Total 44% 46% 47% 38% -0.75

Pick 10.5 (#113) – Taking closer number two. You have to take one somewhere. Why not here? Brad Hand is one of the remaining closers available with a high SV% and positive ratios.

Pitcher W SV K ERA WHIP
Old Pitching Total 27% 24% 34% 2.25 3.00
Brad Hand (RP2) 3% 24% 5% 0.25 0.00
New Pitching Total 30% 48% 39% 2.50 3.00

Pick 11.8 (#128) – Kyle Seager, Ender Inciarte or closer number three. Still some decent OF out there so I am adding Seager. And, yes I see my AVG sinking lower.

Batter R HR RBI SB AVG
Old Hitting Total 44% 46% 47% 38% -0.75
Kyle Seager (3B) 7% 7% 7% 2% -1.50
New Hitting Total 51% 53% 54% 40% -2.25

Pick 12.5 (#137) – My third and final closer, Alex Colome. He was one of the few left with a high SV%.

Pitcher W SV K ERA WHIP
Old Pitching Total 30% 48% 39% 2.50 3.00
Alex Colome (RP3) 3% 28% 4% -0.25 -0.50
New Pitching Total 33% 76% 43% 2.25 2.50

Okay, hopefully you’ve gotten a good grasp of utilizing Target Percentages during the draft. I’m not going to go pick by pick for the rest of the draft, but so far I’ve drafted seven batters and five pitchers.

With my remaining six batters to draft as starters I need to draft C, MI, 3 OF and UT and make up 49% in Runs, 47% in HR, 46% in RBI and 60% in SB all while trying to get back positive in AVG. I will have to target players with an average HR score of 8.1% to achieve 100%. It’s not impossible to do this, but it limits some of the players you can select during the rest of the draft.

For example, a quick look at the remaining catchers and I see that there is not a single player with a HR% score greater than 6%. So, when I select my catcher, I have to make up for the shortcoming at another position.

With my remaining four pitchers to draft as starters I will focus on three starting pitchers and one reliever to make up 67% of Wins, 24% of Saves and 57% of K. This will be nearly impossible to do in the draft and speaks more to the nature of pitching in fantasy baseball. You will fill in the gaps with players from the waiver wire, a story for another day.

I hope that this example was helpful to you, and I hope you are getting the idea of how to use Target Percentages – they’ll keep you on target during your draft!

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball

Say Hello to Target Percentages

March 5, 2018 By kopasetic 3 Comments

How many HR or RBI do you need to win your roto league? If you are fortunate enough to draft Los Angeles Angels OF Mike Trout, how much does he contribute to those stats? Target Percentages have the answer.

Why do we play fantasy baseball? Is it the thrill of picking up that pitcher for a spot start and seeing him throw a gem? That’s part of it. Is it seeing that “sleeper” batter you drafted late put up a bunch of crooked numbers for you? That’s part of it. Another part might just be the love of the game and fantasy baseball gives us another way to express that love.

Now, these might just be enough for you and you’re content drafting your players and setting your lineups throughout the season and wherever you end up in the standings is okay. For those of you that like to salt your food with the tears of your enemies, this article is for you!

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
Yogi Berra

In roto-scoring leagues, the goal is to finish with the best score in each category. Coming out of the draft, you want your squad to be in the best position to achieve that goal. Simple enough, right? How do you go about getting your squad in position to win?

First of all, you need to define the best score in each category. How do you do that? You look at last year’s standings. If those aren’t available, you look to the Internet! This process will not help you with establishing a ranking of players but it will help maintain your focus during the draft. What you will need:

  • fantasy baseball projections (also available in Draft Buddy)
  • spreadsheet skills
  • color printer
  • last year’s standings, or those from a similar league setup

In this example I am competing in a 12-team league, 5×5 roto with 13 hitters using 1 catcher and 5 outfielders, 9 pitchers and 3 bench spots. You can easily adapt this approach to different league configurations.

I am going to tell you right now that you are not going to be able to draft a squad that will achieve the absolute best score in each category, unless you are in a league of one, and, in that case, you are both a winner and a loser.

Take a look at the total points score that won your league. In most 12-team, 10-category leagues it was somewhere between 85 and 95 points. That breaks down to an average of 9 points in each category, or 4th best. So, if you aim to finish 4th in each category, you would end up with about 90 points and a good shot at winning your league. I recommend that you strive to finish 3rd in each category. That would put you on pace for 100 points, which should win your league.

How do you do that? If you have last year’s standings, find the third best score in each category. These will become your target for that stat category. For example, if the third best HR score was 356, then you would target 356 HR in your draft. This should all be pretty straight forward. For this article, I took the highest third best score from the final standings last year from my league:

R HR RBI SB AVG
1162 356 1127 159 0.2778
W SV K ERA WHIP
108 120 1568 3.626 1.212

To put my squad in the best position to succeed, I want the projections of the players I draft to add up to, or exceed, these target totals. Now, I could have a sheet of paper with my target totals at the top and when I draft a player, simply subtract his projections from these totals. I’ll keep a running tally throughout the draft.

This would work very easily for the counting stats, but what do you do about the ratio categories? Unless you have hits, at-bats, innings pitched, etc., you will have a hard time keeping track of those categories. This is where my Target Percentages method enters the picture!

Introducing Target Percentages

In one sentence, target percentages are the percentage of the target total a player earns for you based on his projections. For simplicity’s sake, let’s look at Draft Buddy’s #1 ranked player, Mike Trout. We have Trout projected for 511 AB, .309 AVG, 111 R, 38 HR, 106 RBI and 20 SB.

If I divide his 38 HR by the target total of 356, I will see that Trout would give me 10.67% of my target HR total. I advise you to round all the numbers to the nearest whole number. Trust me on that. So, Trout’s target percentage for HR is 11%. Repeat this for the other three counting stats and you should get 9% for RBI, 10% for R and 13% for SB.

The ratio stats, like batting average, are a little bit trickier. The first step is to subtract the target batting average from Trout’s batting average and then multiply by Trout’s at-bats. This will give you the number of hits above the “target level hitter” that Trout is worth. So, we subtract 0.2778 from 0.309 to get 0.0312 and then multiply that by 511 to get 15.9432.

Now you need to take this “Hits-Above-Target-Level” (HATL) number and find out how many standard deviations the player is from the mean. This is where using a spreadsheet comes in really handy. Take Trout’s 15.943 HATL and divide it by the standard deviation of every hitter’s projected HATL score.

For this article, let’s say that there is a 6.249 standard deviation for all hitters. This would lead to Trout’s AVG percentage to be 2.551 (15.943/6.249). Over the past few years I’ve discovered the sweet spot for tracking throughout the draft is to round this number to the nearest 0.25 (this can be done using the FLOOR function in Excel) and formatting so negative numbers are in red to stand out.

So, put it all together for Trout and you get the results in the table below. I repeated the process for Draft Buddy’s top ten ranked batters:

Player R HR RBI SB AVG
Mike Trout 10% 11% 9% 13% 2.50
Giancarlo Stanton 9% 15% 11% 2% 0.50
Trea Turner 8% 5% 6% 31% 1.75
Nolan Arenado 8% 11% 10% 2% 1.50
Mookie Betts 9% 7% 8% 13% 2.00
Bryce Harper 8% 10% 9% 6% 1.75
Manny Machado 8% 10% 9% 5% 1.00
Paul Goldschmidt 8% 9% 9% 10% 1.00
Jose Altuve 8% 5% 8% 15% 2.75
Gary Sanchez 6% 8% 7% 2% -0.75

I also did this so that you can get an idea of what your list will look like. To be effective, you have to do this for every possible player that you might draft because this will be your cheat sheet during the draft.

  • Sanchez makes the list due to position scarcity at the catcher position but you need to keep in mind that you’re going to have to make up the weak catcher stats from another batter… the story since the dawn of time.
  • Turner’s 31% stolen bases is a big chunk of what you need. You’ll find that with the speed merchants in the player pool. Big chunks of your SB can come from a few players. I, personally, like the 10%-15% guys.
  • Who do you like better, Betts or Harper? I’m leaning towards Betts simply for the SB %.
  • Who do you like better, Machado or Altuve? I’m going with Altuve and his 2.75 in AVG. Those positive numbers really help you in the later rounds when you are scraping the bottom of the barrel batters.

For the ratio stats of pitchers, the method is exactly like you did above when you found the batting average score for Trout, with one small exception. You will subtract the player’s projected ratio from the target. This is done to reflect the nature of the pitching ratios, that lower is better. Instead of finding the HATL, you will be finding the “Earned-Runs-Above-Target-Level” (ERATL) and “Walks + Hits-Above-Target-Level” (WHATL).

Here are our projections for the top 5 starting pitchers and top 5 closers. For example purposes, let’s say that the standard deviation for ERA is 61.861 and for WHIP is 11.048.

Player W SV K ERA WHIP
Clayton Kershaw 14% 0% 14% 2.50 3.25
Chris Sale 14% 0% 15% 1.50 3.00
Max Scherzer 14% 0% 16% 0.75 2.25
Noah Syndergaard 12% 0% 14% 1.25 2.00
Corey Kluber 13% 0% 14% 1.00 2.00
Player W SV K ERA WHIP
Kenley Jansen 4% 32% 6% 0.75 1.50
Craig Kimbrel 4% 28% 6% 1.00 1.00
Aroldis Chapman 4% 24% 6% 0.75 0.50
Ken Giles 4% 28% 5% 0.25 0.25
Edwin Diaz 4% 27% 5% 0.25 0.25
  • Hard to argue with Kershaw as the top SP. Look at those ERA and WHIP numbers!
  • Who do you like between Syndergaard and Kluber? Wins are so flaky that Kluber’s advantage doesn’t make up for the 0.25 ERA.
  • Note how the closers (and other RP) help or hurt your ERA and WHIP but typically only a little bit.
  • Regarding saves, I try to get three closers to get close to 100% and then sprinkle in a few other non-closing RP to get a few more saves to get to 100% and help ERA and WHIP.

Enough with all the math! How do you use all of these numbers?

As the draft unfolds, you can keep track of how close you are getting to your target totals. Simply keep a running tally for each category. For example, let’s say (in some bizarre draft) you were able to draft Trout and Altuve with your first two picks. This would put you at 18% of your runs target already secured, 16% HR, 17% RBI, 28% SB, and a +5.25 AVG.

Player R HR RBI SB AVG
Mike Trout 10% 11% 9% 13% 2.50
Jose Altuve 8% 5% 8% 15% 2.75
TOTAL 18% 16% 17% 28% 5.25

Your goal is to get 100% for the counting stats and stay above ZERO in the ratio stats. I recommend formatting the ratio scores that represent negative numbers to show in red. This will help you to differentiate between the values that were rounded to zero, even though some will be negative.

As the draft progresses, you will see that you may be falling behind in a certain category and can target a player that helps you in that category. Also, if you fall short of 100% for any of the counting stats, you will know what type of player to target for bench spots.

Target Percentages are only meant to be used during your draft. Once the season starts, things will change and you have to act accordingly. This is just a tool to help you stay focused during your draft. This is Part 1 introducing and explaining Target Percentages, and in Part 2 I will demonstrate using this concept in a mock draft.

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball

Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy 2017 Released

February 17, 2017 By Draft Buddy 1 Comment

playballThe 2017 version of Draft Buddy for fantasy baseball is now available for download!

If you are an existing member, and do not have access to download Draft Buddy yet, then login and re-up your (free) subscription via the Add/Renew Subscription button from your member page. First timers, register a (free) account checking off you want Draft Buddy and then you should have access.

I feel like I’m behind getting this out to you, but then I look back and my first newsletter went out February 19 for last season. Hmm… maybe I am continuously behind, or just feel that way. As I mentioned to one of our members Joe this morning on Twitter, I am juggling other things on the home and work front, so I am on a sort of every other day schedule to work on this website. Not ideal, but doing the best I can.

In terms of features, there are currently no changes from the prior year version of Draft Buddy, except some compatibility things with the newest versions of Excel for Mac. Give me strength Microsoft. Hey, it was already pretty good feature-wise as-is, right? It is a time thing, and a free tool to boot, so not only hard to jam in more features but also hard to justify.

Lets give a shout out to the websites that provide the baseball projections for Draft Buddy, currently Steamer-Fangraphs and FantasyPros for the Zeile projections. I updated each of these this morning.

Plus, the ADP comes from FantasyPros and NFBC. If you are looking for an online money league to play in then NFBC is the way to go. They have a long history and excellent reputation.

Last but certainly not least, props to members Kevin and Mark who are back again this season volunteering their time to keep the depth charts up to date for us. Thanks guys!

Okay, that is about it. Thanks for supporting Draft Buddy for fantasy baseball, fantasy football, or both! If you have any questions then please email me or hit me up through our Facebook page or on Twitter.

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy

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