compile cheatsheets Archives

Baseball Projections and Rankings Update, Member Q&A

March 24, 2016 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

Hey, didn’t we already update the fantasy baseball projections in Draft Buddy earlier this week? We did, but that was mostly because I was traveling and unable to update towards the end of last week.

Today everything got updated again – projections from all three sources, Steamer-Fangraphs, Zeile from FantasyPros and ZiPS, ADP from NFBC and FantasyPros, and our depth charts (thanks for members Kevin and Mark for doing the heavy lifting on that front).

Please support the sites contributing to Draft Buddy. I wanted to update in time for the upcoming Easter weekend. Some of you guys are forgoing the family commitments for your fantasy baseball draft, am I right?

With the new projections, our online fantasy baseball rankings and Last Player Picked are also updated, for those looking for a quicker print-and-go cheatsheet for their draft.

Not much else to report in terms of site or feature updates. I’ve received some great feedback (thanks!) and good suggestions for Draft Buddy which I appreciate, but won’t be able to implement for this season. Lets close with some questions and answers from my emails with Draft Buddy members this week which may be useful to many of you.

Q: Can you update the stats in Draft Buddy after your draft, just to check new projected standings with the recent stat updates?

A: You can update. It will update the cheatsheets since they are driven off the projections, but then everything will be updated including projected standings. Hopefully not too much change! The only thing you need to be aware of is to change the two reset options on the action tab to “no” before you update. Otherwise you will lose the keepers and draft results.

Q: I noticed Kris Bryant is listed correctly with a position of 3B in the hitters tab but on the main draft tab shows OF. Why the position change? Would this throw off the projections at all?

A: After reviewing your Draft Buddy file, I see your league has a 10 game position eligibility. Default is 20. Bryant actually qualifies as an OF since he played 19 games at OF last season. So in yours he is listed as both OF and 3B… you can see this on the hitters tab. In terms of popping up as OF on the overall rankings (and this flowing through to the summary tab) it is probably just due to sorting. I’m not sure if maybe he had slightly more value at OF so Draft Buddy put the OF position higher on the list, or simply OF moved higher than his 3B record. You should be able to draft him and then switch him to 3B on the draft report tab to carry him through the rosters tab at 3B. Or, even just switch his position on the overall rankings from OF to 3B.

Q: On version 3.0 after I entered my keepers, on the Action tab I changed the Reset Keepers to “no”. The issue is that when I Compile Cheatsheets, all of those keepers stay on the Keepers tab, but all players are removed from the Draft Report tab. Usually changing that setting to “no” keeps the keepers on the Draft Report tab, but for the latest version they are not. The only way I can Compile Cheatsheets but have my keepers stay on the Draft Report tab is to also update Reset draft order to picks to “no”.

Is this how it is supposed to work? I’m afraid that if I get to my draft and something changes, all of my keepers will be removed from the Draft Report.

A: You should be fine by changing them both to no. I know it is a bit confusing but depending on the keeper type you dont want to reset the draft report tab either and that must be the case for your league. Sorry about the confusion.

Q: I have recently come across Draft Buddy, I think it is amazing. However, as you can guess as a Mac user, my system is giving me some hangups. I am running Excel 2008 for Mac. Is it pointless to try and get it to work with macros? Or is there a way to make it happen?

Also, I did jump over on a friends PC (Excel 2011 or greater) and did get things to work smoothly. The only snag I hit there was inputting Keepers. It would not populate a list when I tried to do the pull down bar. Is there an error there? Or is it once again, a software issue?

A: Unfortunately, you really need the macros to work to get Draft Buddy to do what it is supposed to do. Creating the cheatsheets, updating projections and even something as simple as drafting a player all use macros to function properly. And, there is no way to get the macros to work on Mac Office 2008. Believe me I’ve tried! That is the only version with an issue, because Microsoft took Visual Basic out of that version.

You could probably install a trial version of the newest Office for Mac. I personally don’t like the newest version – I find it exceptionally slow (perhaps because my Mac is a bit dated) – but Draft Buddy should work in it. Install the trial for a month and cancel it, would at least get you through this season.

It will work on all versions of Excel for Windows. I don’t believe the keeper thing you are experiencing is due to an Excel issue. Did you select the position first on the keepers tab? Try that, it is the first, smaller yellow highlighted box under the team name on the keepers tab. Then the player drop-down should work after that.

Draft Buddy Update and Optional Projection Pal Available

July 2, 2015 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

Use Projection Pal to add alternate sets of projections to your copy of Draft Buddy. Download a copy of Pal pre-loaded with projections from draftbuddy.com.

Today there is a full projections, depth chart and ADP update available for the fantasy football version of Draft Buddy, our custom cheatsheet and draft tracking software.

If you want to mark these on your calendar, the remaining regularly scheduled updates are July 9, 16, 23, 30, August 6, 13, 20, September 3 and 8. Generally, once a week on Thursdays so Draft Buddy is up to date for you prior to the weekend’s prime drafting times.

The above noted updates are projections from FF Today, included in Draft Buddy by default. Today I also uploaded a copy of Projection Pal to our member download page including the official DraftBuddy.com projections (updated today), so you can add them to your copy of Draft Buddy as a second set of projections. To add them and make them the primary projections for your cheatsheets, follow these steps:

Download Projection Pal, the one that includes the Draft Buddy projections, and open it in Excel.
Open your copy of Draft Buddy in Excel.
On the setup tab in Pal, check that the filename matches the filename for your copy of Draft Buddy. It should unless you changed it. Everyone should be using version 1.2!
In Pal, go to the QB Raw tab, press the Copy to Compiler button, and wait for Pal to copy over the projections to Buddy. Repeat for each of the RB Raw, WR Raw and TE Raw tabs.
In Buddy, go to the options tab and change the default allocation key to 100% Site B.
Go to the action tab and click Compile Cheatsheets.

Use the Average Projections / Allocations Keys box to change the percentage of each set of projections reflected in the cheatsheets, if desired.

Now the cheatsheets reflect the new set of projections. You can use the Average Projections / Allocations Keys box to change the percentage of each set of projections reflected in the cheatsheets, if desired. Just remember each time you change anything on rules, scoring, options, or projections (anything that would cause the cheatsheets to change), then you need to click Compile Cheatsheets again to see the impact of that change.

Since we don’t have projections for kickers, defense or IDP, then you may wish to simply stick with projections from FF Today for each of those. You can change the default allocation key in Draft Buddy by position. To do that, go to each of the position tabs (QB, RB, etc.) and find the two “+” signs near the top of each tab. Click the first plus sign to open up some hidden columns. You’ll notice at the top the allocation key for the tab, which you can change by inputting a different number (from the options tab box), or you can change the key by player in the yellow highlighted column.

Fire away in the comments if you have any questions. Thanks!

Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy 2.0 – Player News and Last Player Picked Price Guide Integration

February 17, 2015 By Draft Buddy 1 Comment

One of the new features in Version 2.0 of the Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy is latest player news headlines pulled in when you update projections.

Pretty big update today folks with two cool new features for the fantasy baseball Draft Buddy. Plus, Projection Pal is ready. Plus, there was one fix to the compile cheatsheets process.

You must download Version 2.0 of Draft Buddy to get these new features and the fix. The link to download Projection Pal is also on the same page. Here are the details of the changes:

Player News Added

On each of the hitters data and pitchers data tabs, scroll to the far right and there is a spot for player notes. Its been there for some time, but finally I created new update files to include the latest news headlines from Rotoworld by player, as available, when you run Update Projections (either projections source).

The information doesn’t flow any where else in Draft Buddy at this time, but still pretty handy to scroll right and down the list to see the latest news item for players. Right now the update files are created locally and updated to the server, so the news isn’t available for Buddy in real-time, but I will see what I can do to provide more frequent updates.

Last Player Picked Integration

You know the online Last Player Picked Price Guide tool, right? We added it to the website last year (also reminding me I’ve overused the Dr. Frankenstein reference).

The LPP dollar value methodology is different than Draft Buddy, as they were each developed independently. At one point I thought about changing the Draft Buddy methodology to be the same as LPP, but that hasn’t come to fruition.

However, one of Draft Buddy’s strengths is its draft tracking ability, so even if you prefer dollar values generated from LPP, Draft Buddy is still useful after transferring the results from LPP to Draft Buddy. Last year I wrote a post on how to do this, but now I’ve made that process a lot easier.

New last player picked tab in Draft Buddy is simply a copy of CSV output from LPP.

Note the “Export to CSV” link found under the League Info tab from your LPP results page.

Select which methodology you want to use for the dollar values on your cheatsheets. If switching methods, then hit Compile Cheatsheets to see the changes.

Open Draft Buddy 2.0, and scroll to end of the tabs for a default CSV (comma separated file) from LPP. Run your own LPP results with the online tool, and at the end click League Info for the Export to CSV link. Download and open your CSV file, highlight the whole thing, copy and paste it on top of the current CSV output in Draft Buddy.

Final step, go to the options tab and at the top change the new Dollar Value Methodology option from Draft Buddy to Last Player Picked. Then hit Compile Cheatsheets, and the values in Draft Buddy on each of the hitters, pitchers and overall cheatsheets should match your values from LPP.

Compile Cheatsheets Fix

One of our long-time members, garf112, noticed in his league with no specific SP or RP designations, instead any 9 pitchers, that Draft Buddy gave some weird results between the starters (who had too much value) and relievers (who had very little value). I narrowed this down to one calculation not updating quickly enough during the Compile Cheatsheets process.

The above is just one example where the results went awry. In most league setups it was perhaps not very noticeable, but best practices would be to download Version 2.0 and input your league settings again and use this file going forward.

Projection Pal

Veteran member WilliamWallace sent me a note through our Help Desk the other night wondering when Projection Pal will be ready. For those who are not sure what Pal is, it is an optional tool (and separate download) to help import other projections or data into Draft Buddy. It helps ensure the data lines up with the right players on each of the hitters and pitchers tabs.

Pal is now ready. I am the first to admit it isn’t the easiest of tools to use, due to the complexity trying to clean and import data from a very wide variety of potential sources, but once you get the hang of it then it works quite well. Check the Projection Pal Demo Video for an overview how it works.

Thanks for your time and enjoy the new features!