fantrax Archives | DraftBuddy.com

Draft Buddy Head-to-Head Weekly Points Fantasy Baseball League

March 7, 2019 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

Here are the details for a Draft Buddy members 2019 fantasy baseball league. It is a head-to-head weekly fantasy points format. Championship belt not included.

That is right, we are running our very own 2019 fantasy baseball league for Draft Buddy members. As of this morning, we are recruiting a few more spots. If you are reading this and available to add another league this season, consider joining us.

We do love roto in these parts with respect to fantasy baseball. However, the motivation for this is because it does seem like a lot of people play head-to-head leagues and fantasy points baseball leagues, but an imbalance exists between roto versus points fantasy baseball analysis. This will give us a points draft to review, and we’ll play it out for fun and bragging rights.

This is where we say, “Hooray for points leagues!” Truthfully, we are big fans of diversity. This is not unlike us doing something crazy like running a roto fantasy football league.

To better support fantasy points baseball leagues, we added default points scoring systems for CBS, ESPN, Fantrax and Yahoo to our fantasy baseball projections, player stats and player pages. To change the scoring, simply click the Switch option found in the upper-right of the table on those pages.

As for the league, we are running it on Fantrax. I will surely be using the new Fantrax integration features found in Draft Buddy. It is a slow draft starting Monday and we would like to settle on 12 or 14 teams. Copied below is the email I sent earlier today to the other participants. Contact me for an invite.

Gentlemen, welcome to the inaugural Draft Buddy H2H Weekly Points League! Or, DBH2HWPL for short. Or, we need a better name for this league is more accurate.

Thanks for joining! We haven’t filled all of the available spots yet but we are well on our way and I wanted to do an intro now since the draft starts Monday. Here are the key details:

– TEAMS… 12 or 14 teams – there are 11 on this email and 10 of 11 clicked their invite to join; if you didn’t get it let me know

– FORMAT… s/b obvious from the name, but it is weekly head-to-head fantasy points

– ROSTER/LINEUP… 28 active roster plus 1 IL (injured) spots, start 1 each C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, UT, 5 OF, 9 P (starters or relievers)

– SCORING… 2018 fantasy baseball player stats (click the “Review” link upper-right of the stats table for details)

– SCHEDULE… will have regular season and playoffs but haven’t finalized this yet as it will depend on the number of teams, so there might be divisions, wouldn’t mind some sort of victory points system to reduce schedule luck (a.k.a. excuses), and we might end a bit early. whatever works best to create a fair regular season schedule and playoffs – will try to decide all of this by end of day Friday

– DRAFT… slow draft, but that doesn’t mean we need to take forever. starts Monday at 8:00am. I will have the site randomize the draft order when we finalize teams. Each pick has a 6-hour timer (turned off overnight) but please be considerate to everyone and
(a) check in often
(b) pre-draft and put yourself on auto when you can
(c) let us know in the chat when you will be away
(d) text/email me to put a pick in for you if you can’t get online

Okay, I think that is it. Actually, I think I’ve surely forgotten something, but as it comes to me I will let you know.

Set your team name or use your Draft Buddy username so I know who you are, and let’s do this! Woot! You all going down, suckers!

Kind regards,

Mike

Announcing Draft Buddy 3.0 – More Projection Options + Fantrax Integration

February 19, 2019 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

This is the draft board for a draft I am currently participating in at Fantrax. Grabbing the leagueId from the URL unlocks an awesome new feature in fantasy baseball Draft Buddy version 3.0, now available for download.

Whirlwind of a weekend here! Daughter’s birthday, another family birthday to attend, Family Day holiday (yes that is a thing), ongoing development work for Dynasty League Football and somehow, some way, I was able to pull together a HUGE update for fantasy baseball Draft Buddy.

Draft Buddy is still free to download, use and update to Opening Day. The new features require a new download if you already have an earlier 2019 version. Read on for details.

More Projection Options

ATC and THE BAT projections are now available to import directly into Draft Buddy via the Update Projections feature on the action tab. If you missed it, check the ATC + THE BAT post for details about these projections. Detailed, high quality fantasy baseball projections from Ariel Cohen for ATC and Derek Carty for THE BAT.

You can scrap the ATC and THE BAT Projection Pal files I posted previously. Getting these projections in Draft Buddy is now way simpler. On the action tab, select the projections you want to import, and hit Update Projections. If you want to import both, select one, import and then use the buttons to move that first set from section Site A to Site B or C. Then select another set and import. Update Projections always pulls the data into Site A, the first large yellow section found on the hitters data and pitchers data tabs.

I will update ATC and THE BAT in line with our other scheduled updates. Note these are also available in Last Player Picked dollar value calculator. Again, huge thanks for Ariel and Derek for providing their projections for us!

Draft Buddy’s Baseball Projections

This is where using the name Draft Buddy for both the software and the website can get slightly confusing, but I ask you to please roll with it. Draft Buddy (website) has its own fantasy baseball projections. These are also available via Update Projections, and in fact are the new default projections in Draft Buddy (software).

They are based on Steamer projections (original default) but include our own playing time adjustments. Much of my fantasy baseball analysis this year is focused on playing time after noticing some issues with the Steamer projections pulled direct from Fangraphs.

A combination of reading The Fantasy Baseball Process by Jeff Zimmerman of Fangraphs and Tanner Bell of Smart Fantasy Baseball (highly recommended), noting Rudy Gamble at Razzball does similar with Steamer, and reviewing playing time from various sources, this seemed like a positive course of action to improve my own fantasy baseball knowledge and to improve Draft Buddy.

I plan to post my process for the Draft Buddy projections, which are also in Last Player Picked and the basis for our online cheatsheets. That now makes six projection options for Draft Buddy – Draft Buddy, ATC, Steamer, THE BAT, Zeile and ZiPS. ZiPS is not yet available. Unfortunately (?) there are still only three sections for projections in Draft Buddy but you can choose any combination of the six to fill the three spots.

Fantrax Integration

This one is huge and arguably deserves its own announcement. It is huge if you play fantasy baseball on Fantrax.com, which you really should. Fantrax is an excellent league manager product they’ve built and no wonder their site continues to experience excellent growth.

I am noticing more and more people mention Fantrax as their league manager, and not just for fantasy baseball. They manage leagues and contests for seven different sports. We ran the inaugural Draft Buddy RotoBowl roto fantasy football league on Fantrax last year.

Get the Fantrax leagueId from the URL of any page for your Fantrax fantasy baseball league.

Input the Fantrax leagueId in the Fantrax Integration box on the options tab in Draft Buddy.

Anyway, thanks to newly available integration with Fantrax, you can now import draft results, keepers and franchise names into Draft Buddy based on your Fantrax leagueId. For those who use the fantasy football Draft Buddy and the MyFantasyLeague.com integration features, you know this is an absolute game changer.

No more selecting each player via drop-down lists for the keepers tab. No more finding and selecting each player off the cheatsheets to add them to the draft report tab. For keepers, copy in the entire roster by team and click a button. For draft results, click a button and everything updates. Its a huge time saver and helps you keep focused on your draft.

I have old videos showcasing the fantasy football Draft Buddy integration with MyFantasyLeague.com for keepers and draft results. The Fantrax integration works very similarly, and I hope to create new fantasy baseball specific videos soon.

New Download Version 3.0

To get all of the newness (a.k.a. awesomeness), we have a new version 3.0 Draft Buddy available for download. You will find the projection changes on the action tab. The Fantrax integration options are on the options tab. All you really need is your Fantrax leagueId and you are set.

If you have any questions then let me know. Enjoy!

A Word About Fantasy Baseball Position Eligibility

February 5, 2019 By Draft Buddy 1 Comment

This is Garrett Hampson, 2B/SS for the Colorado Rockies. Recently picked in one of my drafts at SS, not eligible at 2B, got me looking closer at fantasy baseball position eligibility.

The Super Bowl is (painfully) over, so now it is time to put all of our attention to the upcoming Major League Baseball season and fantasy baseball. Pitchers and catchers report early next week, with fielders trickling in after that for full squad workouts starting between February 16 to 21.

The first spring training games are February 21, and every team is playing on February 23. The regular season starts March 20 for the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners, squaring off in Tokyo, Japan for a two-game series. Make sure to check if your fantasy league includes these stats or not. Official Opening Day is Thursday March 28, the earliest Opening Day in MLB history. Not long now!

Lets take a minute to talk about position eligibility, certainly a more complicated issue than fantasy football in which players almost always have a single position that rarely changes. In fantasy baseball, many players have multiple position eligibility, and it can change often and even in-season, depending on your league rules. It is important to know the rules for your league, but even knowing doesn’t make tracking it an easy task.

Here is a reminder about fantasy baseball position eligibility rules for the popular league managers, plus the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC):

Position Eligibility Rules

CBS P.E. Rules (scroll down a bit)

20 games played preseason, 5 games played in-season

ESPN P.E. Rules

20 games played preseason, 10 games played in-season
5 starts (3 in-season) to quality as a starting pitcher
8 relief appearances (5 in-season) to qualify as a relief pitcher

Fantrax P.E. Rules

20 games played preseason, 10 games played in-season
5 starts (3 in-season) to quality as a starting pitcher
8 relief appearances (5 in-season) to qualify as a relief pitcher

Yahoo P.E. Rules

5 starts or 10 games played preseason and in-season
3 starts to quality as a starting pitcher
5 relief appearances to qualify as a relief pitcher

NFBC P.E. Rules (click “Rosters” to find P.E.)

20 games played pre-season, 10 games played in-season
Does not use separate starter and relief pitcher positions

That is the gist of it, but there are other considerations. Such as, what if a player did not play in the Majors prior to this season? Then he could be eligible at the position he played the most in the Minors. What if a player with MLB experience missed all of last season? Then he could be eligible at the position(s) based on the last season he played in the Majors. What if a player only hit as DH last year, but your league doesn’t use a DH position? Probably only eligible as a utility option.

Last week I joined a slow best ball draft over at Fantrax. To my surprise, the rules for that league do not exactly match my Fantrax summary, above. For their best ball leagues each player is only eligible at a single position to start the season, determined by the position they played the majority of games last season.

Plus, players will not earn any in-season eligibility at other positions. I can only guess that is because figuring out the best ball lineups every week with multiple positions would be a nightmare. That’s fine, but definitely a need to know section of the rules, which gets back to my original point – make sure to know your league rules with respect to position eligibility.

Tracking Position Eligibility

To help you determine position eligibility and find multi-position eligible players for your fantasy baseball league, we have our games played by position tool. Draft Buddy (Excel download) includes games played by position for all hitters to dynamically identify position eligibility for your league settings, or you can manually adjust positions as necessary.

Unfortunately we do not have minor league statistics in our database because those are outside our budget constraints. However, we do have daily stat updates in-season to help identify new position eligibility for players.

Value Changes

Instead of recreating the wheel, here is a good article by Austin Bristow II from October of last year published at Pitcher List highlighting players who gained or lost position eligibility for 2019 based on last season. Clearly this can result in a value change for the individual player when gaining or losing position eligibility.

Plus consider the impact when a position group light on quality options to begin with gets deeper or shallower. There are some good comments to that article by readers with respect to the depth at first base this season.

Next Steps

The positions you see on our website player pages are from our depth charts that member krby13 keeps updated for us. If a player does not meet position eligibility based on 20 games played the prior season, then the depth chart positions are assigned as a default for Draft Buddy.

This was highlighted to me as an area for improvement when I input Garrett Hampson in Draft Buddy recently, at second base. He is a shortstop for fantasy. He played seven games at 2B but 8 games at SS last season. However, we have him as Colorado Rockies projected 2B in the depth charts.

Realizing this potential inconsistency between a player’s anticipated position and qualifying fantasy position – and we are a fantasy site – I am considering ways to make the tracking of positions more robust across the site and all of our tools.

Lastly, here is an excellent scouting report on Hampson. He was drafted early round 17 in my ongoing 12-team points draft. His NFBC ADP is currently 190th overall.