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Mike Trout More or Less Valuable with 5 OF or 3 OF Starters in Last Player Picked

March 16, 2015 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

The window on the left is output from Last Player Picked for a league with 3 OF and 3 UT starters. The window on the right is with 5 OF and 1 UT. Mike Trout’s value is the same in both, as are the rest of the outfielders.

Received an email from member Steve from his using Last Player Picked, and it is something that has stumped him since before LPP was available at this website. Maybe our fellow members can chime in with their own thoughts on this question.

First, thanks so much for continuing the Last Player Picked model; it’s by far the best I’ve ever seen. This question has bugged me since Mays Copeland developed the methodology, but now I’m desperate to find out the answer since I’m joining a league with 3 OF instead of 5. Hopefully it’s not an error in the model and just something basic that I’m missing, but it doesn’t make intuitive sense:

If you reduce the number of starting catchers in your standard league from 2 to 1, their value will decrease considerably. Makes perfect sense, in a 12 team league with one catcher you only need 12 catchers with positive value vs. 24, and the difference between Buster Posey and the 24th catcher is much greater than the difference between Posey and the 12th best catcher.

So why does this same logic not work for outfielders? Cut the number of outfielders from 5 to 3, and Mike Trout is worth MORE, not less. At first I thought it might have something to do with the relative player pool size and depth; there are obviously a lot more OF with positive value than catchers. But that should be irrelevant – by definition in a 12 team league with 60 OF vs. a 12 team league with 36 OF, the 36th OF is worth $1 and the 60th OF is still worth $1. So shouldn’t the difference between Mike Trout and the 60th OF be greater, not less, than the difference between Trout and the 36th OF? ~ Steve

Hi Steve. Thanks for the email. My immediate thought is because there are 24 more OF in the draftable player pool (2 extra OF x 12 teams) so the money has to be spread around more than with the 3 OF league – all else being equal.

I wonder if we did a test comparing a league with 3 OF and 2 UT vs. a league with 5 OF and 0 UT if Trout would indeed be more valuable in the 5 OF format. Of course many of those UT players are likely OF, but perhaps worth a check. I am unfortunately traveling right now and not able to check. I will give this some more thought, but that is one idea for the apparent discrepancy. What do you think?

Continued … I am burning up my roaming internet package, but I had to know. I ran two different scenarios on LPP similar as described above. One, the default settings, uses 5 OF and 1 UT position. The second, I changed to 3 OF and 3 UT, so the total number of starters in each league is identical. All other settings stayed the same. The results were … drum roll please … identical values for OF in both leagues.

So, while Trout’s value did not increase in the 5 OF format vs. the 3 OF format, at least it didn’t go down. I think that lends some credence to my initial thought that the reason someone might see the unexpected result of his value going down with more starters, is because there just aren’t enough dollars to go around.

If anyone has further thoughts on the Last Player Picked valuation methodology – and I really should reblog that as a series here sometime – then please feel free to comment below.

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

February 24, 2015 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

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.

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!