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ATC and THE BAT Projections Available for Draft Buddy

February 7, 2019 By Draft Buddy 2 Comments

High fives all around. Two new sets of 2019 fantasy baseball projections are now available for Draft Buddy – ATC by Ariel Cohen and THE BAT by Derek Carty.

Everyone likes more choice, am I right? With respect to that, I am pleased to announce we have two new sets of fantasy baseball projections for Draft Buddy. Draft Buddy is our custom rankings and draft tracker tool, and is free to download (free membership required). The projections are ATC by Ariel Cohen and THE BAT by Derek Carty.

Both sets of projections are available on FanGraphs, so I reached out to each of Ariel and Derek to ask if we could use them in Draft Buddy for our members. Each guy said, “for sure”. Awesome! Please give them a follow and thank you via Twitter @ATCNY and @DerekCarty.

ATC

ATC stands for Average Total Cost and it is an average of various baseball projections, but not a straight average, which is what I believe Zeile from FantasyPros is (already included in Draft Buddy). Ariel is an actuary so he is no stranger to crunching numbers and calculating probabilities. ATC weights particular projections from each system more or less based on their historical accuracy. For example, lets say Steamer has historically been excellent projecting stolen bases. ATC will then more heavily weight stolen base projections from Steamer in the average.

In Ariel’s article on RotoGraphs from 2017, introducing ATC, he compares his methodology to Nate Silver’s presidential election forecasting. I asked Ariel specifically about playing time, as this is an area of fantasy baseball forecasting I am paying more attention to lately. He said the playing time is derived in a similar fashion – a weighted average of playing time from other projections, based on historical accuracy.

Read more from Ariel at RotoGraphs, here and here.

THE BAT

Celebrating its second year at FanGraphs, THE BAT for season long is an extension of Derek’s original work, THE BAT created to project single game outcomes for daily fantasy sports. That is kind of like when I created Draft Buddy way back when for fantasy football, and then a bunch of you asked for a fantasy baseball version, and here we are today.

Derek is a sabermetrics guy, and as such, integrated many variables into his model. Whereas ATC is more like Zeile, THE BAT is more like (big picture) Steamer and ZiPS. Read his RotoGraphs article about THE BAT for more detail. I found this section particularly interesting:

Player stats are backwards-adjusted to account for all of the individual circumstances they’ve faced in the past in order to gain a truer estimate of a player’s underlying talent level. On the season-level, that underlying talent is then forward-adjusted based on the circumstances the player will face for the remainder of the season.

Playing time for THE BAT is similar to the Depth Chart projections at FanGraphs – based on projected lineup and staff input – plus some adjustments. Free agents are not currently included but should be soon.

If you are interested in THE BAT in-season, especially useful for DFS players, it is available at RotoGrinders.

Projection Pal

Now you are wondering how to get ATC and/or THE BAT into Draft Buddy. It is easy. Not as easy as selecting it off a drop-down list and clicking Update Projections in Draft Buddy, but the next best thing.

Did I mention Projection Pal is ready for the 2019 season? I did in last week’s baseball members newsletter, but otherwise this might be the first time. You can download Pal and use it to import projections to Draft Buddy.

Projection Pal is a necessary tool for importing projections to make sure the data you are trying to import matches the correct players in Draft Buddy. Otherwise, the prior year stats and other projections will be misaligned.

With respect to ATC and THE BAT specifically, I uploaded Projection Pal files that already include each of these sets of projections. Links to each are on the Draft Buddy download page. To get either set in Draft Buddy follow these steps:

Download the Projection Pal file for ATC or THE BAT
Open the Pal file, and open your copy of Draft Buddy
Make sure the filename for your copy of Draft Buddy matches the filename on the setup tab in Pal (it should by default)
Go to the hitters Raw tab and click the Copy to Draft Buddy button
Go to the pitchers Raw tab and click the Copy to Draft Buddy button

After you click the Copy to Draft Buddy button for each of hitters and pitchers, there should be a short wait before it copies over the projections and takes you to Draft Buddy where you can review the imported projections. Then to use these projections in your cheatsheets, go to the options tab, adjust the default allocation key, and hit Compile Cheatsheets (action tab).

Projection Updates

ATC and THE BAT projections were pulled last Thursday, January 31st, from FanGraphs. I won’t necessarily be able to follow the same update schedule for ATC and THE BAT as the other projections, but it is pretty easy to update yourself. Download the latest CSV from FanGraphs, copy the data over the existing data in Projection Pal, check your row numbers and column headings, and click Copy to Draft Buddy, again. Or give me a nudge and I will see what I can do.

Thanks Ariel and Derek!

Quarterbacks to Target and Avoid, Projection Pal Files Available

August 17, 2016 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

I’m not saying make a habit of drafting a quarterback early, but if you are going to take the plunge, Russell Wilson offers the best potential ROI of the top passers.

In case you missed it … What? You haven’t liked our Facebook page or don’t follow us on Twitter yet?… here is a bit of an update on what I’ve kept myself busy doing the last week.

Mostly, answering emails from Draft Buddy customers. It is mid-August and we are in the thick of drafting season. NFL regular season will be here before we know it. If you haven’t re-upped Draft Buddy yet then please get on it. Don’t wait until the last minute in case you do need some help getting ready for your draft.

I also updated my own rankings here on the website. The last update included some icons to show players to target and avoid. I will add a few sentences below explaining why I picked some of the quarterbacks who received the target or the avoid tags.

Today I added three Projection Pal files to the Draft Buddy download page, which include projections from each of CBS, ESPN and FantasyPros you can import into Buddy. These projections are as of yesterday, as it took a little while to put these together.

Quarterbacks to Target

Russell Wilson, SEA
I have him ranked 4th at QB. He usually goes QB4. The point here is, if you are going to take one of these top quarterbacks, grab the guy near the end of that tier and only IF he is at a value. In some drafts, Wilson is falling far enough he is worth it over stockpiling more middling RB and WR. Would it surprise me if Wilson ends the season as the number one QB? Not at all.

Kirk Cousins, WAS
Fantasy players don’t believe in Cousins’ talent. Fair enough. Under pressure, a do-or-die playoff game, I probably don’t have Cousins high on my list either. However I do believe in the offense run by coach Jay Gruden and Cousins has excellent receiving talent around him. Running game could look better. Cousins finished QB9 last season and is usually getting drafted outside the top twelve. When I wait at QB, which is most of the time, I’ve ended up taking Cousins a fair bit.

Quarterbacks to Avoid

Andy Dalton, CIN
A.J. Green is great but Tyler Eifert is banged up and I am not confident he is going to start the season. While I’m getting slightly intrigued by rookie Tyler Boyd because of the opportunity in front of him, Brandon LaFell is LaForgettable. Short of Giovani Bernard catching 100 passes there isn’t enough receiving talent here to propel Dalton to be any more reliable than Alex Smith, and everyone is already avoiding him, right?

Marcus Mariota, TEN
Admittedly my avoid picks at quarterback are, on average, not usually ranked or drafted very high, but I’ve seen a reach or three for Mariota in the last month. I think it is his youth, draft pedigree and good old fashioned optimism getting some fantasy players ahead of themselves on Mariota. Maybe he will be the next breakout Blake Bortles, but not this year. The receivers aren’t good enough and head coach Mike Mularkey has a spotty offensive record even though that is supposed to be his forte.

Dynasty League Football Rankings Now Available in Draft Buddy

July 27, 2015 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

I am pleased to announce a big boost to our Draft Buddy fantasy football software customers! I received permission from Dynasty League Football – the premiere dynasty content fantasy football resource – to make their dynasty rankings more readily available for inclusion in Draft Buddy.

While the DLF rankings are freely available on their website, and our customers could always therefore import them into Draft Buddy via our optional Projection Pal add-on tool, now things are much easier. I’ve done the work for you. Yes, I hear a huge sigh of relief!

Available from the Buddy download page are two new files you can download. One is Projection Pal preloaded with DLF rankings. The other is Draft Buddy preloaded with DLF rankings.

Positions included are QB, RB, WR, TE, DL, LB and DB. The rankings are updated as of July 26, and I will update them periodically to the start of the season.

If you want to add the DLF rankings to your current copy of Draft Buddy for your dynasty league, download Projection Pal, adjust the Buddy filename specified on the setup tab and hit the Copy to Compiler button on each of the position Raw tabs. The rankings get copied to Custom 1 in your copy of Buddy.

If you just want to start from scratch prepping for your dynasty league draft, or want to review how I adjust Buddy options to make the DLF rankings the default cheatsheet rankings in Buddy, then download the DLF copy of Draft Buddy.

Thanks very much to the DLF crew for agreeing to share their rankings to our Draft Buddy customers! Feel free to post your own thank you in the comments or on social media. Please post or direct any questions about adding DLF rankings to Draft Buddy to me and I’ll help out as quickly as possible.