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Introducing Draft Buddy RotoBowl I – Roto Fantasy Football

July 30, 2018 By Chris Spencer 15 Comments

Roto Fantasy FootballTired of seeing your fantasy football season crumble because of one bad week in December?

Tired of putting up the 2nd highest points for the week only to lose to the weekly high score?

Tired of playing checkers and want to play chess?

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above then you, my friend, are ready for roto fantasy football. Yes, it is just like roto fantasy baseball, tracking where you rank in each scoring statistic (a.k.a. category) as opposed to scoring a single fantasy points total for the week or season. Roto is short for rotisserie, the original way to play fantasy sports.

I recently discovered that FanTrax offers roto scoring for their fantasy football product while reading Matt Williams (@MattWi77iams) series on his inaugural roto football experts league. I’m starting up a league myself and I’m looking for others to join me!

Roto Scoring

For a short explanation how a roto scoring league works, lets say you have a 12-team league and 10 statistical categories. One of the statistical categories is passing yards. The team that has the highest passing yards in the league earns 12 points (since there are 12 teams) for that category. The team that has the second highest passing yards earns 11 points. Third – 10 points, fourth – 9 points, and so on down to the lowest passing yards scoring just 1 point.

One key to roto scoring is it does not matter how many more yards, or stats of whatever category, your team has over the next team. It could be 500 yards or 1 yard, only the ranking matters in awarding points. In our fictional 12-team league with 10 categories, the maximum a team can score is 120 points by finishing first in each category.

Roto scoring also allows for the use of ratio stats, such as passing completion percentage, rushing yards per attempt, etc., which is difficult to apply in a traditional fantasy points scoring league.

Statistical Categories

  • Passing Touchdowns
  • Passing Yards
  • Passing Yards/Attempt
  • Rushing Touchdowns
  • Rushing Yards
  • Rushing Yards/Carry
  • Receiving Touchdowns
  • Receiving Yards
  • Receptions
  • Turnovers (Fumbles Lost and Interceptions)

We’ll have nice symmetry with 3 stats for each: passing, rushing and receiving plus one universal negative stat (turnovers). Also, there are eight counting stats and two ratios.

Rosters

  • QB (1)
  • RB (2)
  • WR (3)
  • TE (1)
  • FLEX (3)
  • Bench (6)

That’s right, no kickers or defense. We’re keeping it simple. The Flex position is RB/WR/TE. If we get 12 teams or less we will probably make one of the Flex positions a “super” flex (QB/RB/WR/TE).

Draft

Slow draft (8 hours per pick, timer turned off overnight) starting when league fills to at least 10 teams or as many as 16.

In-Season Management

This is a league we expect you to actively manage your team during the season. If we are going to do this, lets do it right! There are weekly starting lineups and waivers.

Standings

Points will accumulate for the season. There are no weekly head-to-head matchups. The highest points after Week 17 will be crowned the Draft Buddy RotoBowl I Champion!

Draft Order

  1. Bubba – @bdentrek
  2. Chris W – @cman113060
  3. Jim – @Fantasytaz
  4. Pat – @PJHofer07
  5. Mike S – @MStepney71
  6. Josh – @kingsperry37
  7. Chris S – @Roto_Chris
  8. Mike Z – @FFzinger
  9. Dan – @DanYoldi79
  10. Pat – @PolkaPat
  11. Mike A – @MikeJAdamson
  12. Matt – @Razzball_MB
  13. Steve – @fantasygeek37
  14. Evan – @EvFWFB
  15. Brad – @RotoPilot

Follow Along

We’re no longer accepting participants but you can check in on the draft here.
If you have any questions hit me up on Twitter @Roto_Chris or leave a comment below!

Filed Under: Fantasy Football

Draft Buddy 2.5 Beta – Target Percentages Added For 5×5 Roto Leagues

March 7, 2018 By Mike 4 Comments

Screenshot of the new alternate hitters cheatsheet in Draft Buddy 2.5 Beta, with Target Percentages added for standard 5×5 roto leagues. Now available to download.

My normal state managing this website, my office pools website (March Madness Survivor pools now open), and doing web developer work primarily for Dynasty League Football, is a little frantic, pressed for time. I know many of you can relate. That is kind of how we roll as a society these days. Too many things to do, not enough time to do them.

That said, I was very intrigued by Chris Spencer’s Target Percentages article we published earlier this week, and how that could be incorporated into Draft Buddy. Chris asked me if I could add it to Draft Buddy and I even gave him a flat no, not possible, as my first answer. Keeping expectations low, I spent some time yesterday and this morning, and I think we are in business with a really cool concept that could give you one more edge in your fantasy baseball draft.

Introducing Draft Buddy 2.5 Beta with Target Percentages added for a standard 5×5 roto league. You can find the link to the file on the Draft Buddy download page under the “Additional Files” heading below the regular file download links.

I probably shouldn’t even have called it 2.5, as this is not an official release. Hopefully adding Beta does the trick to relay that message. Here is a summary of what you will find different in this file compared to our current version 2.0, all related to Target Percentages (click the images to see them better):

  • roto tab
    • A box to add the total team stat target levels, based on 3rd place finish from the prior year standings as explained in Chris’ article. The default settings are from the article, a 12-team league, 5×5 roto with 13 hitters using 1 catcher and 5 outfielders, 9 pitchers and 3 bench spots.
    • A box showing your team’s total target percentage from starters for each stat category, which should change as you draft players.
  • hitters data tab
    • Scroll right and find a new (old*) section after the Steamer projections and before the 2017 player stats. These are calculations of each player’s contribution to the target totals based on their projections from the light blue section on this tab.
      * This used to be where I would put the post-All-Star Game stats, but since I don’t have those available, this seemed an adequate place to put some Target Percentage calculations.
    • Further right there are some calcs in the custom fields that contribute to the AVG contribution calculation.
  • pitchers data tab
    • Very similar to the hitters data tab, the old stats section is used for target percentage calcs and custom fields help calculate ERA and WHIP contributions. These sections are also used as lookup tables for the new hitters-tp and pitchers-tp alternate cheatsheets.
  • hitters-tp tab
    • New cheatsheet! Yes, this was a fair bit of work, and always tricky doing big changes like this and making sure I don’t mess up an existing feature. Here is the main output of the calculations. It is the hitters position cheatsheet with target percentage contributions for every player in the rankings to each stat category.
    • The contributions are highlighted green on the cheatsheet if the contribution is equal to or greater than the target total divided by number of hitter starters. So basically, that player is “pulling their weight” for your team. If you had 10 starters, and that player accounted for 10% or more of your RBI team target, his RBI contribution is highlighted green.
    • The contributions are highlighted yellow on the cheatsheet if the contribution is equal to or greater than 75% of the target total divided by number of hitter starters. Same concept, but the player is not as helpful.
    • AVG is not highlighted green or yellow, but rather ratio stats we are targeting to finish at or above zero, so positive contributions are black text, negative contributions are red text.
    • Your team totals from the roto tab are carried over to the top of the cheatsheet for convenience.
  • pitchers-tp tab
    • Very same as the hitters-tp tab explanations.

So there you have it, how Target Percentages are incorporated into Draft Buddy. This is important – this concept is NOT custom to your league in Draft Buddy at this time (and why this is not an official release). It is only added for standard 5×5 roto leagues at this time. That is HR, R, RBI, SB, AVG for hitters and W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP for pitchers. Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to customize it for other league scoring categories this season.

You can alter the targets as needed, so it will work for leagues of any number of teams. It is possible you can follow along what I’ve done and adjust the formulas as necessary to pull in, say, OBP instead of AVG, or QS instead of W. My caution is making changes though is don’t insert or delete columns or rows unless you really know what you are doing. Draft Buddy is fairly rigid with all of its existing features and complexities.

Hope you enjoy this addition to Draft Buddy. Chris’ Target Percentages Part II should be available next week and he runs through a mock draft so we can get some insight how he uses these expanded cheatsheets with all of the new data.

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy

Say Hello to Target Percentages

March 5, 2018 By Chris Spencer 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

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