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How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season - Part 6 - Adjust Replacement Level

How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season – Part 6 – Adjust Replacement Level

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Welcome to the final part of the series in which we go through the process of plugging Steamer’s Rest of Season (RoS) projections into your existing ranking/dollar value spreadsheet so you can make informed and objective roster decisions during the season.

If you register as an SFBB Insider (it’s free), you can receive the entire series in an easy-to-use e-book (also free) along with two other helpful guides.  I’ve also written a comprehensive guide on ranking players and calculating player dollar values that’s available at Amazon.

Introduction

In this sixth part of the series we will revisit the concept of replacement level and adjust replacement level for our updated RoS projections.

Reminders About Replacement Level

If you’re new to the concept of replacement level read the introduction here (don’t go into the “Step-by-Step Instructions”.  When you consider the injuries that occur in Major League Baseball, rookies being called up, players underperforming projections, and others exceeding projections, the player pool is constantly changing.

In order to make the best possible decisions and to calculate representative dollar values, it is very important that we update the estimate of replacement level.

Caution:  No Further Adjustments Necessary

When listening or reading fantasy advice, you might come across a piece of advice that goes something like this, “You really need to draft a SS early to account for the lack of depth at the position.  Go ahead and reach for that shortstop.”

Don’t listen to that advice when you’re using the approach we’re now going through.  The replacement level adjustment that follows is already calculating the effect of depth at each position.  And it does it mathematically.  There is no guesswork going on here.

DON’T MAKE ANOTHER ADJUSTMENT.

You do not need to make an arbitrary adjustment to shortstops or catchers, or any other position.  When you have added this adjustment to your rankings, each player will be ranked according the their value over the worst players at the position.  If the position is weak, that’s accounted for.  If the position is deep, it’s accounted for.

If you then decide to make arbitrary adjustments to your rankings after adding in the replacement level calculation, YOU ARE DOUBLE COUNTING.

You will be reaching for players and you will be hurting your team.  Don’t “bump” players up a list because of their position.

Step-By-Step Instructions

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How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season - Part 5 - Update the Player ID Map

How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season – Part 5 – Update the Player ID Map

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Welcome to the fifth part in a series of posts in which I’ll go through the process of plugging Steamer’s Rest of Season (RoS) projections into your existing ranking/dollar value spreadsheet so you can make informed and objective roster decisions during the season.

If you register as an SFBB Insider (it’s free), you can receive the entire series in an easy-to-use e-book (also free) along with two other helpful guides. I’ve also written a comprehensive guide on ranking players and calculating player dollar values that’s available at Amazon.

Introduction

In this fifth part of the series we discuss updating the Player ID Map to pull new players into the rankings information.

Player ID Map

The SFBB Player ID Map contains the Fangraphs, MLB, Baseball-Reference, Retrosheet, CBS, NFBC, ESPN, Baseball Prospectus, Davenport, and Yahoo player IDs for over 1,200 players.  It’s not a comprehensive list of past players by any means, but I make a concerted effort to have all current fantasy-relevant MLB players and those minor league players likely to make a fantasy impact this season.

PlayerIDMap

To give credit where credit is due, I originally downloaded the player map from Crunchtimebaseball.com and tailored it to meet my needs.  CrunchTimeBaseball is run by Tim Blaker.  He continues to maintain his own map of player IDs and generally keeps his more up-to-date than I do.  You can obtain his version here.

Why Update the Player ID Map

April inevitably brings us players that were never intended to be fantasy relevant; minor leaguers that were not anticipated to make the jump, role players thrust into starting jobs, and more.  As the summer rolls on, impact rookies begin to get called up that may not have been in the preseason Player ID Map.  When September arrives there will be more of the same.

While it is possible to add individual players to the player ID map, it can be inefficient to add more than a handful.  Updating the entire list is probably easier.

Step-By-Step Instructions

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How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season - Part 4 - Add the IFERROR Formula

How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season – Part 4 – Add the IFERROR Formula

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Welcome to the fourth part in a series of posts in which I’ll go through the process of plugging Steamer’s Rest of Season (RoS) projections into your existing ranking/dollar value spreadsheet so you can make informed and objective roster decisions during the season.

If you register as an SFBB Insider (it’s free), you can receive the entire series in an easy-to-use e-book (also free) along with two other helpful guides. I’ve also written a comprehensive guide on ranking players and calculating player dollar values that’s available at Amazon.

Introduction

In the fourth part of the series we’ll introduce a new Excel formula to help remove lookup errors, like those shown above, from our spreadsheets.  These occur when we have instructed Excel to do a VLOOKUP to find a player’s RoS projections and Excel is unable to find the player ID within the projection data.

Often times a player will stop appearing in the RoS projections.  This might be because they’ve suffered a season-ending injury, they’ve retired, or they’re an unsigned free agent. If that player remains in the list of hitters or pitchers rankings, no projection can be found for that player.  I’ve realized that the rankings and dollar value formulas I previously used did not handle these situations very well, so it’s necessary to adjust these formulas slightly.

Adding this formula to your spreadsheet is a one-time fix.  You won’t need to go through this part when you download updated RoS projections in the future.

Excel Functions in Part 4

IFERROR

The IFFERROR function allows us to control what happens when another function being used is calculating an error.  The image below is a great example of this.  On our “Hitter Ranks” tab we have a series of VLOOKUP formulas that instruct excel to go find Kendrys Morales’ player ID (moralke01) in the “Steamer Projections” tab.  During the 2014 season Morales is likely not included in the RoS projections because he remains unsigned by any Major League team.

IFERROR-Excel-Formula

The IFFERROR function will allow us to replace the error message with any value of our choice.  It essentially works by telling Excel, “If this other formula I’m using comes back with an error, use this instead”.

The formula requires two inputs:

IFERROR(value,value_if_error)

  1. Value – This represents the formula or calculation we want Excel to perform.  In our example above it will be the same VLOOKUP formula we already have entered.
  2. Value_if_error – This represents the value or message we want Excel to return if the first argument, “Value”, returns an error.  In our example above we don’t want the default “#N/A” error message that turns up if Excel cannot locate Kendrys Morales in the RoS projections.  Instead, we could just ask for Excel to return zeroes for his projected stats.

Step-By-Step Instructions

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How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season - Part 3 - Delete Old Info and Insert New RoS Projections

How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season – Part 3 – Delete Old Info and Insert New RoS Projections

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Welcome to the third part in a series of posts in which I’ll go through the process of plugging Steamer’s Rest of Season (RoS) projections into your existing ranking/dollar value spreadsheet so you can make informed and objective roster decisions during the season.

If you register as an SFBB Insider (it’s free), you can receive the entire series in an easy-to-use e-book (also free) along with two other helpful guides. I’ve also written a comprehensive guide on ranking players and calculating player dollar values that’s available at Amazon.

Introduction

In this third part of the series we will remove the old (preseason) projections from our spreadsheet and paste in the new information.  It sounds simple, but there are a few tricks to be aware of.

Step-By-Step Instructions

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How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season - Part 2 - Download and Prepare Rest of Season Projections

How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season – Part 2 – Download and Prepare Rest of Season Projections

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Welcome to the second part in a series of posts in which I’ll go through the process of plugging Steamer’s Rest of Season (RoS) projections into your existing ranking/dollar value spreadsheet so you can make informed and objective roster decisions during the season.

If you register as an SFBB Insider (it’s free), you can receive the entire series in an easy-to-use e-book (also free) along with two other helpful guides. I’ve also written a comprehensive guide on ranking players and calculating player dollar values that’s available at Amazon.

Introduction

In the second part of the series we will download the free Rest of Season Steamer projections that are available from Fangraphs.com.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step Description
1. Visit Fangraphs’ Steamer RoS projections at this link or visit Fangraphs.com and hover over the “Projections” link on the menu bar and look for “Steamer (RoS)”.Fangraphs2
2. Once the page loads, use the link to “Export Data”.Fangraphs-RoS-Export
3. The data will download in CSV (comma separated value) format. Locate the downloaded CSV file and open it.

It should open in Microsoft Excel (if it doesn’t, launch Excel and then use the File>Open menu to open the CSV file).

You might recall from our earlier work that theFangraphs reports come withPlayerID as the last column in the file. We must move thisto be the first column so we can later use the VLOOKUP formula to pull data from theseRoS projections.Once the file opens, locate the “playerid” column. Right-click on the column header (column “W” in the image below) and choose to Cut the column.Cut_Fangraphs_ID
4. Now right-click on the first column header and choose the option to “Insert Cut Cells”.Insert_Fangraphs_ID
5. Repeat the steps above for pitchers. You can obtain RoS Steamer pitcher projections here or by clicking the “Pitchers” button at the top of the Steamer hitters web page.Steamer_RoS_Pitchers

The “playerID” column is currently column “S” in the Steamer RoS download.Excel-ROS-Projection-Part2-6
6. You have finished reordering the information and have copied it so it can be pasted into your rankings and dollar value calculation spreadsheet.

Example Excel File

We did not edit the main dollar value calculation spreadsheet in this part, so no example spreadsheet is provided.

Questions?

Do you have questions about Part 2? Or want to see what others have asked? Comment below.

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How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season - Part 1 - Introduction to Rest of Season Projections

How To Use SGP To Rank and Value Players During the Season – Part 1 – Introduction to Rest of Season Projections

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Welcome to the first part in a series of posts in which I’ll go through the process of plugging Steamer’s Rest of Season (RoS) projections into your existing ranking/dollar value spreadsheet so you can make informed and objective roster decisions during the season.

A few notes about the series:

Let’s Get Started

If you’re a frequent reader of this site, hopefully you spent the offseason toiling over a spreadsheet making projections, developing rankings, and calculating dollar values.

That dynamite spreadsheet you created has probably been sitting on the shelf for the last month accumulating dust.  But did you know you can still use it to make informed in-season roster decisions?

I’ll show you how in a second.

Avoid This Scenario

Once the season starts, we immediately become retrospective in our decision making. You navigate out to the free agent listing and you see the stats players have accumulated to date.  Some utility infielder with a .240 career average is sitting there staring at you with 5 HR and a .386 batting average to start the season.

This is bad.  We don’t draft based on last season’s stats, so why should we make current roster decisions about last week’s stats?

As we do during the draft, we should be making roster decisions based on projected or future performances.

Some sites do offer full season projections.  They are helpful, but they become less meaningful as the season progresses.  Full season projections are likely not being updated, and we don’t care about the stats that someone has already earned.

What we really want are rest of season projections.  Or what a player is going to do from here on out.

How To Obtain Rest Of Season (RoS) Projections

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In Season Player ID Map Update

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I’m preparing to roll out another resource that will hopefully help bring clarity to your in-season moves (I think it’s going to be big!).  In preparation for this, I’ve gone through and done a Player ID Map update to include players that have recently become “fantasy-relevant”, in my mind.

You can download the updated map here.

A complete list of changes can be found in the “Change Log” tab of the spreadsheet.

ESPN_Player_ID

Some of the more notable additions to are:

If you’re new to the site, consider checking out these past posts that illustrate some interesting things you can do with player IDs.

Please let me know if I’ve missed anyone.  Stay smart.

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Cautionary Notes About Sample Size Stabilization Points

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In this post I’m going to try to tie a pizza utensil, Bill Murray, and Charlie Blackmon together all while trying to help you avoid a pitfall I think many are making in their fantasy baseball research.

Read enough fantasy baseball advice and you’re bound to come across something like this:

We can now trust player x’s <insert rate statistic here> because he’s reached the number of plate appearances for the stat to become reliable.

Or maybe this:

We’ve reached the point of the season where <insert rate statistic here> starts to stabilize.

Maybe you even clicked on a link near the comment, saw some fancy tables with a lot of other stats and when they “stabilize”, references to r-squared, and then concluded, “Seems legit to me.”

These comments are usually followed by some kind of analysis that uses the stat in order to project into the future.  This is the problem!  More on that in a bit.

Not So Fast My Friend

I’ve long been a victim of this.  I’m not a statistician, so if I someone makes claims like this and links to a study that looks legitimate at a quick glance, I’ll buy into it.  This seemed even more reliable because the study is quoted at a lot of reputable sites like Fangraphs, Beyond the Box Score, and more.

But I’m also a regular listener of Fangraphs’ “Sleeper and the Bust Podcast” with Eno Sarris and Jason Collette. I’ve heard Sarris mention a disclaimer several times when referring to sample size stabilization points that has always left me a little unsettled. So I decided to investigate.

A Little History

The original study was performed in 2007 by a man writing under the name “Pizza Cutter”.  It’s a heavy load of information to consume, but I do recommend it so you can understand how he performed the test.  Plus, it’s proven to be a very popular piece of reference material, so it wouldn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with it.

You can’t really tell from the original study, but it turns out that the research has been misused and misinterpreted by many people.  So much so that Pizza Cutter himself has since written several times that his work is being misused.

These Stats Are Not Predictive

Russel A. Carleton, who ditched the Pizza Cutter nickname (except on Twitter), is the man behind the stabilization points research.  He has this to say about the predictive value of stabilization points:

…they are not nearly as powerful in predicting the future as people seem to believe that they are.

And it makes sense.  When developing projections before the season starts, the typical projection system uses at least three years of data.  So then why are we so quick to believe that three weeks of April at bats are meaningful at predicting the rest of the season!?!?!

When referring to an example of how his study is used to say, “this new strikeout rate that we’ve seen is what we can start to expect”, Carleton writes,

That’s not what the study was actually about.

If you haven’t gone and read the article yet, I do recommend it.  You can just sense the angst in Carleton’s writing.  The title of the article, “It Happens Every May”, speaks volumes.  I can just see Carleton surfing the web as we speak reading countless articles inappropriately referencing his work and thinking to himself, “Every season I have to put up with this $#!_”.

It Helps To Understand What Carleton Was Trying To Do

Carleton wasn’t trying to develop a projection methodology in doing this research.  He states that one of his favorite things to do is to make up his own statistics and study if they correlate to other metrics we already use in baseball research.

It doesn’t make sense to do advanced baseball research on small sample sizes.  So all he wanted to know was how soon into a season, or with how small of a sample size, could he begin conducting these studies of his.

What Stabilization Points Really Mean

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New Tool - Historical Batting Lineups By MLB Team

New Tool – Historical Batting Lineups By MLB Team

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Where a player hits in the lineup matters.  For every spot a player moves down the order (lead off to second, fifth to sixth, etc.), that player loses approximately 0.1 plate appearances per game, or about 16 plate appearances over the course of the season.

If a player moves from second to third…  not a big change in a player’s value.  But if you were originally projecting a player to bat 9th and he gets bumped up to be the lead off hitter, that could increase a player’s value 15-20% (8 lineup spots * 16 plate appearances = 128 additional PAs)!!!

I Stumbled Upon This Very Helpful Page at BaseBall-Reference.Com

Each team at baseball-reference.com has a batting order page that displays the starting lineup for each game.  Baseball_Reference_Batting_Order

This is a great way to keep an eye on trends in a team’s lineups and to monitor where your players are hitting.  I’ll often try to check this and it usually takes several clicks to drill down into a player’s game log, click on the last few games, scroll down to the box scores, click back a few times to check the next game, etc.

But these team pages will make it much easier to get the information.

baseball-reference-batting-orderA Lot Of Useful Information

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Improved SGP Calculation Formula - Part III

Improved SGP Calculation Formula – Part III

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Welcome to the final of a three-part series in which we take a closer look at an improved method of determining standings gain points factors.  In the first part of the series we looked at the difference between my old method of calculating standings gain points factors and the improved approach suggested by Art McGee in his book, How to Value Players for Rotisserie Baseball.  In the second part of the series we looked at how to implement the SLOPE function in Microsoft Excel.

In this final part of the series we take a closer look at how these SGP changes affect the end rankings.

Old Vs. New

As I alluded to in part two, I’ve been tracking the standings history (link to view Excel file) for my favorite league for several years and I use this history to calculate my SGP factors.  Here’s a summary of the factors calculated under my old approach stacked up against the factors as calculated by the SLOPE function suggested by Art McGee in How to Value Players for Rotisserie Baseball.

Stat Old Approach SLOPE Approach % Change
BA 0.00184 0.00169 -8.15%
HR 9.63059 8.87013 -7.90%
R 24.82973 22.02314 -11.30%
RBI 25.05772 22.30803 -10.97%
SB 10.00577 8.18620 -18.19%
ERA -0.10587 -0.08817 -16.72%
K 35.14141 31.6227 -10.01%
SV 6.41558 5.69641 -11.21%
W 3.34776 2.95793 -11.64%
WHIP -0.01788 -0.01518 -15.10%

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