How To

Welcome to the sixth and final part of the “Create Your Own Fantasy Baseball Rankings” series.  If you missed an earlier part, you can find it here.  You can start at the beginning of the series or if you want to start here at Part 6, you can download the Excel file created during part 5 here.

Please note that this six part series has been adapted into a 10 part book that also shows you how to convert standings gain points into dollar values and how to calculate in-draft inflation.
A few notes about the series:

• It was originally written before the 2013 MLB season.  The screenshots and player references you see might refer to things from that time frame, but the same approach will work today.
• If you register as SFBB Insider, you can receive all six parts in a free, tidy, and easy-to-use e-book
• Familiarity with Excel is recommended, but I do my best to explain all formulas and functions used
• Some of the formulas used in the series do not work in Excel for Mac computers.  I apologize for this.  I don’t understand why Excel isn’t built to operate the same on that platform.

In this sixth part of the series we will discuss the concept of replacement level players and calculating for position scarcity.

Replacement Level Players

Mike Trout is projected for 114 R, 26 HR, and 83 RBI.  Those numbers are gaudy.  But should he get “credit” for all those statistics if I can go out the day after the draft and pickup a player on the free agent list that is projected for 50 R, 15 HR, and 55 RBI?

This is the concept of replacement level.  If player X is projected for 26 HR and there are several free agents that will hit 15 HR, the true value of player X is in his 11 additional HR (26 – 15).

So when calculating a player’s SGP, you should not perform the calculation on the “gross” or total number of HRs.  Rather, you should calculate SGP with the amount of HR over a replacement level player (a free agent).

Determining Replacement Level

Assuming a 12-team league with 14 hitters (two C, 1B, 2B, SS, MI, 3B, CI, five OF, DH), 168 offensive players will be drafted (you can add more to adjust for bench players).  So the 169th player is “replacement level”, right?

Arguably this is true.  But let’s fine tune this a little more.  In a 12-team league where each team must start two catchers, the 25th best catcher is the “replacement level catcher”.

If the league request one 2B, one SS, and one Middle Infielder, then 36 combined 2B and SS will be drafted.  We can assume this will be comprised of 18 2B and 18 SS, and the 19th best of each position will be the “replacement level”.

Likewise, you might expect 18 1B, 18 3B, and 60 OFs to be drafted.  But given that these positions typically produce better offensive statistics than 2B and SS, 1B and OF tend to be slotted into the UTIL/DH spots.  This can push the 1B up to 24 selected players and the OF up to 66 selected players (with the 25th 1B being “replacement level” and the 67th OF being “replacement level”.  

Let’s look at some projected statistics for Jason Heyward and Robinson Cano (please note the tables below don’t foot due to rounding) :

On the surface, the two are near equals, with Heyward holding a slight overall edge in SGP.  But let’s now compare each to a replacement level player at their position.  In my rankings spreadsheet, the 61st ranked OF is Ryan Ludwick.

In my rankings spreadsheet, the 19th best 2B is Gordon Beckham.

So despite a higher gross SGP (11.54 vs. 11.25), Heyward comes out as less valuable when we adjust for replacement level players.  In fact, Cano moves to nearly one whole SGP of an advantage over Heyward (5.54 vs. 4.61). (more…)

Welcome to the fourth part of the “Create Your Own Fantasy Baseball Rankings” series.  If you missed an earlier part, you can find it here.  You can start at almost any part of the series, but it’s not recommended you start with Part 4 unless you are very familiar with the Excel functions listed below.  Part 4 is essentially reperforming step 3(which focused on hitters) for pitchers.  This post assumes you are familiar with the Excel functions and formulas used in Part 3.

Please note that this six part series has been adapted into a 10 part book that also shows you how to convert standings gain points into dollar values and how to calculate in-draft inflation.

A few notes about the series:

• It was originally written before the 2013 MLB season.  The screenshots and player references you see might refer to things from that time frame, but the same approach will work today.
• If you register as SFBB Insider, you can receive all six parts in a free, tidy, and easy-to-use e-book
• Familiarity with Excel is recommended, but I do my best to explain all formulas and functions used
• Some of the formulas used in the series do not work in Excel for Mac computers.  I apologize for this.  I don’t understand why Excel isn’t built to operate the same on that platform.

In this fourth part of the series we will use Excel formulas and functions to start pulling pitcher information (name, position, team) and projection information in order to eventually calculate our own rankings.

EXCEL FUNCTIONS AND FORMULAS IN THIS POST

Below are the Excel functions and formulas used in this post.  If you would like more background on them, please refer to Part 3 or ask questions in the comments area below.

• VLOOKUP
• TABLES and NAMED RANGES
• COLUMN

STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS

1. Staying consistent with the hitting projections, I’m going to use the free Steamer projections from Fangraphs.
2. To make the pitching projections easier to work with, convert the “Steamer Pitchers” tab to a “table” in Excel.  To do this, click anywhere within the data on the “Steamer Pitchers” worksheet.  Then locate the “Home” tab in the Excel menu system (“the ribbon”).  Click once on the “Format as Table” drop down, and then select your desired color scheme.You will then be prompted to verify the range of cells in the table and that your table has a header row (e.g. Name, W, L, ERA, etc.).  Check “My table has headers”.  Click OK.
3. Because we’ll later be these pitcher projections into other worksheets, it will help us greatly if the fangraphs player ID is the first column of the table (you can use the VLOOKUP formula if the player ID is in the first column, otherwise you’re stuck using more difficult and/or multiple formulas).  Right-click on the top of the fangraphs player ID column (should be column X in the Steamer Pitchers projections).Now right-click on the top of the player name column (column header “A”) and select “Insert Cut Cells”.  When you’re done, you should have the “playerid” column first and “Name” second. (more…)

Welcome to the second part of the “Create Your Own Fantasy Baseball Rankings” series.  If you missed Part 1, you can find it here.  You can start at the beginning or if you want to start here at Part 2, you can download the Excel file created during part 1 here.

A few notes about the series:

• It was originally written before the 2013 MLB season.  The screenshots and player references you see might refer to things from that time frame, but the same approach will work today.
• If you register as SFBB Insider, you can receive all six parts in a free, tidy, and easy-to-use e-book
• Familiarity with Excel is recommended, but I do my best to explain all formulas and functions used
• Some of the formulas used in the series do not work in Excel for Mac computers.  I apologize for this.  I don’t understand why Excel isn’t built to operate the same on that platform.

In this second part of the series we discuss what player IDs are so we can later use them to pull information within Excel.  You might have noticed the projection data downloaded from fangraphs in part 1 did not contain the player’s team or position.  But the downloads did contain each player’s fangraphs ID.

UNDERSTANDING PLAYER IDs

Are you familiar with Chris Young, the long-time Arizona Diamondback outfielder with a career batting average of about .240?  Are you familiar with Chris Young, the oft-injured extremely tall pitcher with a career ERA of 3.79?

Even if you’re not familiar with them, know that there are two baseball players of recent note named Chris Young.  Look at this chart:

Just like you have a unique Social Security Number or Employee ID associated with your name, baseball players have been given unique IDs from different organizations/websites.  These IDs give us a way to differentiate Chris B. Young from Chris R. Young.  The problem is that there is not an agreed upon ID for each player.  Each website or fantasy service uses their own ID.

We need a tool to translate the different player IDs from the various baseball services.  That’s where the Smart Fantasy Baseball Player ID Map comes in. (more…)