The Fantasy Baseball Thread from Mepheaven

[Mephistopheles]

Alright Mephandom, it's ready...for now. Disclaimer: If we have the NSBB GRB league I expect you NOT to use any information you gain from this. I probably shouldn't let you have this until after the draft, eh.

 

So explanations. Page by Page.

 

Note: Don't unhide columns or rows. You'll mess something up.

 

1. Draft O

 

This page shows everything for your league. And I mean everything. The first big box shows all the scores for your league, broken down by the three systems, predicted vs actual and then the averages. O-P stands for the predicted roto score for offense. O-A stands for actual score relative to your league. Score-A, Score-P, P-P and P-A are similar. Score is the total (Pitching + Hitting).

 

The second group of boxes is your offense scores broken down by stat. Self explanatory. The third group of boxes is your offense's raw stats. The small box to the right are the scores added up. The next big box down is scores for pitching by each stat. The fifth big box is the pitching raw stats. The small box to the right is adding the scores up once again.

 

The final box is unsorted really. What it does is it sums up your teams players points over average and points over replacement players. Generally this is useful for hitters, but not so much for pitchers as points is amount of arms dependent. The order is the same as above. Pecota, James and ZiPS.

 

2. Draft

 

This page is where you enter the teams for your league. You can change the name of the teams at the top if you want. Simply type in the players name and viola. Spelling counts, get used to the abbreviations i used. Examples: Manny Corpas, Jonathan Papelbon, Jonathan Broxton, Jr Towles. Not every player is listed. Just about everyone is for offense. Just about every starter is. Every closer is, but a few MRPs arent. The only one getting drafted every now and then that I havent added is Pat Neshek. Everyone else drafted can be used. Spelling counts! The two columns at the bottom are self explanatory. The score is the average predicated score from the far right of the first box on Draft O. The innings is quite simple innings. Its handy dandy to know how many IP you have for roto leagues with limits (usually 1250). Keep in mind that the distributions used for Ws, Ks, Svs are uncapped for IPs. Im an H2H player more so than Roto, so this suits me. Sorry. A use for this post draft is seeing if trades really do help you. Enter your team pre trade. Enter your team post trade. If your predicted points are higher after the trade...make it. If not don't. Pretty simple.

 

3. Overall

 

This page ranks players overall. No stats are listed here though. P_A stands for points over an average player for his position on an average team. P_R stands for points over a replacement level player for his position on an average team. The order is, as always, PECOTA, James, ZiPS. To sort this page, use the Rk column ascending.

 

4. Pitchers

 

This page is all of the pitcher's stats. IP is set for ALL three systems. I came up with the IPs. Shoot yourself if you don't like them...or just change them. All of the displayed information is stuff you know.

 

5. Hitters

 

This page is all of the hitter's stats. PA is set for ALL three systems. I came up with the PAs. Shoot yourself if you don't like them...or just change them. The PAs next to the individual systems are not the ones used (they're used to multiply and stuff, dont mess with them). If you want to change the amount of PAs for a player, you only need to change the first PA on the far left. There is one column here you don't know. TOT_P. See Team for an explanation.

 

6. My Teams

 

This is a place where you can post all of the team totals for your teams. Just copy and paste the actual stats from Draft O. First goes hitters second goes pitchers. Rank is the percentile rank among all Yahoo teams in Team Data. As you can see from my preloaded teams. I'm pretty good...

 

7. Team Data

 

Do NOT add anything here unless you add an entire league! This table is used to find the distribution characteristics of each statistic in a league. It has like 10 leagues in it now. This is used for just about everything. It's the nuts and bolts of everything. It's used to generate predicted scores for your team and the points over replacement/average players. Ive bolded my teams. And yes some of the totals for my teams are different (trades). The ones you see in the Team Data page are right after the draft, before any trades. All of the stuff should be self explanatory. The stuff after the name is just the total P_A, P_R data for the team that was found at the very bottom of Draft O.

 

8. Averages

 

This is the brain of the system. Don't mess with anything. All of the team totals (the last boxes) are calculated on a fly. Average and replacement level players are constants.

 

9. Team

 

This is a simple page. Enter your team's offense. Leave one of the spaces open. Go back to Hitters and sort Tot_P descending. It calculates the average offensive score for your offense. So this will be able to tell you given your roster which player helps you the most. It won't work if two players are missing. Just one.

 

10. PECOTA_H

11. ZiPS_H

12. James_H

13. PECOTA_P

14. ZiPS_P

15. James_P

 

These are just the raw data that the other pages pull from. Nothing special.

 

So the top ten drafts:

1. 102.36 - Meph (Electric Ladyland)

2. 101.85 - Meph (Sweet Child O' Mine)

3. 99.22 - Meph (Love Reign O'er Me)

4. 92.39 - Meph (Voodoo Child)

5. 91.14 - Meph (Speed Two)

6. 91.07 - Meph (Comfortably Numb)

7. 87.34 - Meph (Gone Baby Gone)

8. 86.61 - Meph (Speed One)

9. 85.62 - Meph (Whipping Post)

10. 85.34 - Andy Behrens (Tim's League, Yahoo Fantasy "Expert")

 

Note: No, I don't have 9 fantasy teams that I follow. The only ones I follow are the ones on my main ID. That's four. The rest I don't plan on keeping up with. Three of them (Two, One, Numb) are tests of the roto strategy with speed, runs, BA and pitchers as you can tell from the team totals. The four teams I will follow are Ladyland, Sweet, Love and Gone.

[Rob]

On the Draft-O page, your format is slightly buggered in the pitching projections totals. The ZiPS box starts in front of what should be the James "W+H" cell.

 

nitpick ever>

 

Seriously man, fantastic job. The more I've been messing around with this beast, the more I keep learning. And it's already saved me from making a bad trade. Despite the formatting error that took me a whopping total of 12 seconds to fix, you've really outdone yourself. I really feel like I should probably be paying good money for this...

[sneakypower]

Wow, that team tab is epic. Edited February 23, 2008 by sneakypower

[Mephistopheles]

On the Draft-O page, your format is slightly buggered in the pitching projections totals. The ZiPS box starts in front of what should be the James "W+H" cell.

 

nitpick ever>

 

Seriously man, fantastic job. The more I've been messing around with this beast, the more I keep learning. And it's already saved me from making a bad trade. Despite the formatting error that took me a whopping total of 12 seconds to fix, you've really outdone yourself. I really feel like I should probably be paying good money for this...

 

Wow, I never noticed that. You've already done a few favors for me. Although the FFIX problem ended up being my disc. I'm probably just gonna drop the 20 USD for it off of Amazon new.

[Mephistopheles]

If you don't like my rankings for hitters. I don't care. There's a .977 correlation between your teams total P_R (or P_A) for offense to your actual score. So yes, my methods properly evaluate players.

[Rob]

On the Draft-O page, your format is slightly buggered in the pitching projections totals. The ZiPS box starts in front of what should be the James "W+H" cell.

 

nitpick ever>

 

Seriously man, fantastic job. The more I've been messing around with this beast, the more I keep learning. And it's already saved me from making a bad trade. Despite the formatting error that took me a whopping total of 12 seconds to fix, you've really outdone yourself. I really feel like I should probably be paying good money for this...

 

Wow, I never noticed that. You've already done a few favors for me. Although the FFIX problem ended up being my disc. I'm probably just gonna drop the 20 USD for it off of Amazon new.

 

Hey now, I said I should be paying, not that I could afford to. There are a lot of bar owners and strippers that are counting on paying rent with that money.:lol:

 

Looks like you changed the baselines for replacement level and average around a bit. Is this just a function of adding more leagues to your evaluation, or due to the new playing time projections?

[Mephistopheles]

Hmm I havent messed with those in awhile. The rankings change because of the distribution of various stats in leagues. IE: fast players were undervalued because the system thought that the standard deviation of stolen bases was high because I had a few teams with well over 250 steals because of the Speed/Pitching test I am conducting.

 

I could (and probably should) overhaul the RP level.

 

I actually have another draft tonight that I was going to do the speed test with. That'll give me four speed teams (none with reyes yet though) to test the theory. Ill probably draft a few more teams before now and the end of the season in order to get a better distribution. As you can see all the good teams are mine and that's probably not realistic considering I've entered three drafts of teams not drafted by me, and none of the 36 teams happened to pass my teams.

[Rob]

Hmm I havent messed with those in awhile. The rankings change because of the distribution of various stats in leagues. IE: fast players were undervalued because the system thought that the standard deviation of stolen bases was high because I had a few teams with well over 250 steals because of the Speed/Pitching test I am conducting.

 

I could (and probably should) overhaul the RP level.

 

I actually have another draft tonight that I was going to do the speed test with. That'll give me four speed teams (none with reyes yet though) to test the theory. Ill probably draft a few more teams before now and the end of the season in order to get a better distribution. As you can see all the good teams are mine and that's probably not realistic considering I've entered three drafts of teams not drafted by me, and none of the 36 teams happened to pass my teams.

 

Makes sense, I suppose.

 

I imagine it would help if we posted our leagues up once we have them, to get a more standard distribution?

[Mephistopheles]

this is true

[Tyrant]

This is all very impressive. I'm very stupid, so I don't understand most of it. But basically, the "overall" is just a compilation of various projections? And that's a rough order of how Meph would rank the players?

 

Just trying to sort out how to use it properly.

[Mephistopheles]

no that's not exactly the way I would rank them. I have my own set of sleepers

[Tyrant]

no that's not exactly the way I would rank them. I have my own set of sleepers

 

A rough guideline though, I assume? My league counts OBP instead of AVG, so I'd probably need to do some tweaking as is.

[Mephistopheles]

Yeah a rough guideline. It shows how people generally improperly value catchers and pitchers. In my four leagues I made sure to get one of the top catchers {Mauer, Russell, Martinez}.

[Rob]

I'm working on some stuff right now... I think I can remake my team from this...

 

ARod

Pujols

Rollins

Vlad

#12 pick

#13 pick

 

to this...

 

ARod

Santana

Braun

DLee

#1 pick

#7 pick

#12 pick

 

And I should be able to pick up VMart, Upton, and Hart with those three picks.

[Butterscup1679666578]

Yeah a rough guideline. It shows how people generally improperly value catchers and pitchers. In my four leagues I made sure to get one of the top catchers {Mauer, Russell, Martinez}.

 

I've done this too. Out of the 5 teams I've drafted, two have Russell and two have Martinez. On the other I have McCann.

[Balsa]

McCann is due for a bounceback year imo. That hand injury slowed him down.

[sneakypower]

and he still almost reached 100 RBI. he's in the same class as martin and mauer.

[Balsa]

What's the best place to view ADP?

[sneakypower]

ADPs

[Mephistopheles]

McCann is due for a bounceback year imo. That hand injury slowed him down.

 

 

He's not in their class. His 2007 is pretty much what's expected for a guy with a career sub 800 ops in the minors. 2006 was out of line. 2007 fits him. don't expect much more (not that he was bad).

[Rob]

Trying my best to dissect your wonderful work here... and I came up with a question.

 

When you're calculating "Rk" on the Overall worksheet, I understand that you're just averaging each player's rank above average and replacement in PECOTA, James, and ZiPS. But there are only five columns you're averaging (ZiPS above replacement level seems to be the missing one). Was this intentional, or what?

[Mephistopheles]

that is a mistake, thanks. easily correctable though

[Rob]

that is a mistake, thanks. easily correctable though

 

It'd be much easier to fix if I weren't excel-[expletive] and had to input each "=RANK(H,H:H)", individually, throwing the specific row number into each equation. But I'm 20% done, so it shouldn't be too much longer.

[Burtonbell]

Sweet mother of all statistical fantasy rankings Batman!

 

I need to find a way to bring my laptop to my draft! Thanks Meph.

 

edit: I just spent the last 47 minutes putting players on the Team tab and seeing what the results are. My draft cheat sheet looks a lot better now. Should I send you part of my winnings this year? lol

[sneakypower]

that is a mistake, thanks. easily correctable though

 

It'd be much easier to fix if I weren't excel-[expletive] and had to input each "=RANK(H,H:H)", individually, throwing the specific row number into each equation. But I'm 20% done, so it shouldn't be too much longer.

individually?

 

if i'm understanding you correctly, hover your mouse over the lower right hand corner of the cell so you get a + showing as your cursor, and click and drag downward to as many cells you want have that formula copied to (it adjusts the formulas to associate with cells in the same row). or you could just double-click when you get the + showing and it will copy down as far as there are cells populated adjacently.