SubscribeDid you know that you can add the Price Guide’s dollar values to your fantasy league’s website (Yahoo, ESPN, CBS Sportsline, or Allstar Stats)? Here’s what it looks like on a public CBS league:
These are dollar values that are customized to whatever settings your league is using and that only show up on your computer. During the preseason, you can use the projected stats on this site or your own customized projections. Once the season starts, you might instead show each player’s actual, year-to-date dollar value.
The dollar values are easy to add. Since CBS already has their leagues up, here is all you need to do to add them:
1. Download Mozilla Firefox and Greasemonkey. Firefox is an internet browser that works as an alternative to Internet Explorer. Greasemonkey is an add-on to Firefox that allows you to customize how pages appear.
2. Enter your CBS Sports league settings into the Price Guide. For a public league, you should only need to change the number of teams from 12 to 10. If you use “Standard Roto” (i.e. 4×4) rules, you will also want to remove batter runs and pitcher strikeouts. (If you have a Premium league at CBS, you may need to change more settings to match your league.)
3. Click the link on the results. At the top of the Price Guide results, you should see a link to add dollar values to a CBS Sportsline league. Click the link and Greasemonkey should recognize and install the script.
4. Check it out on your league homepage. Go to your league, and you should notice the dollar values showing up next to each player’s name.
While CBS provides player rankings that give you an idea of a player’s value, remember that these are not customized for your specific league. Also, it might be valuable to know places where the Price Guide’s projections diverge from CBS’s. Compare CBS’s 2B rankings to what the Price Guide thinks:
While much of those rankings line up, the Price Guide’s projections put much less weight in Aaron Hill’s and Ben Zobrist’s remarkable 2009 improvements, expecting them to settle somewhere in between 2008 and 2009.
At 3B it is clear that the Price Guide continues to put less emphasis on one year’s stats: The projections don’t discount David Wright’s mysteriously poor 2009 as much as CBS does, placing him at $28 and the 2nd best 3B.
While you certainly don’t have to agree with one or the other, I think those kinds of discrepancies can be valuable to realize. Also remember that these values will update as the Price Guide updates this spring. During the year, they will update daily based on the latest year-to-date stats.
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Great tool, thanks for sharing. Is there a way to make it work with Google Chrome? I started using that as my default browser a couple months back.
Great tool, thanks for sharing. Is there a way to make it work with Google Chrome? I started using that as my default browser a couple months back.
Sorry if this dupe posts, stalled when I hit submit a minute ago.
Any chance you can get this to work with OnRoto? Thanks.
@Tavo: I haven’t tried it yet, but I think Greasemonkey scripts will work with Google Chrome:
http://lifehacker.com/5180010/enable-user-scripts-in-google-chrome
I’ve got Chrome installed, so I’ll try it out later to make sure the Price Guide script works.
@Jamie: The biggest difficulty with adding a new site like OnRoto is mapping the player IDs. Yahoo, CBS, and ESPN all use different IDs, and so I have to update each of them whenever a new player is added.
It looks like OnRoto uses yet another system of IDs. If there’s demand for it, I could probably do it though.
Mays – I actually just assumed it didn’t, sorry, laziness on my part. I am going to try when I get home tonight and will let you guys know.
Cool idea, but getting some wonky results on CBS for some players (seems that pitchers are off by the most). I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong with this, but it must be something.
@Tavo: I just tried out the script on Google Chrome, and I don’t think Chrome supports it (yet).
The script is designed to connect to http://www.lastplayerpicked.com to get up-to-date dollar values. Google hasn’t implemented the Greasemonkey feature that lets scripts connect to a remote site.
@Aaron: Wonky? I’m not sure what you mean; the results should be the same as what you see here. If you can give me some details I’d be happy to look into it.
Mays – Some of them match up, and some don’t (this is in a 4×4 AL-only CBS league). Just as an example, Anthony Swarzak came up at a $20 player on CBS. There are a bunch of other examples where CBS doesn’t match up with the values from here. I’m just I just botched something but it’s definitely not working right for me.
Is there a way to use this for multiple CBS leagues? I have two leagues on that site and the prices show up on both leagues. But the leagues are very different so the prices are not accurate for one league.
Awesome stuff by the way… I’m glad I found you… I’ll send you a valentine if it’s appropriate ;-0
@Rob: Yes, you can set the scripts to only run on certain pages. The scripts by default run on any page that matches “*.baseball.cbssports.com/*”. You just need to edit that address for each script so that it uniquely matches only one league:
In Firefox, go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> Manage User Scripts. On the “Included Pages” section for each script, you just need to edit the address to be something like this:
*league1.baseball.cbssports.com/*
Where “league1″ is whatever shows up in the address bar on your first league homepage. Then do the same thing for the other league (e.g. “league2″).