SubscribeYou may remember that when I compared the Price Guide to some of the other player valuators, my impression was that RotoTimes’s Player Rater was the worst of the bunch. RotoTimes recently added some new features, like the ability to choose how much money to allocate for hitters and pitchers. I tried it out again to see if anything had changed or improved.
What I found is that the Player Rater still can’t compete with the Price Guide head-to-head. Using the same sorts of drafts as before, RotoTimes always finished below the Price Guide in the standings. It is hurt by its continued tendency to overrate fast OF — it ranks Ichiro as the 21st best hitter last year, ahead of guys like Matt Kemp and Nick Markakis. (The Price Guide has him as 41, for comparison.)
But the main problem I see with the RotoTimes Player Rater is that it has no clue as to what to use for the replacement level. That’s because you only tell it the number of hitters and pitchers that your league uses, instead of the number at each position. If you tell it 14 hitters, it will give you the same values if your league drafts 14 outfielders per team or if each team starts 14 shortstops. All it knows is that each team gets 14 hitters.
It doesn’t take a crazy 14-outfielder league to make it give weird results, though. When I get values for a 12-team fantasy league with 14 hitters per team, it shows 10 catchers with a postive dollar value. Ten catchers for twelve teams? That doesn’t even work for a one-catcher league, and it is terribly inaccurate for a two-catcher league.
Out of curiosity, I tried out a few more league settings and counted how many catchers the tool said to draft:
12 mixed: 10 catchers (.83 per team)
12 AL: 22 catchers (1.83 per team)
20 mixed: 27 catchers (1.35 per team)
20 NL: 56 catchers (2.8 per team)
So in some leagues, the Player Rater doesn’t even draft enough catchers to fill one per team. In other leagues, it decides that most teams need three catchers! I have no idea how they are coming up with their replacement levels, but I’m pretty sure it’s not right.
For the record, I still haven’t found any valuation system that can beat than the Price Guide.
Related posts:
- Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part III (Razzball and RotoTimes)
- Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part I (Introduction)
- Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part IV (Showdown: Price Guide vs. Point Shares)
- Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part II (Baseball Monster and ESPN)
- Introducing the Price Guide
Yup, glad to see someone else share their disappointment with the Player Rater. I always knew their positional adjustments were terrible just by looking at how low catchers are valued.
The good news for us? Many fantasy owners who don’t know better will use their values, giving us the leg up!
First of all, this is a great site and a great service, I am glad I found it today. Quite frankly, your values come in astonishingly close to my spreadsheet values, which I find a little scary, but it also makes me more interested in your thoughts and analysis.
Concerning a post you made earlier, you can get a reasonable base for average market values in an auction draft by laking the lists published by cbs, etc, and averaging them. Most drafters are going to get their lists from somewhere, and these are what they will probably be based upon.
Anyway, great site, and thanks for the spreadsheet download capability.
Hmmm. I have been looking over the customized spreadsheet that I derived from the Price Guide.
Does the program conclude that all bench players are worth $0?
Is there any way to tell the Price Guide how many bench spots my league uses? I think that this would impact the price it spits out.
For my league, there will be 252 players drafted, but the Price Guide gives me only 187 players with positive value. Is this because it does not recognize the bench players, or is there another explanation?
It does rank bench players at $0, because none of their stats contribute towards the standings (in theory, at least).
If your league buys bench players at the draft, I recommend excluding the money you expect to be spent on bench players from what you enter in the Price Guide (e.g. $245 per team instead of $260).
When looking at some of the projections the relief pichers have(for chone and zips), there are dollar values but no projections for saves. I’m in a 10 team AL pool with standard 4×4 categories