Archive for the ‘Price Guide’ Category

End of Season Price Guide Updates

7 Comments
October 13th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

A couple of quick updates regarding the Price Guide:

  • Errors, holds, and quality starts are now all available for 2009 stats.
  • You now have the ability to force a custom hitter/pitcher split instead of using what the Price Guide determines as optimal. If you know that owners in your league will only spend 30% of their budgets on pitching, you can force a 70/30 split to mimic your league’s behavior, even if the Price Guide is recommending a 64/36 split.

As you may have noticed with the posts trailing off as the season started this year, this blog will primarily be a seasonal feature. I’m hoping to focus on content and Price Guide updates from January through March, and then slow down as the draft season finishes up.

I appreciate all of the comments that everyone posted this season, and I’m looking forward to continuing that discussion next spring.

The 2009 Fantasy All-Star Team

2 Comments
July 7th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide

Using the inseason dollar values from the Price Guide through yesterday, here are my lineups for the Fantasy All-Star team:

C – Joe Mauer ($38)
C – Victor Martinez ($30)

Brandon Inge ($27) is worth mentioning here, too, but he falls a little behind these two. No one else is even close to these three.

2B – Chase Utley ($29)
SS – Hanley Ramirez ($31)
MI – Ian Kinsler ($26)

Absolutely no surprises there, as those three were all early round choices. Aaron Hill ($25) has provided a nice windfall for fantasy owners.

OF – Carl Crawford ($34)
OF – Torii Hunter ($31)
OF – Ryan Braun ($30)
OF – Raul Ibanez ($27)
OF – Jason Bay ($24)

Carl Crawford’s incredible stolen base total has placed him as the #2 most valuable hitter, behind only Albert Pujols. Torii Hunter has apparently become a five-category talent this year to win a starting nod on the team.

Either Johnny Damon ($24) or Adam Lind ($23) can take the place of the injured Ibanez.

1B – Albert Pujols ($46)
3B – Mark Reynolds ($30)
CI – Justin Morneau ($29)
Util – Prince Fielder ($29)

Pujols has been the clear first half MVP, leading the next best hitter by $12. David Wright ($23) has not shown any power so far, but he’s been good enough elsewhere to still be a valuable player.

SP – Dan Haren ($39)
SP – Zack Greinke ($34)
SP – Tim Lincecum ($34)
SP – Roy Halladay ($26)
SP – Felix Hernandez ($23)
SP – Matt Cain ($23)
RP – Jonathan Broxton ($19)
RP – Joe Nathan ($14)
RP – Heath Bell ($14)

The early half of 2009 has seen some strong performances by starting pitchers, with just about all of the top ten all having ERAs below 3.00. Yovani Gallardo ($23), Chris Carpenter ($22), Edwin Jackson ($22), Javier Vazquez ($22), and Josh Johnson ($21) all deserve a mention here.

Relative to that, relievers haven’t been that spectacular. Ryan Franklin ($13) and Andrew Bailey ($11) have been pleasant surprises for save-chasers this year.

Anybody I’m leaving out?

ESPN League Dollar Values

10 Comments
April 27th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

You may have noticed the latest Greasemonkey script link on the Price Guide — a script for ESPN leagues.

Here’s what the Player Rater looks like in the FantasyPros911 Experts League, a standard AL-only league:

ESPN Player Rater with Dollar Values

With both the top fantasy hitter and the most valuable fantasy pitcher on his team, it’s not surprising that Perry Van Hook has a solid grip on 1st place.

You can get dollar values customized for you own league with the Price Guide. From there, you should see links to add the prices to your league homepage (Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, or Allstar Stats).

Dollar Values on Your CBS League Homepage

16 Comments
April 22nd, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

As promised, I’ve got a new Greasemonkey script that will display customized, up-to-date dollar values on your CBS fantasy league homepage. The effect is very similar to the Yahoo screenshots I posted earlier.

Now, whenever you generate dollar values with the Price Guide, you should see links to add the dollar values to your league:

Greasemonkey links

The links are Greasemonkey scripts that are generated with your specific league parameters, so there’s no longer any need to edit the scripts yourself. If you have Greasemonkey installed, all you have to do is click the link and the prices should start showing up.

This is all still a work in progress, so there could still be a few quirks. Please let me know if you have any problems with it.

Assorted Updates

No Comments
April 21st, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

A quick update: You can now add dollar values from the composite projections to your league homepage.

If your league is hosted by Allstar Stats, there is now a Greasemonkey script for you — available here.

I’ve matched all of the player IDs from CBS with the IDs I have on the stats and projections, so there should be a CBS script available pretty soon. ESPN is next after that.

Price Guide Dollar Values on Your League Homepage

12 Comments
April 17th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

Having unveiled in-season fantasy dollar values, I’m ready to reveal my latest project — Price Guide values on your league homepage.

The screenshots below are Price Guide values inserted into one of Yahoo’s expert fantasy leagues – the Friends and Family League. The values are customized for the settings of this exact league (14 teams, 1 catcher, 2 Util).

Here’s the pitching staff for Brad Evans, currently in last place:

Brad Evans and a Last Place Team

Some free agents:

Free Agents with Dollar Values

Transactions:

Recent Transactions

It’s all done through the magic of the Firefox plugin Greasemonkey, and it is completely customizable for your specific league settings.

If you have Greasemonkey installed and are at least mildly comfortable editing scripts, you can try out the Yahoo league version for yourself. All you should have to do is replace the Price Guide URL in the script with the URL for your league.

Suggestions are welcome. Once everything is polished up I’ll see about putting it out on UserScripts.org.

2009 In-Season Prices

1 Comment
April 11th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

I’ve made a preliminary attempt at adding season-to-date dollar values in the Price Guide. You can find it by selecting 2009 Stats.

With less than one week in the books, Emilio Bonifacio is the clear leader for most fantasy leagues. He’s been a five-category star, thanks especially to that inside-the-park HR. After yesterday’s game, Miguel Cabrera unseated teammate Brandon Inge as the #2 fantasy player.

I hope to have the stat updates automated in the coming days. I’d also like to have some way to update position eligibility if I can find a source for games by position.

Let me know what you think.

Another Look at the RotoTimes Player Rater

5 Comments
March 3rd, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Other Sites, Price Guide

You 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.

Net Steals, K/AB, and K – BB

18 Comments
February 28th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

I’ve got a handful of Price Guide updates that I’d like to make you aware of:

  • New categories: Net Steals (SB – CS) and K/AB for hitters, K – BB for pitchers. If you happen to be in a fantasy league that uses those exact three categories, Juan Pierre is the man you want. Ryan Howard comes in at a spectacular -$64.
  • The league averages now show up for rate stats (BA, ERA, WHIP, etc.) In a standard league, the Price Guide projects the average hitter to bat .279; the average pitcher will post a 3.73 ERA and a 1.26 WHIP.
  • I’ve been experimenting with a way to export the Price Guide’s results to a spreadsheet. For those of you who like to poke around, you can see an early version if you add “&o=CSV” to the querystring. I haven’t quite got it working for minor league players, but it’s a start.

As always, let me know if there’s a feature you would like to see.

Another New Price Guide Category: Pitcher Walks

20 Comments
February 21st, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

By request, I’ve added another stat category for the Price Guide: pitcher walks.

It works as you would expect in a normal league (i.e. walking fewer batters is better).

Please let me know if there are any other categories you are interested in. If it’s a stat that is typically projected, it is usually pretty easy to add. (Holds and quality starts, unfortunately, aren’t projected by any of the systems.)

For those who aren’t familiar with it: The Fantasy Baseball Price Guide is an online tool that builds auction dollar values or draft rankings customized for you league. It handles any number of teams, any number of starting positions, and most stat categories. You can also edit the projected stats for any player to fit your own expectations.