Last Player Picked

Early fantasy drafters get ready: The Price Guide has its first 2011 Projections, SG’s CAIRO projections. Yankees fans already know about the excellent Replacement Level Yankees Weblog where SG posts. We non-Yankee fans can still find some great projection info at RLYW, like SG’s explanation of the CAIRO methodology and his 2011 projected standings (updated throughout the preseason).

Perhaps the worst part about having dollar values available for Yahoo, ESPN, and CBS fantasy leagues has been that I now have a new part time job: maintaining player IDs.

You see, every time a rookie shows up in the majors (and often before that, even), he’s assigned a unique ID by each of the fantasy league hosts. When Yankee’s “phenom” Anthony Claggett was called up earlier this year, Yahoo ID’ed him as number 8450, CBS assigned him 1654377, and ESPN determined that he would be player 2312.

And since they all use different IDs to refer to the same player, it has been my job to match those up. For every player.

Luckily, I was able to start out from some pretty good sources. Tango compiled IDs from several different sources for players who played in 2008. Benchcoach had quite a few that he didn’t have. With assistance from some helpful individuals, as well, I’ve managed to build a pretty decent list of player IDs.

Right now I have about 10,000 players with IDs from STATS (used by Yahoo and Allstar Stats), MLBAM, ESPN, CBS, BIS, BDB (Baseball-Reference), and Retrosheet. I’ve also tried to keep track of name variations between sources. There are still lots of gaps, however, as I only have a complete set of IDs for about 12% of those players.

Just in case anyone is interested in what I’ve got so far, though, here’s the full list:

ID Conversion (May 01, 2009)

Last Player Picked is a site exploring various aspects of fantasy baseball analysis, especially relating to drafting and player valuation strategies.

Much of what is discussed here will involve the Price Guide, an online tool I developed to build dollar values or player rankings customized for any league configuration.