SubscribeMuch of the discussion on this site will involve the Price Guide, a tool I developed to build accurate rankings and dollar values based on players’ stats (or projected stats). All you have to do is enter your league settings (number of teams, stat categories, and positions), and it spits out values for every player, customized for your league.
While there are other sites that try to do the same kind of thing, I think that the current feature-set of the Price Guide makes it one-of-a-kind:
Completely customizable
The Price Guide can handle whatever stats your league wants to use. Do you want to count hitters’ OBP? How about HR/9 or K/BB for pitchers? The Price Guide can handle these and many more.
(And, if you have a category that is not currently included, let me know and I’ll see about adding it.)
Able to handle any size league
A lot of the player valuators are geared toward 10 or 12 team leagues and will become less accurate the more your league diverges from those settings. The Price Guide will work with any size league (including AL-only and NL-only leagues of any size).
Adjusted for positions
The Price Guide takes into account how many players your league starts at each position, and it adjusts the baseline accordingly. For example, if you have an auction league with 12 teams that each start 2 catchers, the Price Guide sets the value of the 24th catcher at $1 and calculates the other values accordingly.
When doing this, the Price Guide will also consider a player’s positional eligibility, customized for your league’s eligibility rules. So no matter if your league requires 1 game to qualify or 50, each player will be ranked at whatever position gives them the most value.
Built on a meaningful scale
For auction leagues, it’s not enough to know how one player compares to another on an arbitrary scale. That’s why the Price Guide presents player values in terms of dollars.
Like everything else, the amount of money per team is customizable to whatever your league uses.
Back and forward looking
Not only does the Price Guide build values based on last season’s stats, but it can also look ahead with values based on various projection systems. While these projections have their limitations, the Price Guide is able to accurately convert the stats into fantasy dollar values.
Accurate
I mentioned that there are other sites that try to build rankings and values of players for fantasy, but the Price Guide beats out all of them when looking at which system actually gives the best chance of winning. (Later, I’ll show that the head-to-head results backup my claim.)
Based on open methodology
I want the Price Guide to be the best valuation system possible, and I realize that community input is going to be important in making that happen. I’m going to be open with how the Price Guide works, in hopes that any flaws can be exposed and then improved.
So let me know if there’s something you think doesn’t look right, or if there’s something else you would like the Price Guide to do.
Give it a try: Price Guide
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I just wanted to drop a post-season note of thanks.
This site and the ideas within let me excel this year. I played in 7 leagues, 3 H2H and 4 roto. I missed the playoffs in 2 H2H leagues and lost the championship game in the other. But the real success of the price guide-theory lies in roto leagues.
In my 4 roto leagues (2 mixed leagues, 1 NL-only and 1 AL-only auction) I won my NL-only league, won 1 mixed league, and finished 2nd in the AL-only and other mixed league, in both of those losing 1st place within the last week of the season. This is my best fantasy season ever, and the first where I really employed the price-guide valuation theory in all of my leagues.
So the idea of simple projections and valuations based on standard deviations clearly works, and works well. For roto leagues at least. Head-to-head is a much tougher beast to evaluate for because of pitching streaming and natural variances in consistency.