SubscribeI’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.
Related posts:
Mays, thank you so much for these updates – I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. In my league, the player can play only the position in which he played the most games the previous year (whether majors or minors). This includes pitching – so someone who started 10 games and relieved in 15 would be classified as a reliever. Is there something that you could set up to accomodate this? Thanks, again.
@Jooky Junk: I’ll see what I can do.
Great tool. Are you going to add ZiPS when the complete projections come out this week? Also, how does the Price Guide account for the relative value of innings (i.e., Lincecum’s 2.6 ERA was worth more than Papelbon’s 2.3 since Lincecum threw so many more innings)?
One last request – it would be great if there was a way to force minimum IP per team. My league requires 910 IP/team/year, but the “ideal” IP for the Price Guide comes out to 640…
I know this is like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
@Tyler instead of putting for example “6 P” as your settings just fool around with it like 4 sp 2 rp until you get to the right number of ip and the way most of your league ran last year. You kinda have to trick it yourself.
@MV – indeed, that worked (almost) perfectly. Thanks much.
ZiPS: If Dan releases the 2009 ZiPS under the same license as he has before, it shouldn’t be any problem to add them here.
And MV is correct about the best way to hit IP minimums. Also keep in mind that the projections tend to be somewhat conservative in predicting IP, so you might be OK even if the IP totals are a little lower than what your league usually does.
@Jooky Junk: I’ve added some initial support for players qualifying only at their “top position.” I haven’t added it to the form, but you can add “&tp=Y” to the URL in the address bar to see how it looks.
And one more:
@Tyler: ERA (as well as WHIP and AVG) is computed based on how that player did compared to what an average pitcher would have done in the same number of innings.
For Lincecum in a standard league, an average pitcher would have given up 78 ER in 227 IP, because the league average is 3.08. Lincecum allowed 12 runs fewer than an average pitcher.
An average pitcher would have given up 23 ER in 69 IP (a 3.08 ERA again). Papelbon only allowed 18 ER to finish 5 runs above average.
So the Price Guide gives about twice as much credit to Lincecum for his ERA, because it prefers his 12 runs above average to Papelbon’s 5 runs above average.
Fantastic, thanks for all the help. Can’t say enough of about the Price Guide.
Not sure if this works for everyone, but simply cutting and pasting from my web browser to excel seems to work pretty well for getting the results into a spreadsheet.
What I’d really like to see is a way for us to upload our own spreadsheet of raw stats and then apply the price guide to them. Might be a tall order though…
Mays, how important is it to have the teams assigned to all the players in the price guide? I’m an M’s fan and I saw Jeremy Reed and Sean Green both listed as SEA (now NYM), Endy Chavez as NYM (now SEA), Franklin Gutierrez as CLE (now SEA), Chris Shelton listed as TEX (now SEA), Julio Mateo listed as SEA (no clue where he is now, but I think we released him 2 years ago), Tug Hulett as SEA (now KC), Luis Valbuena as SEA (now CLE?), RA Dickey as SEA (now MIN), Jake Woods as SEA (no clue). If you have an AL or an NL only league, doesn’t it throw off the calculations if there are players assigned to the wrong leagues?
Also, what about the blank teams – don’t those get included in both leagues when you do an AL-only or NL-only analysis?
And, what about Ben Sheets, who’s going to miss most of 2009? Doesn’t having his projections included skew the values of the other players?
@Jooky Junk: I started with everyone’s last team in 2008, and I’ve tried to keep things updated (by hand) as I see signings at MLB Trade Rumors. Obviously, I’ve missed a lot of smaller transactions. I’ll go ahead and update the ones you mentioned, but let me know if you come across any others.
Blank teams get counted as either AL or NL. That was a bigger deal earlier in the offseason when there were lots of free agents that could really end up anywhere.
Injured players will skew the rankings, but not if you edit their projection to something closer to what you think will happen.
Wonderful job on the site. I was just directed here from Fangraphs, and am so glad I was! I was wondering if there was any thought given to adding a defensive category? A few leagues I play in use Errors as a scoring category.
Thanks again!
I haven’t added errors simply because they aren’t typically projected by the systems. It’s the same reason I haven’t been able to do quality starts and holds, which a lot of people have asked for.
How about hits allowed for pitchers?
Also, how do I deal with bench slots? I’m in a league that auctions off those positions as well. I’ve just been splitting them evenly between Util and P, but I’m concerned that may throw off the replacement levels for the other slots.
For bench players, don’t add extra slots, just reduce the $ per team by the number of bench spots you have.
You don’t want to adjust the averages, SDs or replacement levels based on your bench players, since they’re not actually contributing stats.
When calculating value you only care how much better Albert Pujols is than the worst 1B who is in a starting spot. Pujols’s stats don’t become more valuable in relation to the other contributing players because there’s a bunch of scrubs on the bench not contributing. Replacement level isn’t really “replacement level,” it’s more of a baseline adjustment to who the bottom contributing player is, since the worst contributing player at a position is worth $1. Think about it – if you’re drafting for 2008 league today, you’d pay $1 for the worst player at a position that will be in your lineup. No reason to draft bench players at all, since you know exactly what each person will produce.
With that in mind, you’re never going to spend more than $1 for a bench player (or at least you’re not going to value them more than $1).
So you assume you’ll spend $1 per bench player and just take that out of your available budget.
Of course, this is different than how things work in practice. The person who drafts Chipper Jones might also pony up for a better-than-replacement level 3B to have on his bench for when Chipper gets hurt. Maybe Mark Reynolds or Jorge Cantu or something, rather than Bill Hall. So maybe you should change replacement level based on bench players a little.
I still think the best thing to do is to assume that your bench players will be $1, and adjusting your budget accordingly, and making any emergency adjustments based on what happens on draft day.
“How about hits allowed for pitchers?”
Hits are added.