Last Player Picked

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)

Related posts:

• Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part II (Baseball Monster and ESPN)
• Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part I (Introduction)
• ESPN League Dollar Values
• Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part III (Razzball and RotoTimes)
• Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part IV (Showdown: Price Guide vs. Point Shares)