SubscribeThis is going to be my running list of things I would like to add to the current functionality of the Price Guide. This is also the official place for feature requests. I’ll start off with these:
Customizable projections
Formula-driven projections don’t take a lot of things into account that fantasy players might take into consideration, even some fairly obvious things. For example, it would be nice to be able to knock 15% off of Chase Utley’s 2009 stats for the time he might miss. Maybe tone down Matt Holliday’s projection outside of Colorado. Remove Mike Mussina and add Matt Weiters and Kenshin Kawakami. Changing any of those players will affect the values of everyone else.
I’d like to be able to edit the individual stats for any players and then rerun everything to get new dollar values for all players.
Keepers
One factor that can affect dollar values on draft day is keeper inflation. The Price Guide won’t be very useful for leagues where players end up going for 20-30% more due to inflation.
It would be nice if I could mark which players are kept, and at what prices. Then the values could be rebuilt with inflation automatically factored in.
Better multi-positional adjustments
The Price Guide already does a lot to try to handle replacement levels for different positions. It correctly handles utility positions like corner-infield or middle-infield. It works for leagues that have OF spots and leagues that have LF, CF, RF (and leagues that have some combination of both).
But for players who are eligible at multiple positions, I would like it to do better at finding each player’s most valuable position. Right now it assumes that a player is most valuable at C, then SS and 2B, then 3B, OF, and 1B. This order is typically true, but each league is different. Ideally, it would be nice if it recognized leagues where (for example) OF are particularly valuable.
What else do you want to see in the Price Guide?
Related posts:
Well, it looks like you’ve already come up with many of the things I’d like to see. I’ll second the keeper suggestion. In a league with 10 keepers/team, it would be nice to see how things change when all of those players are removed from the player pool.
I would love to also see some ADP information incorporated into the Price Guide. If there was a way to get a feed from say, mock draft central, and juxtapose those with the rankings spit out by the Price Guide, it would be really easy to identify players that are being over/under valued and to draft accordingly.
Would there be a way to use a “custom” set of projections? I’m thinking a user could cut & paste a spreadsheet according to a specified format, and then the price guide could generate its rankings from that?
Doing this would mean that we could manually adjust projections according to last minute injuries or role changes, or if we have some reason to believe that a certain player’s projection is inaccurate.
This would also be a way around not being able to use certain projections because of them being unavailable to the public (Shandler, PECOTA).
When looking at fantasy values, I’ve always wondered how I should input the specifications for my league that has a bench. Should I just put in the number of starters and ignore the bench players? I’m in a league that starts 9 hitters, 4 starting pitchers, and 2 relievers, and has a 10-man bench. It’s a weekly league. So do I put in just the starters to determine dollar value?
@Nick: Keepers and customized projections are both very close to happening. I like the ADP idea… I’ll see how feasible it is.
@Bobby: For a daily league, I recommend bumping up the number of starters to account for bench players that might get rotated in (especially with SP). I doubt that that would be necessary for your weekly league, though.
Otherwise, I’d just adjust the salary cap that you enter into the price guide to account for what teams spend on bench players. If the average team spends $20 on their bench, then just reduce the cap by $20.
Alright I know I’m being greedy here, but another feature I’d like to see is the option to export the results to a .csv or .xls file. It’s nice to be able to sort by position or category or to play around with things on a spreadsheet. In one league I play in, players are assigned a cost of $6, $4, or $1 depending on last year’s stats, and I like to deduct their cost from their projected earnings to determine an estimate of “profit.” Having the results in a spreadsheet allows me to do further adjust for weird league features like that.
If you were feeling really, really ambitious, a great add-on would be a draft manager which would include a number of features, including:
- greying out of drafted players
- adjusting of values/rankings the reflect diminishing returns based on what your team/other teams have already drafted (after all, if you win by 10 RBI or 100 RBI, there no difference)
Any thoughts about adding Holds for leagues that play with them?
Holds would be an easy thing to add, but currently none of the projections project them. (I’m lucky that at least Marcel projects saves…)
One feature I (and possibly others) would find useful would be an option to have “bench” slots in the league configuration that can be mixed between hitters and pitchers.
@Molson: The hard part is determining how bench players affect the values… They obviously change will change the replacement level, but what is a bench player worth?
Technically, bench players have zero value, because they don’t contribute to your team when they are on your bench. Practically speaking, that’s not usually the case, because they will be rotated in on off days and as injury replacements. I don’t have a good way to estimate that contribution, though.
The way that I do it is to assume that they don’t affect replacement level for each position and treat them like Util or P.
I don’t have them affect replacement level since you’re not really drafting them as a position player but as a replacement player.
Then I figure out what the lowest adjusted score is and add that value to all the scores to set the lowest bench player to $1 and then calculate the values normally.
Not sure if this is the optimal way or not, but it seems to work OK.