SubscribeThe Price Guide is a free, online tool that gives you fantasy dollar values or fantasy rankings, customized for your league.
Here are some of the things it lets you do:
Customize Player Values for Your League
In fantasy baseball today, there’s no such thing as a standard league — your specific league settings can drastically alter the fantasy values of players. So why do so many fantasy sites and magazines only give a one-size-fits-all ranking of players?
The Price Guide adjusts player values to the particulars of your league. So if you’re in an 8-team, NL-only league with standard categories or a 14-team league that adds OBP and holds, the Price Guide delivers values that are customized to those exact specifications. The Price Guide can be configured to handle literally millions of unique leagues.
Wonder how the Price Guide works? The details of its inner workings are all spelled out on the site, so there’s no proprietary secret or black-box to the methodology. There’s nothing about the Price Guide that you shouldn’t be able to recreate on your own.
Edit the Projections
While the Price Guide projections are already great, what happens if you disagree with the projected stats for a player? With the Price Guide, you can easily tweak any player’s stats and the values for all players will be automatically recalculated.
So let’s say you come across a prospect who is initially slated for 10 HR and 10 SB, but you think he can get 20 of each. Enter new values on the Price Guide, and you’ll not only see his value jump, but you will also see a slight revaluation of everyone else as the number of available HR and SB increases.
Enter Keepers
If your league let’s you keep players, you know that they can have a dramatic effect on draft-day prices. With the Price Guide, as you enter keeper prices, you can watch the inflation rate raise the values of the remaining players.
Upload Your Own Projections
If you ever encounter a situation where you want to change a large number of players’ values, the Price Guide also lets you upload your own projections into the system. All you have to do is put the stats in a simple Excel format and upload them to the site. You can upload as many sets as your want, so you are free to continually adjust your projections throughout the spring.
Add Values to Your League Website
Using a Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey, you can even add Price Guide dollar values to your league website. Get a leg-up on the competition with this handy tool to help you evaluate free agent pickups and trade opportunities.
The dollar values work with Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, and Allstar Stats leagues. As on the Price Guide site, the values are customized for your exact league settings, and the year-to-date values update daily throughout the season.
Interested yet? Everything is completely free, so why don’t you try it out?
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Mays, still wondering if you can filter out players who are unsigned, in the minors, or on the DL from being included in the Price Guide calculations. I would like to go into our draft day on April 5th with a list of players and their values for those who made it to the opening day roster. This site is awesome! I used it last year for draft day and I plan on using it almost exclusively this year. Thank you!
Can I just take the opportunity to say once more how totally awesome this site is? The playing time adjustments and ability to upload our own projections is even taking it to a higher level. Thank you Mays!
Ditto from me. I play with multiple league formats and the flexibility of the Price Guide is priceless. I am wondering if it’s possible to assign multiple positions when uploading my own projections although adjusting positions afterward is certainly a minor task.
@Tim: That might be best suited for taking advantage of the upload feature. I don’t think I will have time to go through each team’s roster.
@Mike: You can enter multiple positions in the “defaultPos” column; they just have to be separated by a space or a “/”.
Hey Mays
Hey Mays
For some reason when I try to upload my projections it only gives me the options to add the hitters file.
I love the Price Guide. Been doing my own version of this for years but your interface is a far better implementation.
One question: how do I edit the projections for a few players like you mention above? After I get the results, it’s not clear how I get to the fields to edit projections.
Thanks for all your hard work.
@Dagan: To edit the projections, you have to check the box on the settings page that says “Let me customize these projections.” The “Edit” link only shows up on the results if that is checked.
Great! Works perfectly. Don’t know how I missed that setting. I’m excited to put together my final target list with your Price Guide info.
Thanks for the quick response.
This is a great tool, excellent work!
I’ve had a few issues over the past few days:
The other day I created a pricing list where I used a copy of the sample templates linked on this site.
I got the batter’s data, but no data showed up for pitching. Is there another template that I could use?
Then today, I tried again and there was no option for uploading the Pitching template at all.
@hankp101 and Todd: I’m not seeing the hitter-only upload problem you are experiencing… Can you email me some details?
@hankp101: OK, I think your problem should be fixed, now. Let me know if it is still messing up.
It looks like both are available now, however I am still having isues with the upload for pitching data. I get a bunch of INF & 0’s with the pitching template that I am using.
Worst case scenario, I can use the defaults and make adjustments.
Mays,
Was directed here by Chris from Fantasy Baseball Trade Market because I was working on some similar stuff. The Price guide looks like a great tool. My question is: The total you come up with before converting to dollar values…does that have any tangible significance? If Hanley has an 11.62 adjusted total, what does that mean physically?
I’ve been trying to formulate a system that comes up with what a player contributes above (or below) the average. So in a 12 team league with 10 categories each team starts at 65 points, 32.5 each for hitting and pitching. Instead of doing a standard deviation for scaling I divide each xCategory by the total the average team would accrue (yes, I know this is league specific). For rate stats, example avg, I’d have (player_average-avg_average)*AB/avg_AB. I think this does a good job of scaling. Then I tally the total and multiply by 32.5 to get what I perceive to be how many points the player would contribute to the teams point total above average.
It seems reasonable, but does it make mathematical sense? Any thoughts? Thanks.
Also, is there any way to cleanly transfer your price guide stats and value to excel. I tried copy/paste but it just put everything into one run on cell. Thanks.
Ah, figured it out! Once again, really dynamite stuff.
Mays,
This site is fantastic. Thank you.
I am fairly new to fantasy baseball and I was wondering… the description of the price guide says it will give you “fantasy dollar values or fantasy rankings.”
I play in a draft league. All I see from the price guide are dollar values. Can I assume that the “rankings” are simply the dollar values in descending order? Or would rankings somehow change if it’s not an auction league?
Thanks so much for the clarification.
@Jeremy: Yes, for a draft you are just concerned with the order of the players listed and not the dollar value listed.
This is an amazing tool.
Is there a way to download the data into an excel spreadsheet? And is the a way to combine the hitter and pitcher data into one list?
Hey Mays, thanks for the quick answer. A new question pops up though…
When combining Hitters and Pitchers for a straight draft, to sort the list am I looking at dollar value or “Adj. Total?”
For my league, if I use adj. total, Tim Lincecum would wind up as the #2 overall pick, but sorting by dollar value, he slips in at #10 overall (which I find a bit more reasonable).
Thanks!
@Jeremy: The Adj. Total and dollar value will follow the same order, unless you define a custom hitter/pitcher split. With a custom split, the dollar values (not the Adj. Total) will determine the ranks you want to use for a draft.
@Mike: If you click on the “League Info” tab on the results, there is a link to “Export as CSV,” and that will open in Excel.
That spreadsheet will list hitters and pitchers together.
Mays,
This is very cool. I made a Last Player Picked csv file of the 2010 Steamer Hitter Projections if anyone wants to use it:
http://sites.google.com/site/steamerprojections/2010-projections
They’ll need pitcher projections from another site for now. We’ll have pitcher projections in the next couple of weeks (perhaps too late for most, I know).
@J. Cross: If you get pitcher projections up by Opening Day, I’d love to include Steamer here with the rest.
Will do.
Used this for a draft this past Saturday, worked great. Thanks!
Question for an auction next week: I’ve double checked my entries for the rosters, and for a 10-team league with 22-man rosters, I’m only getting positive dollar values for 182 players. Since a minimum bid of $1 is required, I have the minor problem of not having enough players valued above 1, but the major problem of believing that the players are incorrectly valued because of the shortage. Any advice on my fixing this other than tinkering with the number of players until I get 220 valued? Thanks.
May have already answered my own question: I submitted starting roster requirements, and notice there’s no option to list reserve spots. My spreadsheet gives 170 players at $1 or more, which accounts for 17 starters on 10 teams.
Is there a better way to account for bench spots than adding them to the individual positions? Would the value between the 10th and 11th first baseman be weighted appropriately (ignoring that the 11th ranked first basemen could likely be used at the UTIL spot)?
Hey, great site. I exported the info to CSV and the batting average is all messed up. It shows fine on the display but then gets messed up when exported to excel. For example, it has Puljos average as 30.62. Is there any easy fix for this? Please let me know.
@Brian: What shows up on the CSV is not BA, but actually “hits above average” — i.e. Pujols will have 31 more hits than the average player who gets the number of AB he gets.
If you want BA to show up in Excel, you have to add a column for it. Luckily, Excel can handle dividing H by AB so there’s not much work for you to do.
Hi. Your website is great – incredibly kind of you to provide all this great information. I went ahead and customized players by putting in the amount they are kept for in my league. As you suggest, this creates a “$(Inf)” column that shows truer prices for all players, which is great. But when I download to Excel, that column is not there (as far as I can tell). Any advice? Thanks.
@Mark: I’ve got a few things to clean up on the “Export to CSV” feature, and what you mention also needs added to that list.
In the meantime, it’s pretty easy to get Excel to calculate the same inflation as what shows up on the webpage. If the Price Guide shows (for example) 21% inflation, you can use this formula in Excel:
=K2*1.21
You can drag that formula all the way down a column to apply it to every player.
Okay, I’ve got hitter and pitcher projections with csv files ready to go if anyone’s still drafting:
http://sites.google.com/site/steamerprojections/steamer-files?pli=1
(just download lppsteamerhitters2 and lppsteamerpitchers2010)
Mays, if you want to add them to the choices on the site that would be cool.