by The 2023 fantasy baseball draft kit has tons of sleepers, advice, rankings and more, but none of them might fit your league exact. Now you have the tool that can take the “2.75-points-for-a-save” whim and put custom ratings into proper context.
- Dom Luszczyszyn is the mastermind behind a fantasy hockey cheat sheet and works with Jake every year to create this cheat sheet that allows you to enter your league settings, adjust projections and basically draft with an optimized list of rankings fully customized to your league.
- We try to make it better and adjust it annually, but there will probably still be some small mistakes. Your feedback is crucial to getting this perfect. So please drop any issues you encounter.
- NOTE: We are still trying to find a solution/way to allow CI, MI, DH/UTIL, combined P and multi-position qualification. It’s a hell of a task with the VORP calculations and more, but we try; we promise!
How to use this fantasy baseball cheat sheet – PLEASE READ
Step 1: Enable editing
You only need to do this the first time you open a new download.
Step 2: Scoring Settings
The tab on the far left above the bottom is “Settings.” If you are in a points league, put the point values in the cells next to the corresponding category. So if your league gives 10 points for a win, put a 10 in the cell to the right of “W”:
You also need to delete all the “1’s” under “Category” in hit and pitch categories, because that is for Roto leagues.
For Roto leagues, delete the point values and put a “1” in the categories you score. So a 5×5 Roto league scoring OBP instead of average would look like this:
Now go to the right of this page and enter the number of teams (10/12/15 whatever) – it will change the “Players selected above replacement” numbers to yellow. And here’s something for the more advanced spreadsheet. If you want to assign a bit more power to a particular position, change the “Players Selected Above Replacement” for that position and the sheet will adjust. A higher number = that position becomes more valuable. A lower number = the importance is reduced. It’s currently optimized to fit Jake’s ratings, but your tastes may vary.
Finally – and this is very important – enter your “format” (Point or Categories).
Then go to the “Rankings” tab.
Step 3: The Ranking Tab
The easiest way to do this is to sort by rank. Tap the little triangle, sort by “ascending” and it will automatically sort for you. If you want to geek out, you can also sort by VORP, in which case you’ll go with “descending” and you might have to click twice to get it to work.
We realize this seems simple, but it takes into account months of projections, some very serious spreadsheet math, standard deviations, replacement-level players, and much more.
Step 4: Miscellaneous and corrections
1. You can do a lot with this tool. If you don’t like the estimates – you can change them. For example, we went to the “Hitters” tab, dropped Pete Alonso from 39:
to 22 home runs:
Going back to the ranking tab, you can see that he has dropped from 80 to 136:
***IMPORTANT: ONLY CHANGE THE PROJECTIONS IN THE “HITTERS” OR “PITCHERS” TAB**** They won’t go anywhere else.
2. Points league players may also notice some marginal categories are missing, such as CG, SHO and CYC. We cannot predict who will hit for the cycle. And shutouts and complete games are such a rare occurrence, we’ll leave it up to you to assign one or two per year to pitchers and manually increase their value.
3. “Hits” = Singles/1 point, so they are one and the same. Doubles, triples, and home runs are 2, 3, and 4 points, so “hits” are already included for those.
4. If you play in a AL or NL-only league, just tap the triangle under “League” on the Ranking tab and check the corresponding league. If you want to include the free agent crop, make sure FA is on.
5. ADP is intentionally blank. It’s there if you want to fill it out, and it depends on when you draft. Unfortunately, with the frequent changes (sometimes daily) and depending on your site (NFBC, Yahoo, etc.) there is no way to get an automated ADP.
6. Stores + Holds works for me if I use 1 point for Savs and 0.75 for Holds.
7. If you have an odd number of teamsall the things in yellow will be converted to decimals like this (which will cause the “Rankings” tab to be filled with “N/A”):
… just go into the yellow boxes and round up to whole numbers and everything will go back to normal:
Step 5: My Team
There is a “My Team” tab that allows you to enter your team (or practice squad) and see what the projected totals will be. It is especially important if you are doing a mock (or a solitaire mock and want to see if your team will compete for a title in Roto, as you can look at previous totals and see where you will finish in the ranks. Just copy the player’s name ( or type it in, but spell it correctly!) from the Rankings tab and paste it into My Team one at their position.
Special “steps”
Keepers
- You must delete the player from FOUR tabs: Position, Hitters (or Pitchers), Std Dev and Rankings. Also, this is going to skew the VORP a bit, which you may/may not want.
Mono (AL or NL only) leagues
- On the Ranking tab, there is a column to sort by just AL or NL for the league. Just choose which one you want and voila!
Shohei Ohtani
- Yes, there is a special rule for Ohtani (Shohei Ohtani – H is the DH, Shohei Ohtani is the pitcher, and he is not a combo player for both).
Add categories etc.
The columns/categories/statistics/fields we have are all there will be. Between my own projections and Dom’s cheat sheet creation, we are limited by what we have the ability to do. But! To combine ALL pitchers or create a CI or MI list, this is from Dom:
- Go to SP
- Find a guy who has VORP = 0
- See how many points he has
- Find a relief jar with that point total
- Put his rank into the settings
- Do the same for 1B/3B and 2B/SS
Okay! Ready to experience the tool?! (Updated 2/20)
(Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
