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Some projects are a labor of love, and working on the latest Baseball Prospectus Fantasy product – Scoresheet Draft Aid – was that for me.  A look behind the scenes at how this unfolded involves resident  Scoresheet expert Ben Murphy discussing various possibilities with Scoresheet Baseball's crack programmer Dave Barton. With my inattention to this project – something about books and former Royals utility infielders kept me from thinking much about it – Mr. Barton wrote on January 26, "I don't know about aiming for opening day this year."  Well, I wasn't going to have any of that, and starting in the second week of February, I pitched a tent in the (virtual) Prospectus office and worked to get this out in time not only for Opening Day, but even in time for most Scoresheet drafts. 

The result: Scoresheet Draft Aid, with the power of PECOTA. (and remember that any "/fantasy" URL on the site can be accessed using "/f" instead, which can be useful for avoiding filters)

For those who don't know much about Scoresheet Baseball, it's a simulation game with the current season being the basis for the simulation results, giving it the excitement of Fantasy Baseball combined with the realism of a simulation game.  The site (www.scoresheet.com) has lots of information to help introduce new players, including how to order a team (there's a much-reduced price for newcomers), and even a recent Podcast with yours truly.  Many public league drafts will be starting on March 1, so if you're interested, now's a great time to try it out.

But I'm not here to plug Scoresheet baseball, I'm here to help people WIN at it.  To do that, I'll walk through the first steps I took to prepare for my NL Public League (#300):

​First, I went to my old friend Team Tracker, and clicked on "Load Teams" (If you don't have a Team Tracker team set up for your Scoresheet squad yet, shame on you – er – click on "Edit Teams" to create one.)  After Dropping all the players from my roster, I selected my Scoresheet League in the drop box labelled "Scoresheet League", and entered my team number (3) in the box labelled "Team #", and click the button labelled "Add Scoresheet Team to My Team".

 

 

This results in my team being populated with the keepers I selected earlier this month:

From there, I return to the main Team Tracker page and see how my forecasts look…

People who are familiar with Team Tracker will notice some new statistics on this page. Well, at this point, I open another browser window and pull up the new Scoresheet Draft Aid and select my league from the pulldown box there:

And if I click on "(show)" by the Batter Glossary entry, it explains some of the new stats:

Ditto for pitchers:

The Draft Aid itself is really best to just dive into and experience for yourself – for Scoresheet owners, notice that only the players available in your chosen league show up. The columns can be sorted by whichever stat is needed (my personal favorite is R-TAv', though Ben prefers SSSIM). The display can show as few as 10 or as many as 100 players. For spreadsheet addicts, it can be exported to your favorite format. Obviously, the biggest advantage comes for the Scoresheet game system, since a couple factors are built into the product – righty/lefty platoon advantages and defensive range – as well as being able to load up a specific league. But for people who don't have a Scoresheet team, choosing the top option ("(Select Your League Below)") displays all players, and gives an interesting perspective on future value for baseball players in general, and also for fantasy games and other simulation games such as Strat-O-Matic (though there's always the delayed gratification of waiting an entire year to see how the cards look in that type of game).

Thank you for reading

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brandonwarne52
2/24
Pretty awesome!
jrmayne
2/24
This isn't just Scoresheet-friendly, it's Scoresheet-excellent. I'm impressed.

How much do we have to pay to bar our leaguemates' access?
vtadave
2/24
This is fantastic. I am a little confused though why Prince Fielder is showing as available in my league - BL_DwMurphy.
dantroy
2/25
I ain't throwing him back in the pool, I can tell you that!
mcquown
2/25
Unfortunately, he's not showing up on the Dynamic Rosters on the Scoresheet site yet, and the feed we get uses the same data that is used to populate these, e.g.

http://www.scoresheet.com/htm-lib/lg_players_frames.htm?dir_lgw=/FOR_WWW1/BL_DwMurphy;dynamic

dwachtell
2/24
At least on Firefox, I'm finding that the "recent articles" sidebar is intruding onto the right-hand half of the draft aid page.
rawagman
2/24
Rob - this is awesome! Any thoughts on my suggestions of incorporating prospects?
mcquown
2/25
Yes, great idea - and we are indeed working on this. It's obviously tricky business, but something involving Kevin's ratings and perhaps signing bonuses combined with UPSIDE (when we get that ready for 2012) should provide a useful "prospect metric".

Not sure when we'll have something we're happy with, but it's prominent in our plans.
jdouge
2/25
Any chance MLBAM IDs or even BP IDs could be included, for spreadsheet-making?

Oh, yeah: This is great even as it is, thanks :)
mcquown
2/25
I had those in the original version. If you look at the URLs, those have the BPID's in them, and those can be cross-referenced with the BP ID listing on the Statistics page. We'll try to come up with some more convenient way to incorporate IDs, but wanted to keep the display "light", as much as possible.
mcquown
2/25
PLAYERID, the Baseball Prospectus ID number, is now downloading when a table is exported. The ID -to- MLBAM ID mapping can be found at http://www.baseballprospectus.com/sortable/playerid_list.php (and there's a link up top for the entire database of players in CSV format).
jdouge
2/26
Yay! Thanks.
jsherman
2/25
Love it!
smallflowers
2/25
I've been playing with this for the last week, and it is indeed awesome. Tremendous work, Rob, and your extreme efforts here are much appreciated.
shankr
2/25
Thanks Rob, great stuff. I am confused, however, by the significant difference for an all-player universe between VORP' in the Scoresheet Draft Aid and VORP PECOTA Weighted Means Spreadsheets. As an example, Pujols has a VORP' of 98.9 in the Aid, but a VORP of 56.3 in the PECOTA spreadsheet, Justin Upton 69.6 vs 27.3, etc.

Not sure which to believe. Would appreciate your investigation with the PECOTA spreadsheet team
rwmiller98
2/25
Earlier today SSSim was a stat available to select on Team Tracker, but I didnt update my team stats at the time.

I have gone back to Team Tracker this afternoon and all the SS stats have disappeared from the selection options.

Is this a temporary glitch?
rwmiller98
2/25
Nevermind. Operator error was identified as the cause.
krukker
2/25
Am I missing something: why are the stats park adjusted when Scoresheet doesn't use park effects? Or do they?
tb3nn3tt
2/26
I assumed this meant that VORP (which itself is park-adjusted) is RE-adjusted to take OUT park effects.

That cold just be a bad assumption, though...
mcquown
2/26
This is correct. I confess I talked myself in circles trying to decide the best way to express this concept, which seems like it should be simple. But all the advanced stats are computed based on park-neutrality, and simply bypassing that code isn't as straightforward as it might sound, since the entire league has to be calibrated to figure out the baselines for replacement levels and averages.
tb3nn3tt
2/26
This is INCREDIBLE, Rob! Now I feel like I've wasted the last month of my life creating my own similar spreadsheet!

Question: Will a player's value change depending on league format since some positions are thinner in one league? For example, replacement level for 1B in an NL-only league may be lower than for 1B in an AL-only league.

Adding prospects to this list would/will be the icing on an already delicious looking cake!
mcquown
2/27
Added this note to the Hitters Glossary entries, which may clear up some confusion:

NOTE: VORP' values will be much higher than VORP for the same player, in general, as “replacement level” is defined by the awful replacement players that the Scoresheet game system inserts into the lineup when a player has to miss time. As such, baselines are much lower than the “replacement level” used for real-life baseball calculations. The net effect is to reward playing time more heavily.
jtwalsh
2/27
This is great! It is also "real time" I have a web based draft already going on and it is updating the available pool in real time. My only request is that the scoresheet numbers be included. That would make it a cut and paste job for the ranking list for web based drafts.

Will this tool be available in season for supplemental drafts?
jimo55
3/05
Rob,

This is a fantastic tool. We put it to use over the weekend in our draft and it was amazing. Also, the real time aspect is huge, as available players were adjusted immediately. This is a huge benefit and, for a Scoresheet participant, justifies the BP.com annual subscription price all by itself, in my opinion.

Nice work.
slackfarmer
3/18
Can you post table with the adjustments to translate from TAv to TAv' and vise versa? Is it a simple park factor, or do you go back and recalculate all the components of TAv? Also, are there different factors for R- & L-TAv' or are these derived by applying platoon splits to overall TAv/TAv'??
mcquown
3/18
TAv' is a simple PF adjustment to TAv.

L-TAv' and R-TAv' are approximations based on a TAv estimator derived through a linear approximation using least squares of independent variables OBP and SLG with TAv as the dependent variable. The coefficients derived are then applied to the platoon ratings Scoresheet provides. The precision of such a method obviously isn't perfect, but in the context of projecting player performances, the expected error introduced by this process isn't very significant.
slackfarmer
3/18
OK. Thanks for the quick response. Are the PF available on BP somewhere?