The 2023 Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit has tons of ties, tips, rankings and more, but none of them fit your league Exactly. You now have the tool that can take your “2.75 points for a saving” quirk and put custom rankings 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 which allows you to enter your league settings, change projections and basically draft with an optimized list of rankings . fully tailored to your league.
- We try to improve and modify it every year, but there will probably still be some small bugs. Your feedback is essential to get this perfect. So please let go of all the problems you are having.
- NOTE: We are still trying to find a workaround to allow CI, MI, DH/UTIL, Combo P and Multi-Position eligibility. It’s a hell of a job with VORP calculations and more, but we’re trying; we promise!
How To Use This Fantasy Baseball Cheat Sheet – PLEASE READ
Step 1: Enable editing
You should only have to do this the first time you open a new download.
Step 2: Scoring Settings
The leftmost tab at 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 awards 10 points for a win, put a 10 in the cell to the right of “W”:
You should also remove all “1”s under “Category” in the hitting and throwing categories, as this is for Roto leagues.
For Roto leagues, remove point values and put a “1” in the categories you score. So a Roto 5×5 league that gets an OBP score instead of an average would look like this:
Now go to the right of this page and fill in your number of squads (10/12/15 whatever) – this will change the “Selected Players Above Substitution” numbers to yellow. And here’s something for the more advanced spreadsheet. If you want to give a particular position a bit more punch, change the “Selected Players Above Substitution” for that position and the sheet will adjust. A higher number = this position becomes more valuable. A lower number = the importance is diminished. It’s currently optimized to match Jake’s rating, but your tastes may vary.
Finally — and this is very important — enter your “format” (Points Or Categories).
Then go to the “Rankings” tab.
Step 3: The Rankings 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 nerd out, you can also sort by VORP, in which case you want to go with “descendant” and you might have to double click to get it to work.
We realize this sounds simple, but it takes into account months of projections, very serious math, standard deviation, replacement level players and much more.
Step 4: Miscellaneous and Fixes
1. You can do a lot with this tool. If you don’t like the projections, you can change them. For example, we went to the “Hitters” tab, dropped Pete Alonso by 39:
at 22 home runs:
When you go back to the ratings tab, you can see that it has gone from 80 to 136:
***IMPORTANT: MODIFY ONLY THE PROJECTIONS IN THE “HITTERS” OR “PITCHERS” TAB**** They won’t take anywhere else.
2. Points league players can also notice some marginal categories are missing, such as CG, SHO and CYC. We can’t predict who will hit for the cycle. And shutouts and complete games are so rare that we leave it to you to assign one or two per year to pitchers and increase their value manually.
3. “Hits” = Singles/1 point, so they are identical. Doubles, triples, and home runs are 2, 3, and 4 runs, so “hit” is already included for those.
4. If you play in a AL or NL league only, just tap the triangle under “League” in the Rankings tab and check the corresponding league. If you want to include free agent culture, make sure FA is enabled.
5. ADP is intentionally empty. It’s there if you want to fill it in, and it depends on when you’re writing. Unfortunately, with frequent changes (sometimes daily) and depending on your site (NFBC, Yahoo, etc.) there is no way to get an automated ADP.
6. Backup + Maintain works for me if I use 1 point for saves and 0.75 for takes.
7. If you have an odd number of teamsall items in yellow will change to decimals like this (causing the ‘Ratings’ tab to be filled with ‘N/A’s):
… just go to the yellow boxes and round to whole numbers and everything will be back to normal:
Step 5: My team
There is a “My Squad” tab which will allow you to enter your squad (or a practice squad) and see what the projected totals will be. This is especially important if you are doing a simulation (or a solitaire simulation and want to see if your team will compete for a title in Roto, as you can look at past totals and see where you would end up in the ranks. Just copy the player’s name (or type it, but spell it correctly!) from the Ratings tab and paste it into the My Team tab at their position.
Special “steps”
Guardians
- You need to remove the player from FOUR tabs: Position, Hitters (or Pitchers), Std Dev and Rankings. Also, it will skew the VORP a bit, which you might not want.
Mono leagues (AL or NL only)
- On the Rankings tab, there is a column to sort only AL or NL for the league. Just choose what you want, and you’re done!
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 combined player for both).
Adding categories, etc.
The columns/categories/statistics/fields we have are all there will be. Between my own projections and creating Dom’s cheat sheet, we’re limited to what we have the ability to do. But! To combine ALL pitchers or create a CI or MI list, it’s from Dom:
- Go to SP
- Find a guy who has VORP=0
- See how many points he has
- Find a relief pitcher with this point total
- Put your rank in the settings
- Do the same for 1B/3B and 2B/SS
GOOD! Ready to discover the tool? ! (Update 2/20)
(Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)