This was author and innovator Lou Poulas’ introduction, “While Grey and Rudy do a great job of breaking down everything you need to know for 2012 fantasy baseball, drafts still trip me up. I’ve been lamenting my inadequacies from the past 3+ years which resulted in an inordinate amount of time number crunching in Excel. My quest – a draft day “war room” that allowed me to keep my finger on the pulse of the league while minimizing my effort. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to keep track of more things as opposed to fewer.”
Presenting the free 2012 Fantasy Baseball War Room. It’s an auto-updating Excel workbook that keeps track of all the necessaries:
• Color Coded Dashboard that “crosses off” selected players.
• Team by Team analysis of players taken, players left.
• Real time projected totals, along with real time projected league standings.
• Goal Tracking Dashboard
Unfortunately, Lou and Simply Fred (who took the reins last year) were inundated with the real world but were kind enough to allow me to make updates for 2012. My quick two cents: I added notes 4+5 on the Notes Tab under user steps. It just explains how to add a player and a note about when the pitching and hitting totals update. The pitching and hitting totals look like they are broken until each team has at least one hitter and one pitcher. I have been a fantasy baseballer for a long time. The first team I drafted my ace pitcher was suppose to be Steve Stone. He had won the Cy Young the year before. He sucked the year I had him. When I ran out of money I bought two cheap young pitchers, Fernando Valenzuela and Mike Norris. I have been hooked ever since. The only reason I tell you how long I have been doing this is to support the following compliment. Razzball is the best source for fantasy baseball information that I have ever used. The combination of humor and analysis is unmatched. I read it daily but do not comment often. I thought I would update the War Room as I hope it helps the site in some small way. I did not spend a lot of time debugging the sheet. I figured the daily posters will do that for us, the Razzball community. I will look for your comments to see if there’s anything I can help with.
This year’s version has been slightly customized to Razzball:
- The Players page lists players in order of Grey’s top 300 for 2012 fantasy baseball with Grey’s projections (and his auction values on the auction draft worksheet). FanGraphs stepped up to the plate and graciously provided projections for players unranked by Grey.
- AB (At-Bats, i.e. playing time) provided by FanGraphs.
- Goal Tracking has been pre-loaded with temp targets for “What it takes to win a 12 team fantasy baseball league.”
- The “Dashboard” displays players by position in order of Grey’s rankings.
- The ‘Team Rank’ box (League Standings) is limited to no more than 12 teams. Projected ‘Batting Totals’ and ‘Pitching Totals’ extend up to 25 teams.
- Up to 25 players may be drafted per team (allocations set by the user via the ‘User Input’ page).
- I have left the spreadsheet ‘unprotected’ so you may overlay with your own projections if you like.
The value of the War Room, for me, is to load the picks of a draft to determine which categories I am falling short in. In this manner, I can keep adding/deleting targeted players until I consistently get a strong team.
Click on the ‘Notes’ tab for instructions for how to load league team names, etc. Put questions and comments in this post and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Download the 2012 Fantasy Baseball War Room <–Snake Draft
Download the 2012 Fantasy Baseball War Room <–Auction Draft
(UPDATE 2/21: 1. – You can add more than 12 teams – Just had to change a setting. If you want to rank more than 12 teams you need to insert rows to the bottom of the projected Batting and Pitching Ranks. Then go to the cells for the categories and change the range of cells that it is ranking. IE. The formula for ranking runs in cell B27 is currently RANK(C71,C$71:C$82,1) – Just change it to RANK(C71,C$71:C$86,1) if you have added 4 rows to make it a 16 team league. Do the same for HRs RBI SB +avg. + the pitching categories. 2. Corrected the misspellings 3. I color coded the tiers in the catchers. It does not look that good but it may be helpful. You can color code your tiers by changing the color of the letters. Do not change the color of the cells it breaks the cross off feature. Just change the color of the lettering. 4. Fixed the formatting in a few bad cells.
UPDATE 2/25: Ryan Braun projections and ranking updated.)
Download the 2012 Fantasy Baseball War Room <–Point Shares and Point Shares Auction Values included (NOTE FROM GREY: This will be provided once Rudy finishes Point Shares in the next few days. Go to his latest post and bug him to finish faster. Oh, and thanks to JD for doing this!)
