It’s that magical time of year again, when players report to spring training and nerds report to their keyboards with dreams of drafting an all-star fantasy team. Looking to go beyond the copious 2018 fantasy baseball draft tools and online fantasy baseball war room? Do you yearn to have the ultimate drafting tool, to track goals and keep track of how other teams are doing? Want rankings based on points/OPS/etc instead of just plain old roto? Aiming to fill your roster with not just stars but also the occasional diamond in the rough, still available far beyond a reasonable ADP? Look no further – it’s here… the downloadable 2018 fantasy baseball war room!

The 2018 Razzball Commenter Leagues are now open! Free to join with prizes! All the exclamation points!

Standard features of the Excel war room (if you are new to the site):

• Color-coded Dashboard and Players tabs that “cross off” selected players as you enter a team name next to the player – green if player is on your team, and grey if on opponents’ teams, making it easy to see at a glance who you drafted and who is off the board;
• Team by Team analysis of players taken, and players left;
• Real time projected totals, along with real time projected league standings, and Goal Tracking Dashboard;
• ‘Players’ tab lists players in in order of Grey’s top 500 for 2018 fantasy baseball, including Grey’s projections (stats and auction values);
• ‘Dashboard” tab displays players by position, using Grey’s rankings (colour coded by tier!);
• Points rankings auto-update based on custom league scoring.
• Sortable columns for pitchers’ K/9 and ‘Ace Index’ (K/9 less BB/9), with user-selectable cutoff for each stat.

**NEW FOR 2018**

• “Can you add rankings for my ____ league?” -> OBP, SLG, and OPS rankings are now integrated into Players tab as sortable columns, (based on Steamer, not Grey projections, just like the Points rankings) – if you don’t need to use them, just click the minus button above to hide them!
• “Go big or go home” -> now supporting up to 25 teams per league!
• “Go big or go home…Part Deux!” -> the list of ‘Your players’ has been expanded to allow 30 hitters & 30 pitchers for your team. (click the ‘+’ button beside row 38 on Dashboard to see the extra slots)
  
• “Does 12 mean I am the best or the worst?” -> New option allows you to invert the [dynamically updated!] league team rankings (i.e. use number 1 as best, instead of worst).
• Dashboard has additional RP in tiers (not just closers) -> 84 total RP, so roughly the top 3 relievers per team. 
  

   A few of my personal tips:

• For auction usage: be sure to click the ‘+’ grouping button on PLAYERS tab, above columns ‘L’ and ‘AO’, to expose the salary input column
• Prior to your draft, on PLAYERS tab, press CTRL-F to enter “Find” mode, and select LOOK IN: “VALUES”, otherwise you will get a result that says ‘no data found’ since searching formulas will get you nowhere; once you have this enabled searching VALUES, though, you can quickly find a player in your draft by pressing CTRL-F and searching their name (while on this tab/worksheet);
• Also prior to the draft starting, I like to lock the values on the Player tab (converts all the formulas to values, to prevent any Excel glitches).  To help with this, a “lock Projections” button is on the “User Input” tab– click it to lock projections (be sure you have macros enabled in Excel, since this feature is a macro to copy-paste all the proper columns and save you the trouble!). Remember: Once you do this your projections data are locked and cannot be updated live from Grey’s projections, so only do this right before your draft if you are the type that likes to stay current.
• Use short team names on the User Input page to act fast in your draft (I use the 3-letter team abbreviations from my ESPN leagues) Or just call yourself ‘A’ and put everyone else’s pick as the ‘B’ team. Sure, you won’t have the team by team analysis correct but that isn’t as important as knowing who is still available if you are in a league that drafts fast (and league analysis is moot once the real life games start anyhow!)
• If you really want to be a power drafter, do split-screen multi-pane view (or even nerdier, multi-monitor!) and have the dashboard up next to the Player page.
• If you are really quick, you can click the top of the position column to filter by ESPN or Yahoo position – which can be helpful if you are missing a player in a certain position. Note: this is harder in 2018 with multi-position eligibility for so many players (I’m looking at you, Rizzo). Or, better still, flip over to the Dashboard tab and see which position column needs more ‘green’ – a quick scan will tell you if your next pick should be a hitter or pitcher (or a gamble on a prospect!)
• In all honesty, everyone will use this spreadsheet differently. I personally never look at the ‘War Room’ tab during the draft, only the Dashboard and Players tabs, as it is enough work just to keep up with entering my opponents’ selections as they draft so I’m not pining after a player who was taken five rounds earlier. But the functionality is there if you want it, and in a slow draft you can really maximize the analysis.
• Prospects who AREN’T projected by Grey can be found all the way at the bottom of the Hitter and Pitcher list (or, ideally, sort by Prospect ranking to bring them to the top!)
• We don’t have an AL/NL specific version, but try this as a workaround….first, LOCK PROJECTIONS. Then, say you want NL-only: start by making a fake team #25 named ‘z’; go to Players tab and sort hitters column L to only show AL teams and draft them all by ‘z’, then clear the column filter for hitter teams so you are showing all teams again. Then, do same for pitcher side (filter to just American League teams in column AO, only, draft all those players by team ‘z’, and then clear the team filter to show all) [NOTE: if things look messed up after doing this, get back to original order by sorting Hitter/Pitcher by Grey rankings (columns A and AF)]. Now, all the players in American League are drafted and unavailable and crossed off on dashboard too, meaning anybody that is left is National League and fair game to draft. I realize league team rankings will be messed up, but at the end of your draft just reverse the process and delete the ‘z’ drafted players and you can evaluate how you stand versus your real peers (and not team ‘z’!)
• One last fast trick: once you type a team name beside a player in the Players tab, the next time you go to type that team name Excel will try to autocomplete the name, which can really save you time to just type the letter and then hit enter (note: this works best if all teams on the User Input tab all start with different letters!)

Here are some screenshots of the 2018 spreadsheet in action, showing the link between Players and Dashboard tabs, and the revamped War Room tab (click for full size):

Keep checking here throughout the pre-season, as the war room will be updated if required to fix any major bugs that crop up. I hope to add Keeper rankings too, when published. While credit goes to the originator Lou Poulas and a host of other update authors over the years, I’m proud of the features and colorful interface that I’ve implemented over the last couple of years to make the tool more usable to navigate in a fast paced, high-pressure draft. I hope you enjoy it too – any feedback / suggestions / bug fixes?  Leave a comment below (for feature requests, please check the existing Feature Request list on the Notes tab in the Excel file before posting suggestions here). Good luck with your draft(s)!

The newest version will always be hosted here on this page, click here to download:

Fantasy Baseball War Room 

(Current version V5 – Mar 6 2018 —Fixed “Lock Projections” macro disabling some formulas, resulting in ‘Your Players’ not getting populated properly (note: rankings and team data was otherwise unaffected, just the yellow ‘your players’ box)

Remember to enable macros / enable content if prompted by Excel security warnings, to be able to use “Lock Projections” button on User Input tab and other features.)

Fantasy Baseball War Room – COMPATIBLE  (“vanilla” version – for those who have older versions of Excel that struggle to keep up with the sheer awesomeness of the newer formatting. I recommend using regular version if at all possible.)