21 Responses

  1. Tanner Bell
    Tanner Bell at |

    Please post your questions or suggestions to improve the rankings system in the comments here.

  2. Spencer
    Spencer at |

    Excel keeps telling me that my formula is invalid at step 28… ideas on why it doesn’t want to pull my projections from steamer and associate it w the fangraphsID?

  3. Matthew Scott Martin
    Matthew Scott Martin at |

    Spencer, if you copied Tanner’s formula and pasted it, then IDFANGRAPHS is misspelled as IDFRANGRAPHS. LOL. Just take out the “R.” It took me a bit to figure it out.

  4. Thomas
    Thomas at |

    I agree with Spencer. Even after accounting for the misspelling I still couldn’t get it to transfer the data from the steamer table. I feel like something else is amiss but am not sure as to what.

  5. Thomas
    Thomas at |

    I’m using Excel 2013. I had no problem transferring data from the playerID sheet;however, transferring the data from the Steamer sheet proved to problematic. I spent about a half-hour troubleshooting it last night but couldn’t seem to the problem out. Every time I attempted the Vlookup command, it would give me #REF or #N/A in the cells.

  6. Thomas
    Thomas at |

    *figure the problem out.

    That’s what I get for staying up late messing with fantasy and then replying before I had my coffee.

    Great site, looking forward to your reply.

  7. Thomas
    Thomas at |

    I figured it out. I just needed to go through it again step by step. Doing it before midnight helped this time. Thanks for reaching out to me Tanner!

    1. Junior Ortiz
      Junior Ortiz at |

      What did you do? I just went through it step by step and keep getting “your formula contains an error” messages.

  8. Jimmy
    Jimmy at |

    Hey just wondering if you do some sort of average for the projection systems, maybe I missed something but aren’t the ranks only going to be based on Steamer?
    By the way this is awesome and I’m having fun following along, thanks for doing this.

    1. Tanner Bell
      Tanner Bell at |

      Hi, Jimmy. When I first set out to write this series, I did plan on including averaging of the projection systems. But it’s actually a complicated topic to explain, if I want to do it right. So at the time I elected to just show based on one system (Steamer). I do hope to have averaging instructions available one day. But I may not make it before the season. You could consider getting already averaged projections from FantasyPros.com or Cory Schwartz’s composite projections.

  9. Jimmy
    Jimmy at |

    Or I could just make my own averages of all projection systems, but not sure if that’s useful. Do you know which system has the best correlation between projection/performance?
    Thanks

    1. Tanner Bell
      Tanner Bell at |

      You could make your own average of various systems. I believe it has been proven that averaging multiple systems typically gives better and more accurate results than using a single system. That is, unless a single system has proven to be more accurate and consistent over time. If you know the most accurate system, then you’re better off using that instead of averaging.

      There are usually a number of articles around the web each year that evaluate the accuracy of various experts and projection systems. Here’s a table at FantasyPros (note Podhorzer is in the top 10, he explains his projection approach in Projecting X). Razzball usually puts out really interesting articles on the topic.

      Steamer is highly regarded. It’s free. And easy to download. So I spotlight it a lot on the site.

  10. Ron
    Ron at |

    I am also having a problem with step 28. I keep getting the response that invalid character, etc. I have tried going through the formula 3 times and nothing changes. I even tried renaming the file to Steamer. Still no good. Any help?

  11. Jason Prugar (@jprug)
    Jason Prugar (@jprug) at |

    Tanner, I am getting an error on step 21. When I type PLAYERIDMAP in the table_array it gives me this: #Name? Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

    1. Tanner
      Tanner at |

      Hi Jason, that is Excel trying to tell you it does not recognize the “PLAYERIDMAP” name that should have come in when you copied the Player ID Map in during Part 2. Are you possibly using Excel on a Mac? Whether Mac or Windows, what version of Excel are you using?

  12. Jason Prugar (@jprug)
    Jason Prugar (@jprug) at |

    I am using Windows with Excel 2010. I was using your examples and trying to alter them to my league parameters. I built one from scratch and everything works fine now..

    1. Tanner
      Tanner at |

      Glad you got it figured out. You should have no issue with that version of Excel, that’s what I originally built the examples with. It’s possible the name of the PLAYERIDMAP could change if you tried to copy in a newer version on top of the existing one. You can check the names of the tables in the document by going to the “Formulas” tab and clicking the “Name Manager”. Perhaps it renamed it to “PLAYERIDMAP1” or something similar.

  13. An Important Lesson and How to Resolve VLOOKUP Errors | Smart Fantasy Baseball

    […] performing the same search you did manually. This is another reason I am a big fan of using table names and structured references in Excel, especially when setting up lookup formulas. If you look at the formula below, you can […]

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