Create Your Own SGP Rankings – Part 10

Please use the comments below to ask me any questions you might have about Part 10, “Incorporating In-Draft Price Inflation and Keeper League Inflation”.

13 Responses

  1. Matthew Scott Martin
    Matthew Scott Martin at | | Reply

    I may just be really too tired to figure this out. So, need a little help here. First of all, I am in a keeper league with a snake draft. So, no auction. I get it that when entering keepers into the spreadsheet, we just put their $value into the $actual column. 1st question: how do I indicate in the spreadsheet who the owner is of a drafted or kept player? Perhaps it does not matter for the purposes of this spreadsheet, and I should just keep a list of the drafted players separately. 2nd question: if the dollar values in $value shift as players are drafted (it is my assumption they do from skimming the material with my tired eyes), does player A’s shifted $value go into the $actual column then when player A is drafted?
    Thanks.

  2. Tanner Bell
    Tanner Bell at | | Reply

    Hi Matt. I probably should have built the ability to track during the draft into the instructions. But you can use these instructions to add it into the spreadsheet.

    In regards to your second question, you will just enter the actual price paid for a player in the $ACTUAL column. If they were auctioned off for $15, you put $15, even if the $VALUE columns says $18.

  3. Matthew Scott Martin
    Matthew Scott Martin at | | Reply

    Thanks. Since my draft is a snake draft and not an auction draft, then would I just put the $VAlue in the $Actual value column?

    1. Tanner Bell
      Tanner Bell at | | Reply

      I think that’s even too much work. If you use the instructions for tracking players above, you don’t even need to enter anything in the $VALUE or $ACTUAL columns. Just follow the instructions to document who has been taken. Then use the filters to make drafted players disappear. Entering the dollar values will just take up time you don’t need to waste. Focus your efforts on thinking about your own plan.

      1. Tanner Bell
        Tanner Bell at | | Reply

        If you’re in an auction, tracking the $ACTUAL is important to get an understanding of the inflation. But in a snake draft the $ACTUAL has no meaning.

  4. Matthew Scott Martin
    Matthew Scott Martin at | | Reply

    Thanks!!

  5. Thomas
    Thomas at | | Reply

    This is not unique to your book but something I always see when discussing keepers and has never seemed quite right to me. Money saved on a hitter is all put back into the hitter money pool. Same for pitchers.

    Using your example if I have Mike Trout at $20 I’m probably pretty likely to put some of that $27 savings toward pitching. In fact I’d probably be likely to put a good chunk of it towards pitching thinking that my hitting is already ahead of the curve with Mike Trout.

    The answer is probably that it will even out enough over all of the keepers in the league and it will not make enough of a difference in dollar values to make it worth the extra calculation. In my league more hitters are kept than pitchers which I’d assume is typical and I’m not entirely convinced it is something to completely ignore.

  6. Tanner
    Tanner at | | Reply

    I have been thinking all day and don’t know that I’m any closer to an answer. I have two lines of thinking…

    Thought #1: I think I’m convinced that it doesn’t make sense just to allocate all your money saved on keeper hitters exclusively back into your hitting budget. But just because you saved money on a hitter shouldn’t change the fact that on the whole hitting is still your best investment and provides the best return for your money. It doesn’t mean we should deviate significantly from valuations we would have made without the savings. Whether we have savings from our keepers or not, the values we calculate (unadjusted, the original calculation of value) are still representative of what we expect players to earn. We’re now just deciding how to pay for those same earnings. So I think taking your savings and then reapplying 70% to hitters and 30% to pitchers has some merit (or whatever split you prefer).

    Thought #2: Everything from the first thought is all well and good. But at some point strategy and maximizing our chances of winning need to come into play. At some point your offense becomes so good that the law of diminishing returns kicks in and it makes less and less sense to keep allocating your savings back into hitting. If you have Trout, Cabrera, McCutchen, and Abreu, adding Goldschmidt doesn’t have the same effect as adding Kershaw, regardless of what the dollar values say is a player’s value.

    To summarize, barring anything extreme, I think reallocating your keeper savings along your original split makes sense. If you and everyone else in the league has relatively good offensive keepers, it doesn’t make sense to pour all your resources into pitching. But if you think you have a distinct hitting advantage, the more I think it does make sense to deviate from suggested allocations and focus on pitching.

    Thought #2 is a judgment call. I don’t think it makes sense to model this into a spreadsheet. But Thought #1 could be implemented.

    Do you agree that there’s a distinction between “savings from keepers” and “savings obtained during the draft”? The answer to that might affect how the spreadsheet is designed.

    1. Thomas
      Thomas at | | Reply

      I do agree that most people probably have a budget like $180 hitting and $80 pitching and will probably stick to it. Meaning that yes most people will probably treat in draft inflation different than keeper inflation.

      That being said I see two additional differences between keeper and in draft inflation. First you are never saving $27 in a draft. At most you are likely to save a few dollars here and there on a player and probably not more until later in the draft. In fact due to the stars and scrubs drafting strategy you are more likely to see deflation at the start of a draft and inflation come in as the draft goes on.

      I think the in draft savings are small enough and would equal out over the draft to make it probably not worth differentiating them from the keeper savings. The keeper savings are substantial enough to alter values significantly.

      Your second thought that in the end it all comes down to roster construction giving you the best chance to win is interesting. In that sense Kershaw’s value is different for different teams in the room. I guess that is part of what makes this so difficult.

      Like I said it is something that has always stuck out to me as strange but I also don’t really have an answer on what the proper formula would be either. I tend to think that something along the lines of reapplying 70% to hitters and 30% to pitchers may be on the right track.

  7. Kyle
    Kyle at | | Reply

    Tanner, a couple technical difficulties I’m hoping you can help with:
    -the sum of my hitting dollar values are two less on the rankings page vs the settings page? How is it I’m that close, but still not equal? An issue with my positional replacement levels perhaps? Pitching sums are spot on.

    -did you filter out players with #N/A sums on their individual SGP totals? If so how? I’m getting an error when I try to use the full columns to do a sum of all points and dollars remaining.

    Thanks! I enjoyed the book! Very clear and helpful!

    1. Tanner
      Tanner at | | Reply

      Hi Kyle,

      When you are referring to the sum of your hitting values, which column are you checking? Is it the “$VALUE” column? Or the “$INFLATE” column? You want to be checking the “$INFLATE” column because it doesn’t include ALL players. The “$VALUE” tab will have negatively valued players that can mess with things.

      Assuming you are checking “$INFLATE”, I’m not sure. If you try emailing me your file, I can take a look. My address is smartfantasybaseball at g mail dot com.

      In regards to the #N/A errors, that’s an issue that I didn’t anticipate when I wrote the book! When I wrote it, the player IDs on the map and the IDs in the Steamer download were essentially one-for-one. There were no players in the map that were not active major leaguers.

      But over time guys have retired and I’ve even added a few big names for research projects I did where I wanted to look at past seasons. So this leads to names being on the map that are NOT included in the Steamer projections. This causes the “#N/A” error because those names can’t be found.

      The solution is to wrap your existing VLOOKUP formulas in the IFERROR formula. For example…

      Formula from the book: =VLOOKUP([@IDFRANGRAPHS],STEAMER_H,COLUMN(STEAMER_H[PA]),FALSE)

      Wrapped in IFERROR: =IFERROR(VLOOKUP([@IDFRANGRAPHS], STEAMER_H,COLUMN(STEAMER_H[PA]),FALSE),””)

      You’re just putting ‘IFERROR(‘ in front of the formula and ‘,””)’ behind it.

      This means, “if the VLOOKUP results in an error, just show a blank (or “”) instead”. Instead of the “”, you could put a zero. I don’t think it matters.

      Hope that helps!

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