A Simple Tool for Managing Multiple Fantasy Rosters

Raise your hand if any of these statements are true.

1. You have a hard time remembering all the players on your various fantasy teams.
2. You remember the players, but you have a hard time remembering exactly which team the players are on.
3. You get alerts that one of your players is out of the lineup and you need a quick way to find all the teams that player is on to swap him out.
4. You have more than four fantasy teams (… but maybe not this many).
5. You like to look at more than the base stats provided to you about each player on your league hosting site (R, HR, RBI, W, and SV are nice but you want K%, OPS, FIP, etc.)
6. You would like an easier way to research your own players on various sites like Fangraphs, Brooks Baseball, and Baseball Savant (the official MLB version!).

I have a poor understanding of the “fantasy baseball demographics” of our readership, but hopefully the majority of Fangraphs readers can relate to at least one of the issues above. Many believe that duct tape fixes all problems. I believe they’re wrong and that spreadsheets are the superior panacea.

I’ve been working on a prototype spreadsheet that will help keep track of all the players on your fantasy teams, provide easy access to all of your league sites, free agent listings, and standings pages, help you easily determine what teams a specific player is on, and will also let you easily research players on Fangraphs, see pitch velocities and usage mixes at Brooks Baseball, and see exit velocity data at Baseball Savant.

How To Use

Before you skip ahead just looking for the download link, please stick around to let me explain how it works and to give a few warnings. I’m quite fearful of releasing such a document to so many people. It would be a lot easier to write a 1,000 word article that requires no future maintenance and move on with my life… But fortune favors the bold. So here we go.

Access the File Here

The file is only available as a Google Sheet. You can access it here.

You won’t be able to edit that version. Do Not Request Access to Edit the Document.

Instead, make your own copy of it using the File>Make a copy… command.

Sorry. If it felt like I was yelling there… It’s because I was.

Tailor the Document for Your Leagues

I’ve tried to design things so you don’t need to (should not) make many edits. You should only need to edit information in the orangeish yellowish cells within the document. DO NOT RENAME THE TABS IN THIS SPREADSHEET. It’s likely things will stop working.

How the Document Works

The spreadsheet has 11 tabs for your use. The first tab contains areas to enter information about your various leagues. You can enter a description (the league name), the league home page web address (or you could use the URL for your specific team), the league free agent or waiver wire web address, and the league standings web address.

The remaining sheets can accommodate up to 10 different fantasy teams. The information from the “League Settings” tab will automatically flow into the hyperlinks on each league page (so you can look at your team and quickly jump right to the free agent list, if needed).

Use the drop down menus to select the players from that team (keep reading for a special disclaimer about the player names and drop downs).

After you have selected players from the drop downs, the links to the right of each player will take you directly to that player’s page at the corresponding website.

Hitters have links that will take you directly to the player’s main Fangraphs (FG) page, the FG advanced area, FG batted ball area, and FG plate discipline area, as well as to the Baseball Savant page for the hitter where you can see exit velocity, spray charts, and zone charts.

Pitcher links will take you to the FG main page, FG batted ball area, FG plate discipline area, Brooks Baseball velocity data, Brooks Baseball pitch mix data, and Baseball Savant exit velocity data.

Once you’ve populated the player lists for all your teams, return to the “League Settings” page. You’ll see a “Do I Own this Player” area on the right side of this page. Use the drop down menus to select a hitter or pitcher to see exactly which teams that player is on. Good for determining all the teams that might be affected by an injured player.

Important Things to Consider

If you make a transaction, you will need to reflect that change on your team roster. Things don’t work automatically (once I have things working automatically you better believe I’ll be selling service and quitting my day job).

Please feel free to leave suggestions for improvement in the comment area below. Please be reasonable. I cannot design this to accommodate every Fangraphs user’s preferences and leagues.

The players that will work with this are those whom I deem to be “fantasy relevant”. It’s possible that I’ve missed an important player. But please be reasonable. The 46th -50th rounds of your draft and hold NFBC team may not be included in the drop down menus. But if they get called up to the big leagues or start seeing significant playing time, let me know and I can have them added.

You’re welcome to make tweaks to the document. But please understand you do so at your own risk. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to offer much support if you deviate far from the template.

Don’t get too married to this version. If I am anticipating that I’ll get some helpful feedback and will make adjustments and improvements in a later version. I don’t think the setup is too bad and you should be able to copy the links from this version into that later one.

Special warning to NFBC players… The NFBC website is a bit odd in that it doesn’t seem to like direct URL or web addresses. They all seem to be generic pages like “http://nfbc.stats.com/baseball/reports/league_home.asp”. To find the address for a specific league, go to your “My Teams” page and hover over each team name.

You should see the web page address for each league in the lower left-hand corner of your browser. Right click on each team name and choose the “Copy link address” command to copy this league-specific link.

So… What Do You Think?

What am I missing? Is this worthwhile? Or a complete waste of my time? This will represent a behavior change, but could you see yourself using something like this?