A Simple Tool for Managing Multiple Fantasy Rosters
Raise your hand if any of these statements are true.
- You have a hard time remembering all the players on your various fantasy teams.
- You remember the players, but you have a hard time remembering exactly which team the players are on.
- 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.
- You have more than four fantasy teams (… but maybe not this many).
- 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.)
- 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?
Tanner writes for Fangraphs as well as his own site, Smart Fantasy Baseball . He's the co-auther of The Process with Jeff Zimmerman, and has written two e-books, Using SGP to Rank and Value Fantasy Baseball Players and How to Rank and Value Players for Points Leagues, and worked with Mike Podhorzer developing a spreadsheet to accompany Projecting X 2.0. Much of his writings focus on instructional "how to" topics, Excel, and strategy. Follow him on Twitter @smartfantasybb.
Thanks for this, I like the “Do I own this player” table.
Something which would be helpful, but might be a great deal of work would be to add a similar functionality as the auction calculator. If you had the ability to select whether you keep track of points or not, how many relief pitchers your league has, etc.
jbrass,
Can you tell me a little more about what you’re thinking? I don’t know that I’m fully understanding.
Do you mean so you could document each league’s settings? And league type (roto, points, H2H)?
To be honest, I don’t know that I’m fully understanding what I’m thinking either.
This sheet would be more useful to me if on each of the league pages it would display the relevant stats. So if I have a complex league it would display the complex stats in sheet rather than via a link. I was thinking the beginning of that process would be to add inputs on the data entry tab where you would say you wanted to view SwStr%, balks, GiDP.
I use a very dumb version of a sheet like that to help me look at projections before drafts. This way I can rank players based on who would perform better in which league.
This might all be outside of the scope of your sheet, and only really useful to me. I mention it more as a “it’d be kinda cool.”
This sounds amazing, but I feel like I might be too dumb to tackle using this. I bet that most will find this very helpful if they do it right. I just almost always mess up anything spreadsheet’s. Appreciate your handwork, but even more so for helping others.
Thanks, bateIsjason. I tried to make this as user friendly as I can. There is just some pasting and using drop downs. If you give it a shot and get stumped somewhere, let me know.
Very cool. It seems likely there will be a learning curve to using something like this, but if a player has 4 or more leagues it can only help to focus the information in a single place.
This is great! I’d like to request to be able to see stats from the day before….so that there’s one place to look to find out how each of my guys did on a daily basis. Is this possible for you to include?
Thanks for the suggestion, e27. Noted and on the list for future consideration.
What is the best course to provide feedback or demonstrate enhancements we recommend or that we have made that we want share?
I’ve long since tried to replicate the look and feel of league sites in excel but always run into issues because the pages live behind login pages.
All in all seems like v1.0 is off to a great start. Thanks for sharing Tanner.
timbuck,
If it’s relatively simple and straight forward, you can just post it here. If it’s an involved discussion, try e-mailing me. smartfantasybaseball at gmail dot com.
The login issue is a big one. I’ve found a setting in ESPN that allows you to work around this, but I’m afraid others don’t/won’t have this.
You keep pumping out gold man! Thanks!
Ha ha, thank you!
This is wonderful! Thank you!
Thanks, Jarcaines!
Good stuff. I have used a single-league version, that included all of the teams’ rosters and standings. That was beautiful because it gave updated projected standings for the rest of the season, based on to-date stats & projections. But the upkeep was tough for anything but a weekly-moves league.
To me, though, that’s the holy grail. Knowing who’s on your team is fine; having a better gauge of how your team fits into the league in real-time (not just today’s standings) is gold.
I agree, that is the Holy Grail. I may work on another sheet to calculate projected standings. The problem with that is that there are no shortcuts. For it to work you’ll have to select all the players on each team in your league. And copy in/key in the year-to-date stats for each team so far.
Wow the amount of leagues you are in! You are my inspiration!
Ha. I’m only in four myself. But I’ve heard others on the site are in as many as 15-20. Hearing them talk about the issue is where I developed this idea, but thought I could even benefit from it in my four leagues.
This sounds awesome. I’ve created a spreadsheet that imports data from the weekly score board and averages out a each team’s categories over the course of the year. I also run each team’s standard deviation. Might be something worth considering. It helps me see how I stack up, where I have gaps and make decisions each week. I’m currently playing around with a trade analysis tab. Something also worth considering.
Pretty cool! Do the stats auto-update? Are they pulling from Fangraphs or elsewhere? I’ve never been able to figure out how to pull stats from the Fangraphs leaderboards into a spreadsheet automatically (obviously the export to .csv works, but is manual).
Yeah, the stats are pulling from the FG leaderboards. I can get those to work, but the projections I can’t. The web pages they’re stored on work a little different than the leaderboards. So I am forced to rely on the csv for any projection information.
Of course this was the year I trimmed my league count from 6 to 3. Great work and much thanks. Will post constructive comments as I play with it a bit.
Nice tool and easy to use.
I’m trying to link the new SaberSim values, but I’m only able to pull the first page. Figured it would be nice to use the tool to decide who to start / sit.
ErbEric, right. I can’t get more than the first page to pull either.
I kinda skimmed the article because I’m only in one league, but it sounds really cool. Can you think of any ways this could be useful to a single league player? If so, I’ll take a closer look.
As a lower-intermediate level excel user I may just download the file anyway to dig into it and try to learn some new tricks.
I think the benefit would be just an easier way to look up the players on your team on other websites. It may become more of a tool as I build it out a little further.
So not an overwhelming benefit yet. Much of the value comes from managing multiple teams.
This is fantastic! I’m really excited to be using this.
One question: how are you using the “position” values? Is it based on slot on the league, position the player actually plays, or what? I’m not sure what the best way to approach this would be…
That’s really not used for anything. I just thought some people may want to enter the POS in order to better visualize their roster, who’s starting, who’s on the bench, etc.
This is cool, I like it.
If you wanted to get really aggressive with it, you could put the entire thing together on regular excel & use the Data Sources tab to webquery all of the data from these sites that you wanted.
Yes, I agree, Jim. If anyone’s interested, I’ve written many times about web queries and you can see example posts here: http://www.smartfantasybaseball.com/?s=web+query&submit=Go
For this tool, I elected to keep it more universally available, in case some don’t have access to Excel.
Request:
Any way you can replicate the FG/Brooks/Savant w/ a Baseball Reference link? BBRef has some very specific splits info that I’ve found to be particularly useful in a number of my leagues, which are presently unavailable elsewhere. Both a standard BBRef player page link and a BBRef player page current and/or past splits link would be supremely helpful.
I’d suggest making some of the player fill-in roster data splits-related as well, but you can probably just file that in the distant future category.
I find this pretty cool, congrats. One thing, I own Enrique “Kike” Hernandez and although in the player list he appears as Enrique his stats don´t appear when I do the player scroll thing. Please help. Thanks.
Hmmm, interesting. It looks like Kike’s name is showing up as Kiké Hernandez on Fangraphs. I’ll talk to someone about that. Seems like an error.
This looks awesome thank you. I can’t wait to dive into its functionality.