Fantasy Rankings Prep (Part 1 of 3) by Jeff Zimmerman February 12, 2014 About four times a season, Eno unleashes the shocky monkeys and a few of us slow-footed writers are forced to enjoy ranking all the players. For the next few days, I am going to go over how I prepared my rankings. Note: I am trying to keep the amount of math to a minimum. If somewhere you get lost in the procedure let me know and I can explain the procedure in more detail. The first item to remember is all leagues are not even close to being the same. In my three keeper leagues, two are points based and the other is an AL only league with one pitcher category being Wins+Saves+Holds. Additionally, some leagues have keepers. How the keeper’s “salary” is set determines a their value. Other league options have innings pitched limits (good rates stats needed) or as in the case of my league with W+S+H, an IP minimum is set to keep owners from only using relief pitchers. Catcher rankings can vary quite a bit from a one catcher to two catcher leagues or even two catcher slots with a 162 game limit as in Ottoneu. For my rankings, I did them off a basic 5×5 12-team league with 23 positions (14 position players, 9 pitchers). If possible, I like to use the standing points gained method (a couple of explanations on the methodology). Some other methods may or may not be better, but I like it because it shows the league’s biases and gives me good baselines for final league positioning. I will not go into every gory math detail of the ranking method, so you may want to go back read the two articles previously reference or read Art McGee’s book, How to Value Players for Rotisserie Baseball or Larry Schechter’s new book, Winning Fantasy Baseball. To get my values, I calculated the average final 2013 values from the last 20 teams to draft at NFBC last year. Here are the final totals and averages for each place in the standings along with the value (slope method) it takes to jump up one position in the standings. Hitters Rank AVG Runs HR RBI SB 1st 0.280 1109 293 1075 191 2nd 0.276 1078 272 1039 176 3rd 0.273 1048 266 1016 167 4th 0.271 1035 260 996 159 5th 0.269 1020 252 977 153 6th 0.268 1007 247 965 145 7th 0.267 987 241 949 139 8th 0.265 975 237 931 130 9th 0.263 960 229 917 120 10th 0.261 926 220 897 113 11th 0.259 899 208 854 107 12th 0.256 840 191 796 93 Average 0.267 990 243 951 141 Change to move up 0.00195 20.8 7.8 21.4 8.2 Pitchers Rank ERA Wins WHIP Strikeouts Saves 1st 3.11 109 1.13 1496 122 2nd 3.27 102 1.16 1446 110 3rd 3.34 100 1.18 1404 102 4th 3.40 97 1.19 1370 95 5th 3.48 94 1.21 1347 90 6th 3.55 92 1.22 1323 84 7th 3.62 90 1.23 1303 80 8th 3.68 88 1.25 1281 75 9th 3.76 85 1.26 1256 69 10th 3.85 82 1.27 1221 61 11th 3.95 76 1.29 1149 52 12th 4.10 70 1.32 1063 35 Average 3.59 90 1.23 1305 81 Change to move up 0.081 3.0 0.015 33.3 6.8 These tables can be used for two purposes. Number 1: Knowing where your teams stands during drafts and auctions. I keep track of a couple of items (in the points leagues, just one, total points) during the draft to make sure I am not getting too unbalanced, SB and HR (possibly AVG). Once a player is picked, just total their projected stats. You can then know how close you are at getting to a value which will put you too high in the rankings and over killing a stat. One item to notice is how the top and bottom one or two teams are further away from the pack. These teams won by too much and wasted the stats they accumulated. When you are building a team, don’t aim for the previous top value, aim for just more than second place. Number 2: Value Players. Well, I am going to go stop here and go over this step in detail in my article tomorrow. Please let me know if you have any questions so far. We hoped you liked reading Fantasy Rankings Prep (Part 1 of 3) by Jeff Zimmerman! Please support FanGraphs by becoming a member. We publish thousands of articles a year, host multiple podcasts, and have an ever growing database of baseball stats. FanGraphs does not have a paywall. With your membership, we can continue to offer the content you've come to rely on and add to our unique baseball coverage. Support FanGraphs