Fantasy Baseball Tools

by Todd Lammi

Once your fantasy baseball draft or fantasy baseball auction starts, in addition to managing your roster, you need to be able to manage and track your stats. Tracking your team stats is something that is easy to do during  your fantasy baseball draft and it takes little time to do so.

Before the draft, you should have a target goal of a minimum of no lower than third place in every category. If you have played in fantasy baseball leagues in previous years, you will have an idea of what type of stats you will need depending on if your fantasy baseball league is 10 team, 12 teams, 14 teams, etc.

This is a great idea because the stats for each of the categories don’t vary that much at the top from year to year. It is important as you go through the draft to give yourself a realistic check to see where you stack up in each category. That way in the middle of the draft if you are deciding between a base-stealing outfielder or a power hitting outfielder, a quick check of where your team is stats wise will help guide you in the right direction. It becomes even more critical to track if you are drafting in a league where there are no trades allowed and it is a lot harder to make up ground if you come out of the draft lacking in one or two categories.

If you are drafting online, have your projections open in an Microsoft Excel sheet, click on the sheet after your pick, and copy and paste over your player to a tab where you are tracking your team. Usually I set my sheet up with the positions down the left, a sum total row at the bottom, my goal row underneath the total row and then a calculation row underneath that, which subtracts my current stats from my goal. Doing this will also help you when it comes down to your last five or six hitters to draft when you see how many more stats you need and what stats are still available in the draft pool to determine if you need to take a hitter with your next pick, or you can wait a round or two and grab a couple of pitchers.

If you a drafting at an event, say the NFBC and you do not have a laptop, you can track your stats by writing them onto a sheet of paper and doing the calculations with a calculator. Again, it is an easy process and something that is important to do if you want to start seeing an improvement in your fantasy baseball drafting skills.