Big Board

Tip #1: Know where player values come from
Tip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch split
Tip #3: Value your Picks and Make Preseason Trades
Tip #4: Customize your Projections

It may come off as odd to say this, as a purveyor of the best draft tool around, but draft tools can’t do everything. One of the great subtleties to drafting in fantasy baseball is seeing and exploiting tiers within each position. While the Big Board will help you see them, it’s another thing to plan for them and make sure you avoid the biggest dropoffs in each position on draft day.

(If you want to skip the words and get right to the tiers, here they are)

Tip #1: Where do player values come from?
Tip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch split
Tip #3: Value your Picks and Make Preseason Trades

Fantasy baseballers, I come to you today with an admission: I’m a total hypocrite. I am the first person that will tell you that the computer-based projection systems like Steamer, PECOTA, ZiPS, etc will beat a human-curated projection every time. And yet, year after year, I find myself *tinkering*. Changing an ERA/WHIP projection here, increasing a batting average or HR-total there. There are certainly areas where the computer systems fall short, since they don’t know about injuries, can be slow to adjust to real-world depth chart changes, and tend to be skeptical of breakouts. This year, I’ve created a tool that allows me to go about this customization/adjustment process in a much more systematic way: the DIY Projection Tool. Thanks to this handy tool, I’ve been able to integrate all of my preseason research, including injuries, xStats, and depth chart info, into a set of over 300 custom projections (included in this year’s Big Board). But, I’m all about empowering you all to do these things yourself, so what follows here is a comprehensive tutorial in how to build your own custom projections.

Tip #1: Know where player values come from

Alright guys and gals. It’s still January, which means we need to hurry up and talk about the nerdiest aspects of fantasy baseball before all the normies come back to baseball world after the Superbowl. Today is part two of the 2018 Big Board Player Valuation Series: “The Hit/Pitch Split”! Readers of “Tip #1” will know that an integral part of player valuation is deciding how to split the values between hitters and pitchers. If you’ve already downloaded the Big Board, and you’ve opened up the ‘Settings’ box for the first time, you’ve come across this seemingly innocuous box entitled Hitter%: