2017 Position Tiers for Fantasy Baseball [Printable PDF Cheatsheets]

The value of your options do not decrease incrementally at each position in your fantasy baseball drafts. There are often big lumps of similarly-valued players and then a sudden drop in value once those players are gone. That’s the concept of positionally based tiers. By putting your players into tiers at each position, you can start to know when a drop in value is coming a certain position so you can know whether that position is a high priority or not.

Each year, I put together a printable cheatsheet as an alternative to my Excel cheatsheets (which work on both Windows and Mac now). The printable cheatsheet breaks down the draft pool into positional tiers ordered by the Average Draft Position of the main draft sites out there. Using these cheatsheets, you can get a sense of the impending drops-in-value that might occur at any given position and plan your draft accordingly.

I initially started doing these sheets because my Excel cheatsheets could not run on Macs in the past and wanted an alternative resource that people may want to use. I’ve found that these have been valuable for drafters who want a printable resource though and am continuing to produce these sheets even though my Excel cheatsheets now work on Macs too.

These draft guides are in PDF format and they can easily be used from your computer using a PDF editor or they can be printed out, depending on your preference. When opening the sheet, you’ll see players broken down by position and ordered by their average draft position (ADP) at each site. Beyond that, they are grouped together with players of similar value at their position. If a group of rounds represents a drop in that value, a new tier is created. This gives you a good idea on whether you can wait on a position or not.

The numbers next to each player’s name in my sheet represent their projected WERTH roto value according to my Special Blend projections. These are position-adjusted value to represent that player’s value at that specific position. A player with a value of of zero would be a replacement level player at that position and anything below zero represents a projected bench player. If you don’t see a value for a player, that is because the Special Blend projections did not have a projection for them (which I explain in my linked article above about the projections). You may notice that a player who is eligible at multiple positions may have very different values at each position as a result of the position adjustment. I tried to account for multi-position eligibility as best as I could according to the position rules at each site (Yahoo’s being the most lenient in that regard).

Download the 2017 Printable Cheatsheets

To check out the PDF cheatsheets themselves, choose one of the following download links. If you are drafting at a specific draft site, I’d recommend downloading the cheatsheet for that site as your draft order will likely more closely resemble that draft site’s ADP.

2017 Average ADP Tiered Cheatsheet
2017 CBS Leagues ADP Tiered Cheatsheet
2017 ESPN Leagues ADP Tiered Cheatsheet
2017 NFBC Leagues ADP Tiered Cheatsheet
2017 Yahoo Leagues ADP Tiered Cheatsheet

How To Use

If you print out the sheets for your in-person draft, you can just cross off names as they are drafted to keep track of your draft. If you choose to use your computer, you can use a PDF editor to strike-out names as they get drafted.

2017 Printable Cheatsheet Preview

The basic idea is to eliminate players from each tier as they get drafted so you can see when a new tier is about to arise. This helps you stay ahead of the curve and know which position is most important to draft at a given time.

Enjoy and happy draft season!

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  • Kris
    03/15/2017 at 11:20 AM

    These look amazing, nice work as usual Luke!

    • Kris
      03/15/2017 at 11:39 AM

      And after looking over it, crossing off keepers, etc… I did notice, or maybe missed, Mark Melancon in the RP column. Or maybe I’ve been looking at fantasy baseball research too much the past few days and just missed him

      • Luke Gloeckner
        03/15/2017 at 4:21 PM

        Cool. Which of the sheets is that on? I do them each manually so there certainly could be a human error or two on them.

        • Kris
          03/15/2017 at 6:30 PM

          I believe it was on the first one, the Average

    • Steve Howard
      03/27/2017 at 4:38 PM

      Tim Anderson seems to be missing (SS for CHW).

  • Christopher Russo
    03/15/2017 at 2:16 PM

    Lindor also appears to be missing.

    • Luke Gloeckner
      03/15/2017 at 4:21 PM

      Thanks. Which of the five sheets is that on? I do them each manually.

  • Drew
    03/16/2017 at 10:36 AM

    No love for Razzball rankings>

    • Luke Gloeckner
      03/22/2017 at 1:05 PM

      Not sure how I would use Razzball’s site rankings in these sheets? What did you have in mind?

  • Jon
    03/17/2017 at 9:19 AM

    Can you make AL only and NL only versions? ESPN doesn’t post league specific cheat sheets anymore. It’s an opportunity for you to fill the void 😛

  • John
    03/22/2017 at 12:28 PM

    Some of those players aren’t “DH Only” they are also eligible fielders at various positions. Or am I misunderstanding something? Pujols is still an eligible 1B for example. I love the sheets, don’t get me wrong. It’s just throwing me off not seeing some of those in their respectable positions.

    • Luke Gloeckner
      03/22/2017 at 1:03 PM

      You may be right. With so many different eligibility rules between sites, I may have missed a couple of situations like that. If I get the time before the weekend, I’ll try to go through them and see if there are tweaks that need to be made.

  • Doug
    03/23/2017 at 1:44 PM

    Love your work, Luke. Can the tiered rankings be set up for a 16 team league? I can only get them for 12 teams right now.

    • Mike
      03/29/2017 at 2:11 PM

      Luke…fantastic site. Another vote for tiered rankings for 16-team league. My draft is Saturday. I’d be eternally grateful if you could swing it. Thanks.

  • Dan
    03/23/2017 at 4:14 PM

    Luke

    Can you explain the numbers in ( ) for me please?

    Thanks

    Dan

    • Mike
      03/23/2017 at 9:13 PM

      5th Paragraph, Dan-o.

      “The numbers next to each player’s name in my sheet represent their projected WERTH roto value according to my Special Blend projections. These are position-adjusted value to represent that player’s value at that specific position. A player with a value of of zero would be a replacement level player at that position and anything below zero represents a projected bench player. “

  • Ben
    03/27/2017 at 6:55 AM

    Great site! Would you be able to make an AL/NL only tier sheets? Thank you

  • Ron Soriano
    03/27/2017 at 8:36 PM

    Yes I love the tier sheets but al nl only would be great

  • Ron Soriano
    03/27/2017 at 8:37 PM

    Luke Great Job

  • Ed
    03/27/2017 at 9:34 PM

    Thanks for your time and effort Mr. C. Great sheet for getting a lot of info in a hurry…

  • Jack
    03/28/2017 at 9:56 AM

    Hi, does the tier pdf exist for 10 team leagues? This is awesome, thanks so much for all of your work

  • Jp
    03/28/2017 at 9:55 PM

    Hi, I know there a lot of calculations with the excel sheets, so I wanted to be sure to ask before just plugging in and maybe dsirupting the eq’s.
    When entering league settings, there is no BN option. Would I fill out the 3-4 bench spots my league has as DH, or would I enter more of other positions? Or is there a BN already factored into these draft settings?

    Thanks for everything you do!

    • Luke Gloeckner
      03/28/2017 at 11:16 PM

      Yeah, entering your bench isn’t necessarily. The calculations just need to know number of starters because it calculates replacement level in your league based on that and uses that within its calculations. The sheet will allow you to put as many bench players on your team as you want.