Fantasy baseball draft season is approaching! Scrap whatever you were doing because I officially welcome you to the eleventh year of Mr. Cheatsheet. I’m here, once again, at your service to help you win your fantasy leagues aided by the craziest Excel spreadsheets in the land.
I create highly customizable and data-overloaded spreadsheets every year that can handle any single league you throw at it. The general idea is that you take your crazy league settings, enter them into the spreadsheet and get advanced projections and analysis catered to your specific league settings. From there, you can conduct your entire draft from within the spreadsheet and get insight and knowledge throughout the draft to help give you an edge over your clueless leaguemates. Sound good? Then let’s rock.
What Makes These Cheatsheets Special?
I, myself, play in a variety of fantasy baseball leagues and every single one of them is different. There are auction leagues instead of snake drafts and there are keeper leagues instead of redraft leagues and there are points leagues instead of roto leagues. The list goes on and on. Considering that’s just me, I can only imagine the infinite number of fantasy league varieties that exist in the universe. As a result of there not being one standard way to play fantasy baseball, I built these highly customizable spreadsheets to help aid anybody with their unique league type, no matter what crazy settings you may have.
Once the draft gets going, you can keep track of it in the spreadsheet. You’ll be able to see projected standings and all sorts of data during your draft so that you can make educated decisions when your time to pick comes up.
If you are in a keeper league, you can enter your keepers in and the cheatsheet will take those into account. If you’re in a roto auction league, you can run it from the cheatsheet and get custom values based on your league settings that change during the draft based on your league’s inflation rates. The possibilities for what these cheatsheets can handle are (nearly) endless.
What Data Am I Pulling In?
This spreadsheet would be pretty mundane and boring without all the options that are included in it. You can choose from a ton of different baseball projections, or ADP data, or auction values, or expert rankings. I owe a great deal to all of those services for existing. I’m simple offering a tool that puts them all at your fingertips.
As the draft season progresses over the next month, these options will expand a bit but here’s what you can find inside this first version of the 2020 cheatsheets.
- Projections Sources: Steamer, The BAT, ZiPS, Clay Davenport, Mr. Cheatsheet’s Special Blend
- Average Draft Position Sources: FantasyPros, ESPN, CBS, Fantrax, NFBC
- Auction Values Sources: FantasyPros, CBS, ESPN, Yahoo, RotoChamp
- Expert Rankings Sources: FantasyPros, Yahoo, ESPN, RotoChamp
WERTH Values (Roto Leagues)
If you’re playing in a roto league, you may notice that these cheatsheets have a WERTH value for each player. These are essentially z-scores in each roto category based on your league setting, which shows you how far above or below average each player is in comparison to the replacement level for your league. A positive WERTH value means that player will contribute positively for your team. This is all dependent on your league settings which makes these values completely unique to your league.
Download Your 2020 Cheatsheet
I’m excited to announce that there are four different varieties of cheatsheets this year. I’m introducing a Points Auction version for the first time, due to popular demand. It took a lot of work (thus the slight delay in the release of these sheets this year) but it’s finally here! Rejoice, my points auction friends. But let’s dive deeper into your options this year.
Roto Leagues
If you play in a rotisserie league or a H2H categories league, you’ll want to download the roto cheatsheets below. You can either choose the draft version if you have a typical fantasy draft for your league, or you can choose the auction version if your league conducts an auction instead of a straight draft.
Download the cheatsheet for your rotisserie standard draft leagues
(Current Version: 1.19 uploaded on July 21 at 6:15 PM EST)
Download the cheatsheet for your rotisserie auction draft leagues
(Current Version: 1.19 uploaded on July 21 at 6:15 PM EST)
Points Leagues
If you don’t play in a rotisserie league, you likely play in a points-based H2H league that scores a bit like fantasy football where players are awarded points for each stat they accrue based on your scoring system. If you are in a Points league, you can download the draft or auction version of the spreadsheet below based on your draft type.
Download the cheatsheet for your points-based league drafts
(Current Version: 1.19 uploaded on July 21 at 6:15 PM EST)
Download the cheatsheet for your points-based league auction drafts
(Current Version: 1.19 uploaded on July 21 at 6:15 PM EST)
Troubleshooting
There are instructions within the cheatsheets but questions may still arise. Post your questions in the comments below so I can answer for others to see.
While I did a bunch of testing on these prior to their release, it’s hard to test out every conceivable scenario so it’s possible you may encounter a bug or error that I didn’t catch. Let me know about that as well and I’ll post updates as needed. You can keep track of spreadsheet updates by following me on Twitter where I post about any minor updates that may happen.
As new cheatsheet updates are released, you’ll want to utilize the “Save Or Load” page in the cheatsheet to copy and paste your custom data into new updates.
Donations
These cheatsheets are free! And I do that because I want them to reach as many people as possible. If you play in a $10 fantasy league, it wouldn’t make sense to pay $5 for a spreadsheet to help you. But you should still be able to dominate your league. Anyway, there are still costs associated with keeping this website up (in addition to the man hours I put into making these) so I do appreciate anyone who would like to offer a donation to me so that I can buy coffee or something like that.
Greg Stutzman
03/11/2020 at 9:51 AMOn the cheatsheet, what’s the difference between the Special Blend and the Special Blend w/Steamer Replacements projections?
Luke Gloeckner
03/11/2020 at 2:53 PMI need to take out the Steamer replacements option most likely. In the past, the Special Blend projections didn’t have as many players projected as the other systems (because part of the blending process used a source that didn’t project as many players). As a result, I had that option to replace any unprojected player with a Steamer projection. It’s not as relevant anymore now that my blending process includes more players.
Billy
03/12/2020 at 5:33 AMGreat stuff Luke! Love the spreadsheet. Downloaded the latest two versions of the Roto Auction (1.10 and 1.11). Noticed an error on mine that Kirby Yates has lost his stats so isn’t listed in the “Positions” tab. If I search for him in the “Your Roto Auction” tab, he comes up at the very bottom of the spreadsheet with no stats. Not sure if it’s something on my end or if others are seeing it too. He does show up in your initial version (1.02) with stats. Thanks!
PL
03/13/2020 at 6:46 PMIt is asking me for a password to enable the macros. Did I miss that somewhere?
PS – Thank you!!
PL
03/13/2020 at 6:51 PMForget it – I am an idiot and just figured that out (even though my wife has been telling me that for years).
Pate
03/14/2020 at 5:13 AMGreat Job, thx for the hard work.
Quick question, I am in a 6×6 ( runs, hr, rbi. sb. avg. ops) (wins, loses, saves, KOs, ERA, WHIP) categories league on yahoo h2h. however we get points for each category as a tally. So If a guy on my team hits a HR, I get one point. Whoever has more hrs at the end of the week wins that category.
how would i set up your cheat sheat? which style should i pick? thanks for you help bud
Nick Pacenza
03/14/2020 at 8:47 AMWill Smith (C) looks like he still has some issues, at least on the Roto sheet. His ADP is blank on the Your Roto Draft tab so he shows up really low. And he doesn’t show up on the Positions tab (maybe the same reason?). Thanks for all the great work, these sheets are amazing.
Norrin
03/14/2020 at 12:36 PMHi, ive noticed in the roto auctions latest update the majority of set up men have 0 or very few holds projections. Example Yankees’ Ottavino, Kahnle, & Britton are projected for 0 holds.
Thajakel
03/28/2020 at 8:28 AMLuke awesome data and cheat sheets as always dedicated fan doing draft today and your tools are key to winning a bunch. Happily send along some $ for the good karma. Best of luck – thajakel
Roger L Gillum
04/21/2020 at 7:33 PMFor some reason when i open the new roto version up i only get 1 page, probably something on my end, i guess
Tom K
04/24/2020 at 3:05 PMHey Luke,
I hope you are healthy and hanging in there during this challenging time. I realize we don’t know when (that’s right I’m optimistic) baseball will start this year but I was hoping to see your updated cheat sheets with your multi-positional logic and possibly some more current ADP and rankings. I’m still puttering with mock drafts and trying to keep hope alive…lol.
Stay safe,
Tom
Corky
07/14/2020 at 9:20 AMAre you going to be updating your sheets for the 60 game season?
Steve
07/18/2020 at 8:01 PMVery cool spreadsheet! I’m a bit of an Excel geek, so I can image that it took to put all this together!
Something that would be helpful (to at least me, and I think other people), is to include the target player draft position on the Player Notes pages so when you’re making a decision on whether to add a lower or higher note you know where they are to begin with instead of toggling back and forth between Player Notes and Your Roto Draft. It seems like something like =match(a3,’Your Roto Draft’!C$11:C1000) should returns their position, but every time I put it in the Player Notes section it wipes it out so I can’t be sure.
Stephen
07/21/2020 at 2:01 PMHi, awesome sheet! But I think one of the Data Validations is broken on the settings tab of the Standard Roto sheet. It isn’t able to locate the list of Roto categories and therefore nothing can be entered or removed from the cell. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?
Matthew Foley
07/23/2020 at 2:16 AMDonated today. Thanks for the hard work. It’s quite impressive.
Feedback:
– Ohtani – as a pitcher, I don’t see him in the spreadsheet. During the draft I couldn’t find him, and then got totally lost trying to figure out how to skip to the next team because it kept going back to the team that had the empty draft slot. I finally found “Unlisted Player” …but seems like Ohtani as a pitcher is good enough that he should be in there.
– I got a REF#! error about 18 rounds into my draft, and I had to bail on the spreadsheet. Error was shown on the draft log, and I was going to try to just copy and paste the row above into the cells, but it wouldn’t let me because the sheet is protected. I totally get protecting the sheets so that dumb mistakes can’t mess everything up…but I had no luck at all trying to solve the problem, and basically the last 8 rounds I had to go without it…which was a bummer.
Luke Gloeckner
07/23/2020 at 2:31 AMYes, the Ohtani issue is one I was trying to work into the spreadsheet when baseball shut down in March. I have new formulas to handle him and plan to introduce them next year. In the meantime, if you wanted to just switch him to a pitcher then use the Change Position option to see that. He’s only one player currently. In future versions, you’d choose how to treat him in your sheet based on your league settings… I just didn’t fully build it out and then the season shut down and they came back at a time when I wasn’t really prepared to continue that project.
Appreciate the donation and sorry about the error… I’m not sure what that is as it’s hard to troubleshoot with just that information there as I’m not totally sure the issue. I haven’t encountered that error in my own drafting but sorry it messed you up. That sucks.
And, yes, there were plans to implement features such as highlighting players either via the Notes tab or when you draft them and I had built out portions of that concept but then, you know, the season shut down. It just messed up a lot of concepts that I was working on and I couldn’t immediately flip things on when they decided to bring the season back. Thanks again for the donation. It’ll help pay for the server costs to keep this going another year.
Matthew Foley
07/23/2020 at 2:19 AMOne other thought…
Allow the user to designate which team they are…and when a player is drafted to that team, the name gets HIGHLIGHTED on the positions tab so that you can quickly and easily see which players have been drafted to each position, and also you can get a quick look at where those players fall in the position rankings.
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