2023 Printable Fantasy Baseball Cheatsheet for 5×5 Roto Drafts

When I started this website, the purpose was to publish my fantasy baseball research but, more importantly, to give a home to my customizable Excel cheatsheets for fantasy drafts. In those early years, I could not get the cheatsheets to work on Excel for the Mac, but I wanted to still help those folks out too. That led to me making printable cheatsheets as a supplemental tool on my site and they became an annual thing over the years. Even after my Excel sheets started working on all computer types, there were folks who liked the printable cheatsheets and what they provided.

So, here we are again. It’s 2023 and I’m publishing some printable sheets for your fantasy baseball drafts one more time.

What Is This Sheet?

The idea of these sheets is to just show the draftable players in order by their average draft position (ADP) broken down by positions. A list of players in draft order at each position wouldn’t really be that amazing or impressive though. The part that makes these sheets helpful is that, based on my own little calculations, each position is broken into tiers. The idea is that it visualizes where there’s going to be a drop in positional value so you know who to grab before that tier runs out.

So, How Are These “ADP Positional Tiers” Calculated?

With the work I do on this site, I’m able to calculate an approximate value for each player in a 5×5 roto league which are called WERTH values in the sheet. Using those values, I can calculate the average value at each position in each set of rounds and get a chart that looks like this:

Once I have that chart, I can start to see where there is going to be a big jump down in value. I set that as the starting point for a new tier. A tier is basically saying “if you want somebody at this position, you better get them here before the value drops off.”

How Are These “WERTH” Values Projected?

Those WERTH values are a way of saying how far above replacement level a player is in a 5×5 roto league. They’re called WERTH values because Jayson Werth was a big deal when I named them, and also because that value is a way of saying “this is what a player is worth“. It’s fun and it’s a pun.

To calculate those WERTH values, I use my Special Blend projections. Those are aggregated projections that have stood up against all other projections in various tests over the years. Here’s a recent projection analysis from Fangraphs which had some good methodology behind it.

Using those projections, I can determine how many standard deviations above replacement level a player is in each of the five categories in a 5×5 roto league. Adding those five numbers together gives us a WERTH value and that’s a nice way to show approximate value for our purposes.

The 2023 5×5 Roto Printable Cheatsheet

You’ve read about what the sheet is about (or scrolled past it to find the download link) and now it is your time to take it out for a test drive. The sheet is downloaded as a PDF. You can then print it off and manually cross off players during your draft, or you can use a PDF editor to cross guys off on your computer.

Download the 2023 Printable Cheatsheet

Good luck, have fun, be nice to your elders, eat healthy, and have a great fantasy baseball season!