BASICS: How To Value A Counting Category

An Ask Rotoman reader asked how to value some of the new categories his league is adopting. Rather than cruft up the answer to his post with technical stuff, I’m laying the basic steps out here for reference. All quantitative categories that value more work the same way, though it should be noted that you’ll probably want to value all the categories you use to determine who your draftable players are, before you price them.

But here are the steps for valuing one category. Extra Base Hits (XBH). In a 10 team NL roto league. I used the projections from the Patton $ Online spreadsheet, which has full player projections and bid values from me, Alex Patton and Mike Fenger, and will have CBS, LABR and Tout Wars expert league prices as those leagues auction.

Now, not many have replaced HR with XBH, but there is a solid rationale for it. One that loses some luster the week that big time HR hitter Ralph Kiner passed on, because double hitters don’t drive Cadillacs. But I digress.

Follow along in the Google Sheet here.

Step 1) Add up the projected Doubles, Triples and HR for each available hitter. (See Column H)

Step 2) Rank the hitters from top to bottom by XBH.

Step 3) To do this most precisely, select the number of players at each position who rank highest in the category, working from least deep among hitters to most deep. I identify my offensive pool by selecting Catchers, then Shortstops, Second Basement, Third Basemen, First Basemen, Outfielders, Middle Infielders, Corner Infielders, Utility players. For expediency sake, we’re skipping this step in the demonstration spreadsheet, and are taking the Top 130 offensive players.

Step 4) Subtract 1 from the last player in the list, then subtract the resultant sum (that is 26) from each of the total XBHs of all the players in the list. This is each player’s marginal value. (See Column I)

Step 5) Sum all the marginal values (that’s 2235).

Step 6) To convert to dollar values we need to know how much the league is spending on hitting. Since this is a 10 team league, let’s assume $260 per team ($2600 total), 69 percent spent on hitting ($1794). To convert the total marginal value to the one-fifth the hitting budget ($359), we cross multiply like so:

Each player’s marginal value times the category budget, divided by the total marginal value.

The results are in column J.

Extra Credit: You can use the same spreadsheet to value homers (or doubles or triples).

 

Leave a Reply