About
I started playing fantasy football in 2010, I got hooked on the idea of digging into stats and building the perfect team. In 2012 a roommate introduced me to fantasy baseball, and I realized how much deeper fantasy sports could be. Where football is pretty much all about the draft and hoping your team stays healthy, fantasy baseball is flexible you can rebuild mid-season and make a run. You can win with offense and defense which means there is a never-ending well of strategy. After my first year of fantasy baseball, I stopped playing fantasy football altogether.
The first few years of fantasy baseball were spent in a 10-team redraft league on Yahoo, with standard categories. That league grew to 12, then to 14 managers, and from 5x5 categories to 10x10 categories (there was even a year with 11x11). The league went from redraft to a keeper league in 2016, and then again we added a prospect system tracked in Google Sheets. Around 2016, I left the Yahoo draft client behind and started using Google Sheets for all our drafts.
My home league is weird, but that is what makes it so fun:
The FBP Fantasy League (the only league I can honestly keep up with) is a unique dynasty league - 14 teams, started in 2012.
The league uses 20 Categories, 10 battings, and 10 pitching
We keep prospects and have an entire system built on Google Sheets
You can option prospects up and down in Yahoo Fantasy.
We allow managers to trade draft picks, prospects, and player options
Those points probably created more questions than answers which is why I am not advising you on which player is good or bad. Some players are great in standard 5x5 Yahoo fantasy but are much worse in FBP. In addition, I am maybe an above-average fantasy manager in my league. I will not pretend to know enough about baseball to convince anyone they should do anything. That may change in the future if I have some great data to back up my arguments.
What I will tell you is that QUERY is the best function in Google Sheets and I will defend that like a Yankee fan who wants Volpe to win ROY.
Short Love Letter to the QUERY Function:
The QUERY Function is the reason I use only Google Sheets for fantasy baseball and work. Every annoying problem you used to have in spreadsheets can probably be solved with the use of the QUERY function. I used to spend hours matching up two sets of data (because baseball stats websites don’t all have the same names of players, the same format for stats, and they don’t organize them the same way). Yes, I am that guy who once went line by line to combine all the rows of players who got traded mid-season when their stat lines got split. Also, Yahoo has never allowed you to download the statistics from your league (I still copy/paste and format data from Yahoo Fantasy to get some stats that only my home league uses, Looking at you Fangraphs. Please add Quality Starts). Google Query made all this better, and I recommend anyone using spreadsheets daily to learn how to use it. While there are functions to get around most issues, the QUERY function is the most versatile since it utilizes the Google Visualization API Query Language
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