How to set-up a Fantasy Baseball Farm System

Building an off-platform Farm System HUB alongside your dynasty league.

I talked about the weird rules in my league in the first few posts. Those rules made designing an off-platform draft board necessary. But where do we put all of that information after the draft? Yahoo does not have a place to store an extensive prospect system or keepers during the offseason. This meant I had to create a database for the league.

Using Google Sheets, I was about to list all available Yahoo players and the top 900 prospects in a database to track keeper contracts and prospect ownership. Using data validation lists and QUERY I could pull in statistics onto manager rosters and build an off-platform record-keeping system to manage the league. 

Simple right? 

The goal was to present a list of players with information and show who owns who (similar to the player's tab in Yahoo Fantasy). To do this I needed inputs from team ownership, player status, and other data points related to the players. To get to the player list we have to start with the manager lists. These are a visual way to see who is on each team easily. The benefit is on the backend where everyone assigned to a manager list is marked as owned by that manager. In the same way, there are different sections of the manager list that prospects can be assigned to. In our rules, there is a prospect status called “Protected Prospect.” Each team can have 8 total, and there are 8 slots in each manager list. When a player is added to the “Protected Prospect” section they are labeled as owned by that manager and assigned the status of protected prospect.

Data Validation and QUERY allowed me to sort players available to add to manager lists and provide player data alongside those player names to present a great visual for managers viewing keepers and prospect lists. All this data is then stored on lists - all players in the League HUB are on the keeper list with their contract status listed, and only prospects are on the Prospect List with their prospect status listed and the owner listed. I don’t track owners of keepers during the year because we don’t have a way to update drops and trades without manually changing things each day.

[Prospect Database gif]

If you want to build your own league HUB/Database in Google Sheets, what do you need?

First is data. In the diagram, I use a few sources of data to create the off-platform HUB.

MLB Prospect Lists
Our league considers any player who still has their rookie status intact a Fantasy Prospect. To pull these lists I typically use Fangraphs and this list of statistics from the top 900 prospects (which is most of them): MLB Top 900 Prospects List

Prospect Update Form
Google form that adds new prospects or players not in top prospect lists.

Keeper List
List of players on the roster at the end of the season. These are the only players eligible to be kept at the keeper deadline during the preseason.

Farm List
List of prospects the manager owns currently

Minor League Discord Channel
To manage the up-and-down nature of a farm system we have a discord channel dedicated to Farm System actions. These include purchasing contracts of players, trading players, and calling prospects up to their Yahoo roster. Admins keep track of all changes and use the discord channel as a receipt in case of a misclick on the HUB.

Organization

Finally, with all of that data stored, you need an easy way to navigate to each section. Built on the main page is a list of links to every part of the HUB so that each manager can access the data easily.

In addition, because we have all the data easily available in the database, I was able to use QUERY to create two search features so managers can quickly find Keeper Info and look at Farm Lists.

[Keeper Search.gif & FarmSystemSearch.gif ]

Turn Your League into a Dynasty

I am not going to try to argue why Dynasty Leagues are more fun. I am going to provide a way to turn your league into one. You will need an off-platform draft tool - I have one here. Then you will need a Database like I have created for my league to hold all your league data between seasons. That will be the subject of the next post, going out next Thursday.

Substack Update:

Paid Subscribers will get every post as soon as I finish it and will get the Full Version of every Sheet.
Free Subscribers will get new posts on Thursdays.
(The free versions of tools will work great but you don’t get the additional stuff I include in the version I use)

Thanks for reading!