Path to an off-platform draft sheet
The History of changes behind the draft sheet.
Why would you build this?
Why not just use Yahoo or another fantasy app to draft? Back then, in 2018, Yahoo did not have a good way for you to mark keepers for drafts. Yes, there are perfectly good fantasy draft tools and I did not have to go through the effort of putting all this together. However, none of the other draft tools allowed you to trade picks, and by the time you pulled out all the ineligible prospect players you might as well use your list and build your own draft board. Hopefully, by walking through the history of making this draft board I can show you the issues I tried to solve over the past 6 years.
My Home League is Weird
The number one issue I have tried to solve: my home league has some quirks.
We departed from standard 5x5 long ago, partly because Wins and Losses as scoring stats made everyone mad, and partly because baseball is fun and weird and we wanted the league to look and feel like a season of baseball. With that goal in mind, we kept changing things up, we are now at 14 teams, and we have a complicated prospect and keeper system where you hand out contracts, and face draft penalties for keeping more players. You will see in the screenshots of past drafts that most of the best players are kept and not part of the draft, every drafted player gets a 3-year contract in our league, and you get progressively worse draft penalties with the number of keepers kept. Over 7 players kept will result in the loss of your first-round pick. We have a separate prospect draft, so if a player has their rookie status still intact, that player is not eligible in our keeper draft. We also do not do a snake draft, because if your team sucks at least you can rebuild by getting a higher draft pick. The winner of the consolation tournament gets 1st pick. Draft picks can be traded as well.
This weirdness meant we had to use Google Sheets to draft players, so in 2018 we started out with a simple list of players, and if someone picked someone we highlighted the player in yellow. Simple but effective.
The biggest issue was the visibility of picks: it was hard to see who was picked and who wasn’t. Because we had so many keepers it was difficult to scroll through all the kept players to find the next best player.
2019 Draft Board
This was a step forward in design, but not in function. The only addition was a list of keepers on the Draft Tracker tab. At least you can see some of the design elements coming through as I figured out how to make spreadsheets look more interesting. The one thing we decided to change after this draft was the workflow. We were tired of the 4 step process to make each pick and having to have two people to keep up with the pace of the draft.
1. Select Pick
2. Add the Manager's Name next to the picked player on the Draft Board
3. Highlight the Player on the Draft Board
4. Add the Player to the Manager Team Tab
[2019 Draft Board gif]
In 2020, I started digging into the functions Google Sheets offered to figure out a way to automate some of the workflow.
2020 Draft Board
In the before times, when I thought we would actually have a normal baseball season, I found some useful functions to pair with our draft process and automate the manager team tab.
Using COUNTIF and FILTER I could list the picked players on the manager team tab and count the number of positions that the manager had picked. Since I had player stat totals, I also made a way to see their average team stats and compare, in theory, how they stacked up against everyone else.
These changes helped managers track their team during the draft, but on the admin side, it still required two people to update the Draft Board and the Draft Tracker page. In the boredom of 2020 I began to find the solution for the ‘21 Draft Board.
THE BIG CHANGE - 2021 Draft Board
During the dark days of 2020, I worked a sales job, and while I was calling people and getting hung up on, it occurred to me that we were doing the draft backward… In the 2020 Draft Board, I used the Draft Board tab to select players by placing the picking team next to the player's name on the Draft Board.
But we could have been running the draft from the Draft Tracker tab. The only issue was that I needed a powerful function to make that happen. In steps the QUERY function to the story… the most powerful Google Sheets function…allowing the Draft Board to be run from one tab with one person adding each pick.
Using QUERY, we can look at the Draft Tracker tab and see when a player is picked. On a separate tab, we can provide the name of the manager who picked the player and send all that information to the Draft Board to be presented live during the draft. For the first time, this has allowed us to build a Best Available list of remaining players and make it so the draft board updates with picked players.
[2021 Draft Board gif]
[2021 Best Available gif]
(We expanded keepers just for 2020 after skipping the year and then allowed managers to keep 15 players from the ‘20 draft, that is why Corbin Burnes was the first pick as he came out of nowhere to be a top pick in 2020.)
2022 Draft - The Current State
The last change was to make the Draft Board a little easier to read and work on the color scheme… getting away from whatever this was… and moving on to a much easier-to-read format.
More about the current state of the draft board can be read here: 2023 Draft Board - Building a Better Draft Sheets