Okay, so, I wanted to mess around with this whole “fantasy baseball” thing. It’s like, you’re a manager, but you don’t actually, you know, manage a real team. Sounds kinda neat, right? So, I figured the first thing I needed to do was get a handle on was player values, and that’s where this whole “Average Draft Position” (ADP) comes in. It’s basically a number that tells you where a player is typically getting picked in mock drafts.
First, I started hunting for some ADP data. I tried a couple of different websites, looking for a list of players and their average draft positions. I wanted something that I could easily download and play around with.
After poking around for a bit, I found a site that had ADP data in a CSV format. Perfect! I grabbed that file and saved it to my computer. It was a pretty big list, with all the big names and their corresponding ADP.
Then, I opened up the file in a spreadsheet program. You know, just to get a good look at it. It was a bit overwhelming at first, rows and rows of players. But I could see the ADP column, and that’s what I was after.
Now, I wanted to do some basic analysis, nothing too fancy. I sorted the list by ADP to see who the top dogs were. Then I started playing around, filtering the list by position. I wanted to see, for example, who the top-ranked catchers were, or what the average ADP was for starting pitchers.
- Sorted by ADP to see the top-ranked players.
- Filtered by position to analyze specific groups.
- Calculated some simple averages for different positions.
It was actually pretty cool to see how the data broke down. You could start to see some trends, like which positions tended to get drafted earlier, or which players were considered “sleepers” (guys who were being drafted later than maybe they should be). I had no idea about it before I read the data.
I’m still a total noob at this fantasy baseball stuff, but just messing around with the ADP data gave me a much better sense of how the drafts work. It’s like, now I have a little bit of a roadmap. I’m not just going in blind. I even drafted a mock team based on that data, just for fun, haha.
What I learned
This was a fun little project. I definitely learned a lot about how fantasy baseball drafts work, and how important it is to understand player values. ADP is a super useful tool for anyone getting into this hobby. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s a great starting point. I still need to do some work. But I will keep digging around in this interesting field.