They’re available at Amazon, follow this link.
The softcover is $19.99. The Kindle edition is $9.99.
Rotoman $ Values
Rotoman’s Fantasy Baseball Guide 2024
It’s here!
It’s a lot of player profiles, all written by moi, with projections and bid prices for AL and NL Only leagues, plus price lists by position and a major league multi-eligibility chart. It’s available now!
The Fantasy Baseball Guide 2022 Is Here!
We’re live!
This year’s model has more than 1200 player profiles written by old friends HC Green, Rob Blackstien, Jeff Zimmerman, Tim McLeod, and JD Bolick, and introducing a newcomer, veteran sportswriter Larry Fine, against whom I’ve been playing rotisserie baseball for almost 30 years.
Rookie profiles were written by the guys above, with additions from Perry Van Hook, Rob Leibowitz, Jeff Winick, and Scott Swanay. Rob put the section together.
You’ll also find more of JD’s unheralded rookies, a bit about the Perfect Pitching Staff by yours truly, and Strategies of Champions by Glenn Colton, Fred Zinkie, Ron Shandler, Alex Patton, and Don Drooker. Good stuff there.
Plus, the mag to have major league and minor league games played.
Finally, an All-Star mock draft, featuring in pick order Zach Steinhorn (Creativesports 2.0), Tim McLeod (Prospect361.com), Justin Mason (friendswithfantasybenefits.com), Doug Anderson (FantraxHQ.com), Todd Zola (Mastersball), Derek VanRiper (The Athletic), Ariel Cohen (FanGraphs), Clay Link (Rotowire.com), Howard Bender (Fantasy Alarm), Doug Dennis (BaseballHQ), moi, Ian Kahn (The Athletic), JD Bolick (The Guide), Steve Gardner (USA Today), and Eric Cross (FantraxHQ.com), all commenting on each of their picks. Tim McLeod put it all together, many thanks to him for that.
The Guide also has my fantasy prices and cheat sheet, along with Picks and Pans from Dave Adler, Rob Blackstien, JD Bolick, Ariel Cohen, Buck Davidson, Patrick Davitt, Doug Dennis, Don Drooker, Mike Gianella, Phil Hertz, Tim McLeod, Alex Patton, Mike Podhorzer, Vlad Sedler, Ron Shandler, Zach Steinhorn, Seth Trachtman, and Jeff Winick. So many opinions!
Find the Guide at Barnes and Noble, Wal Mart, and an assortment of drug stores, groceries, and magazine stands across the USA and Canada (though maybe not in Wal Mart in Canada). But there is a convenience store in Atitoken Ontario that is usually one of the first on the continent to put the Guide on sale. You’ll have to decide if it’s worth the drive.
There is also a pdf version for sale at thefantasyguide.com.
Look for updates about availability and corrections to mistakes (oops) on the Baseball Guide 2022 Corrections and Updates Page.
Ask Rotoman: We Need the Guide’s Prices!
Dear Rotoman:
I saw you were editor and chief of my favorite magazine…”The Fantasy Baseball Guide”. We use this as our bible to set values for our league. Because of Covid I realize things may be delayed etc. Could you let me know if the magazine is coming out on time this year? Thank you!
A Reader
Dear Reader:
The publisher decided the retail environment was not conducive to publishing the Guide this year, so they have us on hold until next year (we hope).
I’ve been writing profiles and published a full price list and projections yesterday, available to Subscribers to the Rotoman Special at pattonandco.com (pattonandco.com/rotoman). It costs $10. We don’t yet have an automatic link to the prices page for a silly tech reason, but if you subscribe let me know and I’ll send you the link.
I also started a newsletter that contains samples of the profiles. It’s free and you can subscribe at rotoman.substack.com.
Thanks for asking. I’m sorry we don’t have a Guide this year.
Sincerely,
Rotoman’s Fantasy Baseball Guide 2021 is Coming!
The bad news is that the publisher decided the retail prospects were still poor enough that publishing The Fantasy Baseball Guide 2021 was not a good idea. We’re holding out hope for the football magazine, and all we can do is see.
The good news (and I hope you agree) is that I’m writing Rotoman’s Fantasy Baseball Guide 2021, kind of the same but obviously different, too.
What’s the same? There will be a lot of profiles, prices, and projections. How many? We’ll see. Everyone who is projected to be a regular, for sure, and lots of other players who might contribute in deep leagues will be profiled. I’m writing all the profiles myself, so there may not be quite as many bits about back-of-the-bullpen arms as usual. But if the season doesn’t start until June, maybe I’ll get to everyone.
There will also be draft at a glance lists by position, and some pieces about strategy and ways to play fantasy that I’m working on.
What’s different? No mock draft. I don’t think it makes sense when the start of the season is indefinite. Once we know for sure maybe we try one.
No Strategies of Champions. I inveigle my colleagues to contribute to the Guide each year by asking them to explain why they’re so good at this game. And so lucky. They do it for a copy of the printed Guide, which I greatly appreciate. That won’t be possible this year, so I let them off the hook.
There may not be a print version. My goal is to have a print-on-demand version of the book available at the start of February. But my experience with this tech is limited, I don’t think I can promise that at this point. But I’m going to try.
There will be an ebook version available in February if the season is going to start in April. It will be pushed back if the start of the season is.
In the meantime, please sign up for The Newsletter. I’ll be putting out an issue each week, containing the player profiles I’ve been working on, some notes on the news, recommended reading, answer reader asks, and some other fun stuff I hope. It will be free, so you have nothing to lose! Click here to sign up for The Newsletter.
I’m also publishing all the player profiles at pattonandco.com. Alex and Colin have made a special membership level for Rotoman’s Guide. For $10 my profiles for each player will appear at the top of each player page. Subscribers to the big package will have access, too, for no extra charge. Please check out the site, it’s great even if you don’t subscribe but you do have to sign up, the subscription page goes live on December 15th, and the first profiles go up about then, too, once we work out the kinks.
Ask Rotoman: Canha Worms
Dear Rotoman:
I play in a roto 5×5 league which uses OBP instead of BA. Why is Mark Canha rated so low?
Andy
Dear Andy,
First thing, my prices and rankings are for batting average leagues. I’m a big fan of using OBP, it makes total sense to credit hitters with walks, especially when we penalize pitchers for them, but OBP hasn’t caught on yet. So my price, $11, reflects Canha’s weak batting average, not his very good on base percentage.
That said, a few facts argue against that $11 price.
- Canha earned $17 last year, and $11 the year before.
- He went for $15 and $14 in the CBS and LABR expert leagues this year, both BA leagues, and $16 in Tout Wars, which uses OBP.
- My own projection is rosier than any of those carried at FanGraphs, and when you price it it suggests Canha is a $16 player on par in BA leagues, a dollar or two more in OBP leagues.
Absent a transcript of what I was thinking when I priced him at $9 in March, and bumped him to $11 earlier this month in the update, here are the caveats:
- He shined last year as a full time player after the break, a career year really, but that’s a small sample after more spotty playing time because he’s generally been weak against lefties. He hit eight homers last year against lefties, good, with a .221 BA. Bad. If he loses at bats he loses value.
- He’s 31 years old and falls into that class of player who is older, less athletic, platoonable and more prone to lose his job to younger and more athletic players at any time. And if his gains the last two years are real, he’s a classic late bloomer, a type of hitter who generally falls apart quickly as he ages.
Will Canha lose his job this year? Probably not. Could he match last year’s numbers? Certainly, but is that guaranteed? Far from it, and there is some little risk of collapse.
So, I gave him an $11 price because he’s not the sort of player you want to bid up to his career best price, he’s the sort you want to sneak in after all the sexier choices are gone and the boring choice goes a little cheaply.
Still, $11 is probably a little too pessimistic. That’s the price you want to pay for him, but odds are good in BA leagues he’ll go for $13-15, as he did in the expert leagues that use BA, and $16 as he did in Tout. That’s okay. I’ve bumped his price to $13, because it might make sense for you to pay that at some point. In OBP maybe you want to go $14.
And, of course, if you’re a big fan and you want to take him to $16, that may well work out. So, feel free, but you won’t find me bidding against you if you do.
Thanks for the question!
Ask Rotoman News, June 25 Edition
The biggest news is that The Fantasy Football Guide 2020 is shelved. The publisher was getting too few advance orders from skittish retailers, and so we’re taking a pass for this season. We hope there’s a football season this fall and you can enjoy it without the Guide.
The goal is to be back for baseball come January, if possible.
In the meantime, we have baseball potentially starting up. Updated projections and prices for buyers of The Fantasy Baseball Guide 2020, reflecting the 60 game season and the unbalanced schedule, will be available on July 9th on the Updates and Corrections page here.
Feel free to ask Rotoman any questions about this strange and endangered season.
Despite pessimism about the chance the full 60 games get played, I’m looking forward to reconsidering baseball again.
Last time I bought this team in the Tout Wars NL auction back in March.
Patton $ Cheat Sheets are here in time for your Fantasy Baseball Auction/Draft! That means now!
Is your fantasy baseball draft coming up? Are you not ready? Or would you like to see what lists Alex Patton and Rotoman (FSWA Hall of Famers) are using this year? No matter what you need, they are here to help.
We’ve extracted all the ranked position charts from the PattonandCo.com annual subscriber package (which we’ve been selling for 20 years and you can buy here) and made Fantasy Baseball Cheat Sheets based on Alex’s 4×4 and Rotoman’s 5×5 lists for AL, NL and Mixed leagues.
These lists are great for reviewing your own opinions, or as the basis for your auction/draft itself. These are the Cheat Sheets Alex and Rotoman will be taking to their own AL and NL only auctions this week and next.
How to Use The Guide’s Big Price in Shallow Mixed Leagues
A reader writes: “How would you equate or gauge the Big Price to a 12 man 5X5 mixed league auction with $260. We play keepers too but that’s really not my issue. The Big Number seems to be about right as most other magazines I’ve seen will list auction prices using that format.”
I’ve answered this question before, and published an article showing how to do the math in 2014. Click here to read that.
But before you do that, you may want to read this.
The prices in The Guide are for a 24-team mixed league, and are intended to emulate the pricing of a deep AL and NL only leagues. The reason I don’t publish AL and NL only prices—the leagues are a little different, which makes the values of their stats a little different—is because when we put together the Guide in December there are usually hundreds of free agents out there. We don’t know who is going to be in which league.
The important thing to remember about deep prices is that the value of the stats, be they homers, RBIs, runs, hits, steals, are linear. That means that every home run a batter hits has the same value. Every stolen base has the same value. Et cetera. The reason for this is because the vast majority of stats that are produced in the whichever league one is playing in are counted in your roto standings. The replacement level is pretty close to nil for any stat category.
In a 12-team mixed league, you’re playing with just 12 of baseball’s 30 teams. You’re only using the half the available stats overall, roughly (this varies by category). This means that a player has to hit a bunch of homers before those homers have any value. And if he doesn’t hit them, there will someone available for free who will.
What this means, practically, is that in a AL or NL only league, the last player taken costs $1. And in a 12 team mixed league the last player taken cost $1. But the last player taken in the mixed league would have cost about $13 in the only league. The chart below shows the prices for players taken in a 15-team mixed auction, likely Tout Wars in 2016, from most expensive to least.
The thing to notice is that the graph goes pretty straight at about the 50th player taken, which supports the observation that after the third round in a mixed draft the players in each round are pretty interchangeable. No matter who someone takes, there’s another player like him still available. But this isn’t so among the best players. They are not interchangeable, and their value drops quickly, as the left side of the graph shows.
When someone takes Mike Trout, there isn’t another Mike Trout out there. There is Jose Altuve, but when he’s gone there isn’t someone similar. By the time you get to the sixth or seventh player the options are not nearly as appealing as the early choices were. In a draft, the compensation is the earlier pick in the next round. In an auction there is no compensation. Those irreplaceable players can only go to the person who pays for them, and that drives their prices up. Hence the steep curve in the graph showing the prices of the best players.
This situation is even more extreme in a 12-team league than a 15-team league. The bottom line is that if you convert the magazine prices to your mixed league size, it is important that you then reallocate money from the least expensive end of the list to the most expensive end, so that you have realistic prices for the Trouts, Turners, and Scherzers in your game.
Your draft day goal is to have a list that shows the prices you’re willing to pay for each available player, and have that add up to the amount of money available in your auction.
You don’t have to buy those most expensive players. In this year’s Guide, Tout Mixed Auction 2017 winner Jeff Zimmerman talks about how the prices for the top guys in that auction were overinflated. He complains that people always inflate the prices of the top guys in mixed auctions, as if that’s a mistake. I think Jeff is such a numbers guy that he only looks at what people earned to determine their price, and from his success you can see that his price list can work. But I think his list worked in spite of his error, rather than because of it.
What makes me think so? The graph above.
Subscriber Benefits at Pattonandco.com, Available Now!
Spring training is rapidly approaching, which means fantasy baseball prep time is going into high gear.
Alex Patton and I, Rotoman, offer a fun baseball discussion board at pattonandco.com. Every player has his own discussion thread, so you can ask questions and get answers from a strong coterie of fantasy experts, baseball fans and roto players, including Alex and me. The discussion boards are free and open to everyone, though you need to register to be able to post.
On top of that we offer a Subscriber package each spring, for rotisserie and fantasy players who want a little bit more.
What are the benefits?
Rotoman’s projections
Roto bid prices from me (5×5), Alex (4×4) and Mike Fenger (5×5), in an Excel spreadsheet, text files, and as part of the Patton $ Online Window program. These include probable lineups, highlight the top prospects, and are updated each Thursday until the Thursday after opening day, incorporating the latest news, better thinking, and useful comments.
The package is $36.
And the player discussion boards are free all season long, so please check us out even if you’re not interested in the Subscriber benefits.
Not to Brag or Anything
We have the most loyal customer base in the universe, no kidding.
Why? We hear from our customers every year about their good seasons and their bad, and always with their thanks for providing straightforward draft prep information tailored, through the discussion board, to every person’s particular needs.
Our data is bespoke, from rotisserie veterans, but also open enough to help you make your own adjustments and tailor things better to the way you see them happening. This is a powerful combination, and we’re proud of it.
About the Software
Patton $ Online was one of the first fantasy baseball software packages available anywhere. It helps you make lists, adjust for inflation, update and change projections, and keep an eye on the prices you’re willing to pay at your auction.
It is also super fast, written in machine language back in the day when computers weren’t so fast. That’s the good part.
But the fact is that it is an old program that uses old menuing and interfacing, so while it is popular among our loyal veterans who are familiar with it, it presents a learning curve for newbies. We encourage you to try out last year’s edition. This archive has the program, the excel and text files, so you can try it out. We hope you find it helpful, but don’t want to overpromise what we can deliver.
The good news is that the spreadsheet has all the same data, and can be used to craft the same sorts of lists and adjusted bids.
The bad news is that the program runs on Windows. To use it on a Mac you’ll need a copy of Windows running in Boot Camp, or Windows running on the virtual machines Parallels or Fusion. The program run great in Parallels and Fusion, and will run on WINE for a while, but will then it will crash when you try to change data. Which limits it’s use there.
I’m running it this year on a Lenovo Ideastick 300, which cost me $69.99 at Best Buy. It’s a Windows 10 computer about the size of the original Ipod Shuffle that plugs into the HDMI port of a TV or monitor. Paired with bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it’s a limited but capable and protable addition if you have any reason to use Windows.
If you’re interested, please feel free to download last year’s program and data for free. If it works for you, great, if not you got to experience the Patton $ data and decide if you want to be a subscriber as you prepare to win the 2017 fantasy baseball season!
Let us know if you have any questions, and we hope to see you at pattonandco.com.