While I get a kick out of doing fantasy baseball research and blog posts, the powerful and adaptive fantasy baseball spreadsheets that I create are the reason this website is called Mr. Cheatsheet in the first place. Today marks the first release of the 2016 cheatsheets.

The cheatsheets are interactive Excel spreadsheets that are can be tuned to your personal league settings and preferences. You will be able to use these sheets to see how valuable each player is specifically for your league. The spreadsheets also update throughout the draft so you can easily know when you need to adapt your draft strategy based on how a draft is going.

There are three types of cheatsheets. For rotisserie league owners, you can use the standard draft or the auction draft cheatsheet depending on your draft type. If you’re not in a roto league, there’s also a cheatsheet for point scoring leagues too.

To better understand all of the features of these spreadsheets, skim through this post from last year that explains each area of them

Average Draft Position

This first version of the 2016 cheatsheets includes a good amount of average draft position data from websites that host mock drafts. This data lets you know the average place that a player is being drafted on that site. ADP data is largely reliant on the rankings of the site hosting the draft so it is recommended to choose the ADP data source that matches up to the site hosting your draft so you get the best idea on how your leaguemates might be picking. Here are the sources in this version:

CBS (Points League or Roto League)

Yahoo

NFBC

FantasyPros Average ADP

We’re still waiting on ESPN data at this point to add in but that will be included in a future version. However, our good friends at FantasyGameday have closed their doors so we’ll no longer include their ADP data and I no longer find the MockDraftCentral data useful so I’ll no longer be including that as well.

Projections

When opening up the cheatsheets, you’ll have a selection of different projections to choose from. The data you look at within the cheatsheet will only be as good as the projections you are using. There certainly isn’t one perfect projection system but each year I do analysis to try to figure out which ones are best and, for now, I say a good starting point is to use the Steamer projections and then play around with the others from there. Here is what is included in this version:

Steamer

Fangraphs Fans

CAIRO

MORPS Baseline

Clay Davenport

I’ll be adding ZiPS in the future and that will allow me to add in my Special Blend projections which weights the various projection systems to create an optimized projection.

WERTH Values (Roto Leagues)

If you’re playing in a roto league, you may notice that these cheatsheets have a WERTH value for each player. These are essentially z-scores in each roto category based on your league setting. The cheatsheets calculate who the projected league starters would be and then use that to calculate league averages and standard deviations in each category. Using that data, it then says how far above average each person is in that category (z-score) so a positive WERTH value means that player will contribute positively for your team. This is all dependent on your league settings which makes these values completely unique to your league.

Troubleshooting

Please note that these sheets are designed for Microsoft Excel and utilize macros which will make them unable to be used on Mac versions of Excel (it sucks, I know).

Once downloading the sheets, you’ll be prompted with two messages to enable content and then you’ll be able to use them fully after that. Once again, if you are a bit confused upon opening the cheatsheets, refer to the how-to post here.

Download the 2016 Cheatsheet

Without further ado, pick your flavor of cheatsheet from the options below. If you do happen to find errors within there, please let me know in the comments below. Thanks for checking these out. Each year, these take me quite a bit of work to put together and I’m always happy to see the response that they get. Enjoy!

Download the cheatsheet for your rotisserie standard draft leagues

Download the cheatsheet for your rotisserie auction draft leagues

Download the cheatsheet for your points-based league drafts