The player value series is back again! I run this series of posts every year now. They are a mix of repeats from previous years, which are intended as a resource to help broaden the base of people that know how to run player values, and newly updated entries which provide info specific to 2018. Thanks for checking out this post, stay tuned throughout the preseason for the rest of the series! - HWB

Tip #1: Know where player values come from

Tip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch split

Does everyone love the snake draft? No. Is the snake draft necessary because it's hard to convince people to spend 8 hours on an auction draft? Yes. For those of us in keeper leagues, this time of year brings the additional joyous task of trying to strategize for the upcoming draft. Do you trade away players for picks and rebuild in the draft? Trade away picks for players to strengthen your core team? Try to steal away the most undervalued players in the league before their owners realize what they have? Cut any number of ways, if you start throwing draft picks on the table at some point you’ll arrive at the question… what is a draft pick worth, anyway? Today, we're taking a look at the Big Board Trade Tool, which can be found for free on this site as the regular 5x5 version, and can also be found within every copy of the Big Board as a fully customized-to-your-league version.

As referenced in my entry on the hit/pitch split, constructing a value curve for your league is fairly easy. Using either the Big Board or your favorite site’s Auction $ values, you can create a table to map an approx. $ value onto every pick of the draft. The Big Board makes it super easy since you can put in your specific league settings and out pops the BIGz values, in dollars, for every player. For example, if we pull up the default Big Board: