FTN Custom Points and Projection Tool: Part 1

In case you missed it, FTNFantasy now has one of the top tools in the fantasy baseball stratosphere – the Custom Points & Projections Tool.

I know what you’re thinking: This is just some sort of plug, right? Actually, no. It’s a league-winning tool that I’m going to utilize myself throughout the preseason. As someone who drafts in late March and does all my draft prep like a college student cramming for final exams, this tool just made my life a hell of a lot easier. And anyone here at FTN with access will have a major edge on your competition.

Want to single out market inefficiencies? This tool will help expose those. Want to see whether Jackson Merrill is overhyped or actually undervalued? This tool will answer that. Struggling to decide whether you want to deploy a hitter-heavy or pitcher-heavy draft approach? Depending on your league settings, this tool will give you an idea with a few clicks of your mouse. Or a few swipes on your phone.

The tool allows you to tailor your league settings with any roto/H2H categories or points configurations, whether by rank or by auction value. There are default presets for Yahoo, CBS, ESPN and NFBC leagues.

If you play in an ESPN H2H Points league where hitter strikeouts are penalized -10 points, this tool will configure the rankings based on those outlandish league settings. Play in a league with only one hitter at each position, including outfield? You can alter how many players you have at each position, and the rankings will reflect position scarcity in a way your competition can’t.

Need to adjust your auction values based on only a $150 budget instead of the typical $260 budget? This tool can adjust that for you in seconds. The moral of the story here is that this tool is unlike any other in the industry. It allows for flexibility depending on your league size/league settings and will make it easier than ever to draft the best team possible based on value.

Today, I’ll provide some quick takeaways after playing around with the FTN Custom Rankings tool for a few days. This will be Part 1 of a two-part series. First, I’ll look at points leagues. Next week, we’ll look at roto leagues and auction platforms. We’ve had a lot of buzz surrounding points leagues lately. And since it’s a portion of the fantasy baseball market that sometimes gets ignored, we’re going to emphasize it here this week.

Custom Points Tool Takeaways: Hitters

The first thing I did with the tool was set the “Scoring” tab to “Custom.” That allowed me to change the scoring settings to my home H2H points league that’s been in existence for more than a decade. This league runs on ESPN and has these hitter settings:

Not all points leagues have these exact settings, but you get the point. Once I applied the filters, the rankings and projections page showed this:

From there, I went to our VDP Rankings page to check ADPs (Average Draft Positions):

Disclaimer: While it’s easier to go to your individual platform’s live trends, our ADP data was close enough to the other platforms on most players that I’m using our site ADP for reference.

What’s the first thing you notice? Apparently, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a screaming value in my league because he’s projected to score the fourth-most points of any hitter in my league (10th-most overall if you include pitchers), yet he doesn’t even show up in the screenshot of the top 14 players in our consensus ADP. Full disclosure, if this screenshot was another inch bigger, Guerrero would show up at the bottom. Also, our VDP rankings are mostly considering NFBC ADP, which is slightly different from ADP in points leagues. 

Still, it was the first thing I noticed after applying the filters. Clearly, Guerrero is someone I need to pay closer attention to in my home league. 

The above paragraphs represent more of an “idiots guide” to how to use our tool and why it can help us with our fantasy baseball draft prep. And to illustrate my point, look how different the top of the draft pool looks once you change hitter strikeouts from -1 points to 0:

Once you remove a penalty for strikeouts, it’s pretty clear that Aaron Judge becomes the most valuable hitter in this type of points league. Jose Ramirez goes from the eighth-most projected hitter points in my league to off the page. 

Although it isn’t shown in the screenshot, Vinnie Pasquantino is a player I discussed last week in my Points Leagues Targets at ADP article. When I filtered the settings to match my league, he was projected to score the 18th-most points of any hitters. That’s because he has incredible bat-to-ball skills and is allergic to striking out compared to the field. That has major value in my league that penalizes strikeouts. However, without the penalty, Vinnie P loses most of his hidden value and drops all the way down into the 50s.

These are some of the draft nuances we wouldn’t be able to detect without using this incredible tool. Knowing the “hidden” value of certain players based on your league settings is one of the ways to increase your chances of winning – and it can all be done with just a few clicks, like I said before.

Now that I’ve given some examples on the ESPN platform, let’s take a look at some players who may “pop” on our tool in CBS or Yahoo leagues.

CBS Points League Hitters

Now is a good time to point this player out. Although Jung Hoo Lee is being mentioned for the first time in the CBS section, I’m almost certain that he pops across the board based on our projections.

Lee has an ADP of 241.8 according to our VDP rankings. Yet in CBS points leagues, he’s projected for 465.5 points, which is sandwiched between Pete Alonso (47.4 ADP) and Cody Bellinger (100.9 ADP). Based on projections alone, Lee should score roughly the same amount of points in CBS points leagues but is going outside the top-200 players in most roto leagues. Now, I’m not saying we should bump Lee inside our top-50 players, but this is something to consider during your draft.

For example, let’s say you went heavy on starting pitchers early. Perhaps you nabbed an above-average player at each of the infield positions once you swung around to draft hitters. As you stare at your roster, you realize that you haven’t even cracked the outfield pool yet.

Well, there you go. More than likely, Lee will still be on the board based on ADP. You can start your outfield with Lee, a player who will produce like Alonso/Bellinger but at a major discount. Unless your opponents are also using our tool, you can use it to quickly identify a player who’s providing more value than most people expect based on draft data. Because of that, it could allow you to wait longer on the outfield position if you want to load up on more premium/scarce positions before your competition.

Other takeaways from CBS Points Leagues using our tool:

• You’ll see a lot of hitters with stolen-base upside filling the top of the player pool. Most CBS leagues award 2 points per stolen bag, a major increase from other platforms.
• There are still penalties for hitter strikeouts, so Elly De La Cruz’ NFBC ADP near 4 is way too high for this specific platform.
• Vinnie Pasquantino/Steven Kwan bat-skill guys are undervalued compared to market ADP.
• If you strike out a lot and have virtually no SB upside, it’s going to be virtually impossible to find a player who is undervalued with those characteristics.

Yahoo Points League Hitters

I don’t mean to disappoint anyone, but the Yahoo points league takeaways are almost the exact same as the takeaways from the CBS points leagues above. Make sure to prioritize players with stolen base upside, since they are worth more points than ESPN leagues. Oh, and there are no penalties for strikeouts at all.

Elly De La Cruz is the best example from our tool of a player who moves up based on the customized Yahoo scoring settings. He’s projected to score the seventh-most points in Yahoo leagues, the 19th-most points in CBS leagues and the 55th-most points (!) in ESPN leagues. That’s because De La Cruz should be one of the league’s top stolen base artists, and with no penalties for strikeouts (his biggest weakness), he’s almost a fool-proof fantasy asset in Yahoo.

Without our tool, we might have glossed over that massive edge before our Yahoo drafts.

Points League Pitcher Strategy

The main goal of this article was simply to explain to you how to use the Custom Points & Projections Tool. So instead of doing a deep dive into pitching across the three platforms, I’d simply like to point out why using the tool is essential when analyzing pitching.

If you play on ESPN, closers have far less value. Take a look at this table:

As you can see, it makes a lot of sense to alter the scoring settings when looking at relievers before the draft. Here’s what the point totals look like on ESPN vs. CBS, for example:

ESPN

CBS

If we just blindly looked at a set of rankings or projections, we’d be leaving a ton of potential points on the table in CBS, since closers make much more of a dent in your daily/weekly totals. However, if we treated closers like gold in ESPN, we’d be overpaying for a position that doesn’t move the needle as much.

We can do this for any scoring setting. If pitchers get +15 for wins and -15 for losses, the value of starting pitchers would drastically change. Without this tool, we’d be flying blind in our drafts.

Final Thoughts

If you have any questions on how to use this extremely valuable tool on our site, feel free to reach out to us in the Fantasy Baseball Discord for anything not discussed above. I’ve already used the tool to help me make decisions in my keeper league. 

That does it for this week. Next week, I’ll cover roto and auction leagues and how this tool can help you make better draft decisions in those formats. I’ll also discuss some other strategy points that emerged while using the tool. Stay tuned.