MACK/Custom Draft Guide enhancements now available!

[RAY@HQ]

Hi all,

Tonight we've released a couple of major upgrades to the MACK Team Tracker and Custom Draft Guide tools on the site.

Here are the highlights:

- saving your settings in the Custom Draft Guide. No more need to re-select every time!
- keeper league support! Tell us your keepers, we'll recalculate your league prices accordingly. Inflation automatically built in!

The key new features make MACK and the CDG highly interrelated, so there's going to be a specific workflow to take advantage of these changes. At a high level, you need to treat MACK like your league database... create your league and all your teams there. Then keep your rosters, keepers, salaries etc. current there.

Once you've done that setup work, the CDG can read all of those inputs and spit out completely customized values!

Here are the relevant sections from the FAQ page for the CDG. We've shaken it out tonight, and it will get a little more polish in the coming days. Please, post any issues or questions here and we'll address as quickly as possible.

Select MACK League: Choose your MACK league to save and load your league configuration.

Use Keepers: Check this box to freeze the players on the MACK teams in your league at their keeper salaries. The league's remaining budget will be allocated over the rest of the player pool (i.e. the non-keepers).

How can I make the Custom Draft Guide account for keepers in my league?

This tool is integrated with your league setup in the MACK Team Tracker. Before generating your values in the Custom Draft Guide, complete the following setup steps in MACK:

1. Create a new league in MACK.
2. Create each team in your league in MACK, and associate each team with your league.
3. Add the appropriate players to each team's roster.
4. For each team, go to the Team tab, choose Player Properties, and enter the keeper salaries and positions for each player on each roster. (Note that these are free-form fields right now, will be changing to dropdowns soon. Please enter only the dollar value and a single numeric position.)

Once you have completed the above steps, you can return to the Custom Draft Guide. Enter your league configuration on the Settings page, and click 'Save Settings' before clicking 'Submit'. This will save your league configuration for future runs of the Custom Draft Guide.

To include keeper settings in your league calculations, be sure to check the "Use Keepers" box on the input form!

On the resulting CDG reports, your keeper prices will be frozen, and the remaining dollars in your league pool will be allocated to the players available in your auction. Keepers will be indicated in the "Kept" column on the output page and Positional Report. On the Grid view, you have the option to flag the keepers with a (K).

Big kudos to our tech team for getting this out to the user community before draft season hits full force.

[rbbl]

New Mack & CDG freeze features

This is a great new feature. Here are the issues I have encountered:1. Frozen pitchers are not removed from CDG values, offense is; 2. how do I code a pure DH like hafner or any DH for that matter...0? When I used 0's for DHs, the CDG did not work(I coded Hafner as 1b,#3); the input page does not have a DH slot and our league uses DH and UT, how handle this?

Thank you

[Jenkinssssss]

these are awesome! thanks!

on a side note, it looks like mark mcgwire took over the projections. seriously input any of your keeper studs and and be wowed!
i'll take 300 115 34 125 37 out of my $15 matt kemp anyday.

[RAY@HQ]

Merging this with the other thread....

The positions will be changed to drop-downs in the next day or two to eliminate the numbering confusion. Will look at your other issues.

[RAY@HQ]

Projections are messed up this morning (all dollar values = 0), probably residue from this upgrade. Stay tuned.

[RAY@HQ]

Dollar values are back. All is well.

[lego yo ego]

My league is announcing keepers today so I am entering them into MACK as the day goes on. Some of the keepers are being removed from the guide and others aren't. What could I be doing wrong?

[RAY@HQ]

I've got a league with two teams and two keepers each, and all are appearing on the CDG with the "Kept" indicator set. Obviously, that's not a comprehensive test.

Double-check the way you have your keepers defined in MACK. Use numeric position indicators (1 for pitchers). Someone else reported that there may be a problem with DHs.

If you can name some specific players who are disappearing, I can try them in my setup too.

[rbbl]

missing pitcher keepers

Ray,

I entered all the pitcher keepers as 1. I didn't check every pitcher but these are some not excluded from the CDG: Lester, Soria, M. Rivera, Beckett.

Thanks

[RAY@HQ]

Nobody should be excluded from the CDG. They stay in the output, but with the salary fixed at what you set in MACK, and the "Kept" indicator set to "Y".

Search the output, you should find all of your keepers in there. If not, that's something we need to research.

[RobR]

how do I code a pure DH like hafner or any DH for that matter...0? When I used 0's for DHs, the CDG did not work(I coded Hafner as 1b,#3); the input page does not have a DH slot and our league uses DH and UT, how handle this?

Thank you

Due to the special treatment of zeroes by most programming languages, we're using 10 for DH. In a couple of days those input text boxes should change to a drop down with "DH", so you don't need to worry abuot it.

[rbbl]

Values for pitchers go down

Ray and Rob,

I see how the values for keepers are their input salaries and they are noted as kept. However, after including the keepers, the values for players went up but the values for pitchers went down. This does not make sense.With both pitchers and batters frozen, their should be inflation in values for both. Wouldn't you agree?

Thanks

[RAY@HQ]

I get what you're saying, and I think I'm seeing it too. I'll let Rob answer since he's the man behind the algorithm.

But from the little he told me about the way this is implemented, basically what he's doing is just removing the kept players from the player pool when producing the values. So if it was a 100-player, 2000 budget league and you have 10 keepers at 100, the league just gets re-run as a 90-player, 1900 budget league.

One thing to look at is how your keeper dollars are budgeted, as opposed to your hitter/pitcher split setting. The split is fixed, so if more keeper dollars are skewed to the hitter side, the remaining budget dollars are going to get disproportionately allocated in order to make the overall split work.

(At least that's how I'm understanding it.)

[Donkey]

So if it was a 100-player, 2000 budget league and you have 10 keepers at 100, the league just gets re-run as a 90-player, 1900 budget league.
(At least that's how I'm understanding it.)

It seems to be taking the freeze players and moving them to their keeper value, which doesn't account for inflation. If someone has Pujols for $10 but he is worth $40, then there is $30 available that shouldn't be. Instead, it seems to be just making Pujols a $10 player.

[RobR]

Reply to rbbl's most recent question

The initial implementation removes kept hitter salaries from the hitting budget and kept pitcher salaries from the pitching budget, effectively tracking inflation separately for hitters and pitchers.

Are your pitchers kept above overall market value and your hitters below? That would explain the behavior you describe. If not, please PM me with your username for the site (not forums) and the league name where you observe this behavior.

It wouldn't be difficult to offer the option to have separate pitching and hitting or combined inflation. I expect a lot of good feedback and features to come out of our initial release.