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RotoBaller has offered several sets of interactive cheat sheets and draft tools in the past to help fantasy baseball managers prepare for their drafts and the upcoming season. Just in time for the regular season, we have an updated Risers/Fallers Draft Prep Tool!
A special shout out to Connelly Doan for building out this Draft Prep Tool.
The goal of this article is to give a brief overview of how to effectively use the data in this tool to prepare for drafts. It's not too late to get a leg up in your final drafts!
Risers/Fallers Draft Prep Tool: What’s In It and How Do I Use It?
The Risers/Fallers Draft Tool is structured in a fairly simple format to allow users to interact with it easily. There are two pages with similar types of data, one for hitters and one for pitchers. These pages can be toggled by clicking the respective buttons in the top right of the screen.
There are two sets of tables/charts on each page. The first is stat tables. Users will have the option to see a player's stats for the entire 2022 season and will also be able to see how a player improved or got worse from the first half of the season to the second for a number of metrics. While each table is defaulted to sort by one metric, users can alter the table sorting to any metric, ascending or descending by clicking the metric's header in the table.
The next set of main charts is the risers/fallers charts. Each page has two sets of Top 20 Risers/Fallers charts (K% and K-BB% for pitchers, OPS and Exit Velocity for hitters), which show the best improvers and worse decreasers for those particular metrics. Each chart can be pulled up simply by clicking the associated button. Users who are interested in the top risers/fallers for other metrics can sort the stat tables by those metrics to get that information.
There are also some key features to know for interacting with the tool. First, there are several filters to help pinpoint a player or position investigation. These include a player search, a position search for hitters, and a range of innings pitched for pitchers and plate appearances for hitters.
The position filter contains a search function that you can use to expedite this process. Let’s say you’re interested in 1B-eligible players. First, you would uncheck the “Select all” button. Next, you would type in “1B” in the search field. This will pull up all position combinations containing 1B. You can then select each combination by clicking all the relevant combinations.
Additionally, a single player's data can be isolated by clicking that player's name either in any of the tables or in the charts. This allows for a quick focused look into one player's data. Clicking on that player again will unhighlight their name and will pull all the data back into the tables and charts.
One word of caution - because this Live Draft Tool is browser-based (i.e. it's not a separate application), if you refresh it, the results will reset. So, if you're doing a live draft, do not refresh.
Summary
Thus, with just two pages, you can quickly and dynamically interact with helpful data for both hitters and pitchers! The sheet has some instructional text included as a reminder for how to use the tool. Good luck this season!
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