Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Downloadable data: 2008 ADPs
Posted by Paul Singman at 12:01amWhen doing fantasy research, the Average Draft Position (ADP) is a great "stat" for fantasy baseball. I call it a stat because its purpose it to find the value of a certain player. Sounds similar to other stats, right?
Anyway, finding the ADPs for the current year isfairly easy; both Yahoo and ESPN have those easily accessible. The ADP data for past years, however, is not so easily found. This presented quite the problem in this article, in which I wanted to use ADP numbers from past seasons, but could not. So, starting this season I've decided to save the ADP data from Yahoo and ESPN while they still have this season's numbers up.
If you would like to start your ADP database along with me this season, feel free to click the links below to download both the Yahoo and ESPN data. And if you have a head start and have compiled the numbers from past years, I would love to see them.
Yahoo_ADP.xls
ESPNADP_New.xls
The biggest issue with these numbers is the bias that come along with them. If you recall your fantasy baseball draft on either site, you will remember that Yahoo and ESPN (and all drafting sites for that matter) list the available players by their—the site's own personal—rankings. Not only does this influence people when drafting, but it also inflates the ADP of higher ranked players when auto-picking occurs, which happens surprisingly often. That is the major flaw in these numbers; however they still are useful and interesting, and it will be nice to be able to look at the numbers for all the years starting with 2008. Download away.
Update, 10/22: There was an error in the original ESPN spreadsheet I posted; it has since been corrected.
Paul has been managing fantasy baseball teams for many seasons and writing for THT Fantasy over the past three years. He is currently a student at UPenn welcomes readers' thoughts at his email here or in the comments below.