Are You Down With ADP?
After sites like Mock Draft Central launched and league hosts like Yahoo! and CBS have added the information, Average Draft Position data has become all the rage. I have read so many articles referencing ADP, and yet, the majority of the time I still have no idea exactly what the author means or how owners utilize it. I recently read a line from a column about mock draft strategy that called ADP’s employment being overrated. Huh? I don’t get it. And how many times have I read that drafter X “reached” on a player? I am confused exactly what is meant by a reach. So let’s try to get back on the same page, while also figuring out exactly how the heck ADP data is actually best used.
First, the most important thing to understand is that an Average Draft Position list should never ever ever be used as your rankings to draft from. Seriously, do fantasy owners actually do that? If you draft everyone at value (assuming for a moment that ADP does in fact represent a reasonable estimate of a player’s projected value), you will have an average team and will not finish in the money without a heaping of luck.
ADP is simply an ordered list indicating when every player gets selected on average in leagues drafting on the site the list was from. It is not a list of rankings in descending order of projected dollar value. If Mike Stanton is being drafted ahead of Andrew McCutchen, it is not because his projected 5×5 stat line yields a higher value than McCutchen does. It is because, on average, the drafters on Mock Draft Central are drafting him earlier. Of course, this implies that they actually do project him to out-earn McCutchen. To believe they are right, though, would require a leap of faith that regular Joes are good at not only projecting player performance, but also at valuing that performance given their specific league settings. Forgive me if I simply do not have the confidence that the average Joe has such number crunching ability.
So if you absolutely should not be using ADP to actually draft from, there must be some other use, otherwise the data would cease to be published and every fantasy site would be scraping for ideas on topics to write about in the off-season. Before we find out what that use is, it is imperative that you have the ADP list by your side during the draft if yours is online through one of the sites that provide their own ADP. If your draft is live, some extra work is required and a simple average of the ADPs for each player would work better than any single site’s list. Along with that ADP list is the even more important item- your own ranked list, in descending order of projected dollar value.
When I have participated in snake drafts, I make an extra column on my cheat sheet (all players are ranked in descending order of projected dollar value generated from my projections) that includes the player’s ADP. It then makes it extremely easy to spot who I value higher than the average Joe and who I think is overvalued and assume won’t be drafting. What this allows me to do is maximize the value of my picks, and hopefully in turn, my projected team stat totals. This helps you avoid the dreaded “reach”, which brings us to the real usage of ADP. Uh oh, there’s that head-scratching term again.
When I read draft analyses, I rarely finish without reading how this owner reached on this player and that owner considered reaching on that player. Then I hear from others about how it’s okay to reach sometimes. Now I’m shaking my head in utter confusion. What does reaching for a player even mean? I can think of two different definitions of a reach:
1) Freddie Freeman‘s ADP is 122, or round 11, pick 2. You draft him in the 7th because “I haVE To HaVe FrEdDIE FrEeMAn…he’S SO awESOme!!!11!1!!” And you wanted to “make sure” you got him, so you took him well before he is being selected on average. However, you acknowledge that you reached in the post-draft analysis after panicking over a first base run.
2) Your dollar values project Alex Rios to be worth a 9th round pick, and you select him in the 14th, despite him having an ADP of about 219, or round 19, pick 3.
So when someone claims they reached, are they admitting they overpaid, like in scenario 1, or did the owner value the player much higher than the rest of the league and still expects a nice profit, despite taking said player much earlier than his ADP, like in scenario 2?
Before I attempt to answer those questions, the entire point of having an ADP list is to predict where a player will be drafted. Leagues are won by the teams that generated a ton of profit by the end of the year, but since we don’t have crystal balls, all we can do at the draft is accumulate the most projected value we can. The team with the highest projected total team value after the draft is usually the one who would be projected to win if you run the projections for the league, assuming the owner didn’t punt a category and drafted a relatively balanced team. And if you overpay for enough players, you just bought yourself a ticket to the cellar. So taking advantage of profit opportunities is the way to go.
In the first reach scenario above, unless you get a bonus for having a certain player on your team, there should never be a player you are willing to pay whatever it takes for. Everyone has a value and projected stats to contribute to your team and if you draft them too early, you’re passing up on other players who can provide more. Paying the equivalent of $20 for a $15 player is a losing proposition. The player then has to produce that much more than expected just to break even for you.
In the second scenario, this supposed reach is actually not a problem at all. In fact, I personally wouldn’t even consider it a reach and do it all the time in leagues because my values sometimes differ significantly from ADP. You are still banking a projected profit and taking Rios in the 14th round essentially allows you to draft two 9th round values on your team. ADP seriously comes in handy here because you don’t want to take Rios exactly where you value him. Without that precious ADP list, you could potentially wipe out any profit opportunity, and again, you cannot win by drafting a $260 team.
So back to the top and the issue of the employment of ADP being overrated. I am still not sure what that means, but I think using ADP correctly is one of the biggests key to having a successful draft. Without it, I’d potentially be drafting Alex Rios in the 9th, Brandon Morrow in the 8th and Chris Sale in the 12th. Though it makes me look good for being right if those players do earn those values, it does my team no good in terms of winning the league since I paid for those stats.
10
Yeah, you know me.
Nice
And this is why auction leagues are glorious :)
A reach is sort of like what you explained in scenario one, but the motivation is different. When I reach, it’s not that I have to own a player, it’s that some sort of information from the draft has suddenly changed the way I value that player.
How exactly do you go about assigning dollar values to players initially? I have an 8 team NL only auction coming and I’m convinced that I can’t know what a player is truly worth until I know what the other managers are willing to pay.
The traditional method is to assign projections for each stat category, determine the average for your league specific player pool (say 8*25 or however many players are rostered in your league), and then calculate z-scores. Z-scores are essentially a standard distribution of outcomes around a mean. Once you have a player’s z-scores for each stat, you can then convert them to dollars.
That process is obviously a little involved. Your comment on worth is a little misguided since a player is worth his median or mean projection (depending on your preference). You might have to pay more than he’s worth to win him in auction – in fact you almost certainly will for the top/trendy players – but that doesn’t change the player’s value.
My biggest issue with ADP is that it is biased and skewed data. The ADP almost exactly mirrors the rankings of the site that hosts the mock draft. A mock draft at MockDraftCentral (or any site) presents players with a ranked list of players and asks them to draft from that ranked list so there’s a strong bias presented to them.
In fact, if you compare MDC’s ADP to their default rankings, there’s an r-squared value of 0.98. So, with 98% of that ADP is explained by the site’s rankings, finding that 2% of valuable information is hard.
Until there’s a mock draft site that doesn’t post default rankings for the mock drafter to use, the data will continue to be useless. Looking at any expert’s top 300 rankings pretty much tells you the same thing that ADP does.
So, to answer the initial question… no, I’m not down with ADP.
I compare MDC’s ADP to the rankings of my platform to identify players that MDC likes more and less than ESPN.
Yeah, we have (or at least I have) definitely acknowledged how ADP data is highly dependent on the default rankings. This is why you shouldn’t use MDC ADP if you’re drafting using ESPN software. But using ADP is still better than nothing. It still tells me that in general, owners have basically given up on Alex Rios and I can get him real late, so even if I value him as a 9th round pick, it would be foolish to draft him in the 12th.
“This is why you shouldn’t use MDC ADP if you’re drafting using ESPN software.”
I disagree with that Mike. Looking at the different platforms’ ADPs shows where there is disagreement and disagreement is where you can find bargains and avoid busts. ESPN has Hanley at about #13 and Prince at about #17, but I think most other platforms have the inverse. I draft with ESPN, so I know there’s very little chance I get Hanley because I’m not taking him before #13 and there are going to be enough “autodraft” type owners that prevent Hanley from falling past #13 to where I would take him (about #20). If I only relied on ESPN and ignored other platforms, I would have to take Hanley at #11 or #12, but if everyone else is ranking Hanley #17 to #20, there’s a good chance I just “reached” on Hanley and will regret it.
There certainly is some value to looking at ESPN’s ADP if you are in a league draft through ESPN. It gives you an idea of how your leaguemates may act. It also is valuable to look at ADP from various sites to see the variance for a player.
I guess my biggest issue is that MockDraftCentral’s ADP has somehow become fantasy baseball’s “industry standard” for how the public views the player pool. Far too often, I see writers indicate that player is overvalued/undervalued because of their ADP value at MDC. To me, a weird ADP value only tells me is that MDC’s rankings are off.
As it stands at the moment, ADP data has value related to the specific site that hosts your fantasy league. The data is unfairly treated as if it tells us what the overall fantasy baseball public is thinking. If that data actually existed, it would be extremely interesting and valuable to me. But, until that day, ADP just serves as a weird set of information that is a bit overused by fantasy baseball writers.
IMHO.
While ADPs do skew to the default rankings, I’m pretty sure default rankings change somewhat to align with ADPs.
Absolutely down with it. When doing statistical analysis for any reason, to ignore a set of data that relates to what you are looking at is just careless. Use the data, but be careful that you understand what the data actually is. Look at MDC, participate in a mock draft. Are a lot of these picks being made based upon some auto drafting? When you are drafting, try chatting to the other people in your draft. This is a great way to gain some insight as to what kind of fantasy players you are drafting against. Do they match up well with the people who are in your league(s)? There are a lot of decisions you are going to have to make on how to best use the data for your needs.
I have spent some time looking at where players are being drafted, and the best tool for me has been the “Target” draft position. This is a pretty conservative way to project where a player will be drafted, and it works with what I am doing for draft prep.
Bottom line, use it because it’s what we have, but understand what you are using and how to use it for what you need.
It’s not a tool to make your rankings off of, but its absolutely valuable when your clock is ticking and you need to decide between two players. You may see player X and player Y as equal, but if X’s ADP is fast approaching while Y is still 2 or 3 rounds away, you can make the educated gamble that Y will still be there on your next turn, and you can end up with both, whereas if you ignored ADP and went with player Y, player X gets snapped up before your next pick.
Yup, this is the type of skill that takes you from average drafter to expert drafter. This is one of the main ways I use the ADP column on my value ranking list. It really allows to maximize the value of your picks and get the equivalent of two 10th round picks, for example, while others are drafting a 10th and a 12th rounder.
In my mind this is the entire point of ADP. As long as you believe ADP is roughly representative of the way some of your league-mates will behave, its most valuable function is in giving some prediction as to which players may drop, allowing you to pick other players before them.
I have several issues with this article, most notably, the expectation that we should all have projections for the top 300 players, then put a dollar value on those projections (to create our own rankings) then update our projections (and rankings) throughout spring training as more information becomes available (e.g. Victorino hitting 2nd vs. 6th, Strasburg’s IP limit gets raised, etc.). Who has time for this? And who can predict wins for a SP? The point of MDC ADP and ESPN/Yahoo rankings is to see where the EXPERTS rank players – EXPERTS whose job it is to do the number crunching. I will look at the Fangraphs profile page for many of the top 300 players and write a crude profile (e.g. Ubaldo – high GB% pitcher, FB velocity dropped sharply in 2011, good source of Ks, IP and wins but BBs will limit WHIP upside) and make crude projections, but the goal of this exercise is to familiarize myself with each player and to figure out a tier for the player – not to assign a precise dollar value because that isn’t reaosnable. However, the most useful way for me to prepare for the draft is to put ADPs/rankings from different sources next to each other in MS Excel and flag the outliers in the platform I draft from. If other sites like a player more than ESPN (my platform), then I know to take that player ahead of where ESPN rankes him. Same on the inverse.
Another issue is that a huge part of drafting is risk and deviation – things that projections and dollar values handle poorly. You can project Ellsbury for .300.20-45, which seems fair, but the odds of him reaching that line compared to the odds of Prince reaching .285-34-90-110 are much lower. Ellsbury has a higher ceiling than Prince, but a much lower floor, so where those players get drafted has a lot to do with risk tolerance, which is very hard to include in projections and dollar values. However, ADP and rankings do reflect that risk.
I think the point is if you want to be successful at fantasy do not just take a list from somewhere and go ahead and pick straight from that list. I only have 1 draft (3 auctions) and have been using MDC list for years(minus my league’s keepers) since my league is H2H, the speedsters always last compared to MDC, but you have to adjust for your personal likes and dislikes, plus your specific league, your league mates tendencies, etc etc…
I def do see more people looking at the ADps now and maybe that will lead to more mocking and more useful data
i got kevin youk in the 13 rd of a 10 man league.
is that good? i did reach for matt moore a round or two earlier, but i think another guy reached for stras two rds beforei toook moore.
alex rios goes undrafted.
I agree with you to some degree, but when a guy is trying to trade me Ryan Howard as a top 30 ballplayer I look at his ADP of 140 and see he is not worth it.
I hadn’t planned to read this article, until I saw the Naughty By Nature reference.
Reading the headline/ Are you down…
Thinking/ nah. not interested
Continuing to read the really long headline/ ADP?
Thinking/ Naughty By Nature! Hells yeah! I’m reading this!
Do you think its possible to manipulate the data? say you want a particular early rder to slip, arguments sake David Wright, you then enter a bunch of drafts do first few rds and select Zimmerman, youk, beltre consistently early which would raise their ADP and in turn depending on autodrafts and ranks maybe drop Wrights?
I like ADP because it let’s me know where autodrafters will place value. In auction leagues I can nominate players who I don’t really want but I know the computer will snatch up so in later rounds I can make power moves on players who I do want.
Unrelated, kindof:
During the draft, the dollar value of a player changes in real time dependent on players already selected by other teams and your own team. Basically, the value a player would produce to one’s team changes relatively with every single selection or bid because the market of available player value decreases and your fantasy team’s value needs also change.
So you could begin with player A being ranked ahead of player B. The value of each player to your team will change and player B may become more valuable then player A, or not.
I find if you have these arbitrary rankings 1-300, you are more likely not to account for these real-time adjustments and select a player that is ranked higher, but does not provide the most value for your team.
I guess it depends on drafting style, but I prefer using a tier system without individual rankings (with a column for player competency (I.E. what skill set drives the players value)) is more useful. Just my opinion.
Synopsis: ranking players promotes the benchmarking fallacy
Talking about player “value” doesn’t make sense in the ADP context. The ADP is the price of the player – what it costs to acquire them, which is tangible (pick, money, etc) – not the value, which is some mutation of performance vs. price or performance vs. other players.
People have talked about ADPs being highly dependent on the particular site’s default rankings, which is probably the biggest component. The draft computers always default to the site’s default rankings when either a drafter forgets or he sets the computer to autopick. And there are plenty of people who are perfectly content with an accidentally or intentionally assembled ADP team.
In draft rooms with a full compliment of people (who generally know what they are doing) the ADP starts to fall apart after the top-25 or 30 picks, anyway. The top picks are easy because “Bentley or Rolls?” is a more satisfying and less intensive decision to make than “Camry or Malibu?”. Probably the best way to do a draft is to figure out combinations of early picks that please you best (2B/SS/OF, 3B/1B/2B, etc), based on different draft spot combos (1/24/25, 12/13/36/37, etc), that leave you with easy paths to players you want in later rounds.
Value has everything to do with it.
So you go into a draft locking a position into a range of 2 to 3 picks? Drafts are conducted in a dynamic environment and the strategy needs to be flexible.
Rigid (arbitrary) rules and strictly adhering to fill positional needs is a very stagnet and poor strategy.
Evidence: take a look at drafted players versus FA pickups remaining on your team from prior years.
Pretty sure I ddn’t say anything about rigid rules or adhering to fill specific positional needs. I said figure out a combination of players – at any positions you personally prefer – and have a plan so that a person can be prepared for whatever the draft throws at them. Maybe a person does a mock and finds out that when they avoid OFs early they end up eventually hating their OF later, and as a result have a plan to address OF early on the day-of. Or maybe they find out that they’re perfectly content to gobble up CIs in the early rounds because they personally feel fine with the Kubels and Willinghams of the world as their “best” outfielders. And just because a person has a “plan” doesn’t mean that they need to file that plan with the BBWAA and pay stiff penalties if they deviate; obviously if a person has planned to take Cargo in the middle of the 2nd round and, by some miracle, Robinson Cano is hanging out there, for God’s sake I hope they consider deviating. Pre-draft planning is not a new concept. If you’re one of those shoot-from-the-hip drafters, and you don’t need to be bothered with this silliness, then good for you.
Player value is very important and separate from pick value. If you do not value one player more than another, why would you ever take one player ahead of another in a draft? You use Bentley, Rolls, Camry and Malibu as examples. Are you telling me that you don’t value Bentley and Rolls more than Camry and Malibu? I can tell that you are not saying that and that you value B&R more than C&M, but this value based analogy contradicts your earlier statement, “Talking about player “value” doesn’t make sense in the ADP context.”
Player value must be kept separate from pick value. It is performance based and compared to other players in your draft pool. When you combine player value and pick value, you are getting closer to ADP. ADP does not strictly follow a player value/pick value ratio because player values and pick values will vary from person to person.
Mid-round picks like your Camry and Malibu are where ADP might help the most. If you are having trouble valuing one player more than another, that’s a great place to consult ADP reports. Not just ADP, but ADP trends can tell you something about the value of mid-range players.
You say, “The ADP is the price of the player – what it costs to acquire them, which is tangible (pick, money, etc),” but what is a 16th pick worth when compared to a 28th pick? 65th tp 80th? Is a 1st round pick five times more valuable than an eleventh round pick? We all value picks differently, but there is a value that each of us places on them and it is not as easily grasped as you make it seem.
When I say “drafting strategy needs to be flexible”, it doesn’t not imply having no strategy or being unprepared. My suggestion is that Fantasy Drafters take out the No. Column (what ranks the players 1-300) out because it leads to benchmarking.
It’s simply my opinion that I believe fantasy managers let their own predraft rankings prevent themselves from putting together a good fantasy team
But that’s the only way you know how to prepare, so I understand why that sounded like I was saying “screw it, dont prepare, don’t have strategy, just wing it”
Sounds like you stole that title from your old site over at fantasypros911.com. I want to say that was a Greco line. Original Mike.
Knowing the ADP and the ranking (ESPN/Yahoo) on the site where you are drafting is valuable because other people do follow it so you can often predict “this is the last chance I have to get some player” or “this guy is buried 600th in the rankings, so I can take a chance on people ignoring him and getting him late”. You can’t do that in a league of experts obviously but few FB players are in expert leagues.
I’m not really sure what the whole point of this story is besides giving the author something to write.
You also don’t win if you simply use your projections to draft the best team by your projections. You win leagues with value. Value is the value above the expectations of a player taken where he was drafted.
If you have high expectations for a guy like Desmond Jennings and you expect that he could produce numbers similar to Carl Crawford’s old numbers you create value by being able to draft him in the 9th round or what have you. If you expect 1st round value and draft him in the 1st round you don’t gain any value. If you get him in the 9th then you do.
That is where ADP comes in handy. If Jennings on average is going in the 9th round then you know where to expect him to be drafted. The draft starts and your up in the 5th round and you have Jennings rated the top player available does it make sense to draft him there when you could get him at least 2 or 3 rounds later? Of course not. If you did it would be considered a “reach” because its several rounds before he is expected to be drafted. Not that he can’t outperform that draft position but because there was no reason to draft him that much earlier then he needed to. You could take him in the 8th and probably not have had a problem. You could even take him in the 7th just to be sure but to take him 2 rounds ahead of that was the “reach”.
Its good to have your own projections and valuations of players. Its really essential. You take that and compare that to others by looking at ADP. If you know how others value players you can maximize value by not taking players earlier then they need to be taken.